We are now in Khiva, Uzbekistan. Khiva was an important historical town on the Great Silk Road. It’s sandwiched between the Kara-Kum and the Kyzyl-Kum deserts. It was famous also for its long and brutal history as a slave trading post. Our guide did note however, that under Islam, slaves had benefits and therefore were more like servants than slaves. The slave trade continued here until 1873. It might still be hard to determine exactly what ancient Khiva was like as the Soviets restored this in the 1970s, so it’s bound to be cleaner and neater than it had been originally. Still, the town is a busy array of mosques, madrassahs and tiled minarets with lots of souvenir sellers in many of the streets.

According to legend, Khiva was founded some 2500 years ago when a son of Noah, Shem, discovered a well in the middle of the desert and exclaimed “Khi-wa”, roughly translated as “sweet water”. There are also other stories about how Khiva got its start but none would be true were it not for having a source of water. Khiva has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1990.

Khiva is split into two parts. The outer town, called Dichan Qala, was formerly protected by a wall with eleven gates. That wall and the gates are gone today. The other part of Khiva is the inner town, called Itchan Qala. Inner town is where we spent almost all of our time in Khiva. Itchan Qala has a wall around it still that is one and a half miles long. It used to have a moat around it as well. Today about 2,500 people live inside the inner town while Khiva as a whole has about 50,000 people. Itchan Qala or inner town is today a living historic town. It has Islamic architecture that was built over a span of hundreds of years with some 50 historic monuments and maybe 250 old houses, mostly dating from the 18th or 19th centuries. Much of what we saw was rebuilt but it was a fascinating place to visit.

You can see Vicky and a fellow traveler at the south entrance to Inner Town in the first photo. Our hotel was right across the street from here.

The second photo is to the left of the south entrance and you can see that it was a formidable wall. The original moat would have been to the left of the wall.

The view of the wall in the third photo is near the west gate, looking north. You can see some of Dichan Qala, or outer town, on the left and behind the inner town.

The fourth photo is 180 degrees from the third photo. In this photo, you can see the western entrance on the right side. The west gate was the main entrance to inner town. The Kyzyl-Kum Desert is in the distance.

The last photo is from the wall above the western gate looking east at inner town.

So this was just an introduction and overview of Khiva. We were here for two days and enjoyed it very much. There will be more posts from Khiva.