Samarkand
Link to Wikipedia's article on the Registan
When my son Chap and I were discussing via email what we might do when I visited him in Russia, I semi-jestingly blurted, "Samarkand". Chap replied, "Sure", and the rest was grunt work. Samarkand is REALLY old!! Archaeologists have found signs of human activity dating 40,000 years ago. Nobody knows for sure, but best guesses are that it was founded as a population center around 700 or 800 BCE. It lies smack dab in the middle of central Asia on the Silk Route and was conquered by Alexander in 329 BCE around the same time he went kind of funny in the head. In 1370 Timur the Great (Tamerlane) took over and made it the center of his vast empire, knocking off about 17,000,000 people (5% of the world's population) in the process. Samarkand soon became a great center of learning and culture, focused on three madrasahs called The Registan. We visited Timur's tomb, the Gur e Amir (Tomb of the King). A guard told us that when Timur's grave had been opened in 1941 by an archaeologist, he found an inscription that had words to effect that if anyone opened the tomb would cause a terrible invasion. The same day The Third Reich invaded the USSR. Most likely apocryphal but fun nonetheless.
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