Andre Fedorov: The Mysterious Desert Towers of Uzbekistan’s Lost Civilization
We drove out of Khiva
on a bright and blistering summer morning. The shared taxi passed over the Amu
Darya River, pulsing with Himalayan snow melt, and drove on past rich,
irrigated fields and away from the massive domed mosques and medieval tile work
of Uzbekistan’s Silk Road cities. We were headed into the former-Soviet Central
Asian country’s arid northwestern frontier.
Our little band of
backpackers was searching for something to excite our domed-out senses. When we
hit the panoramic desert, the horizon flattened. Slowly, the three austere
mountain fortresses of Ayaz Kala rose from the badlands in the distance, wild
protrusions from history’s depths. They’d been abandoned in the seventh century
A.D. after more than a millennium of sporadic inhabitation.
In the roughly 1,200
years before their rediscovery by Soviet archaeologists, they’d towered above a
people forsaken by the erratic, ever-shifting waters of the Amu Darya. These
and other kalas, desert fortresses dotted across the northwest of Uzbekistan,
are the last remnants of Khorezm, an ancient civilization that flourished for a
millennium in the Amu Darya’s delta, between the sands of the Kyzyl Kum and
Kara Kum. This was the deep history we’d missed in the medieval cities, clues
left by a mysterious civilization most of us had never heard of.
And the
fortresses at Ayaz Kala are the most extreme example, the most remote and
rugged structures built by the Khorezmians. In winter, they are covered in ice
and snow, battered by cold desert winds. In summer, temperatures reach into the
high nineties. The winds blow on, and the fortresses stand still.....read more:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-mysterious-desert-towers-of-uzbekistans-lost-civilization?ref=homeW