Itchan Kala is the walled inner town of Khiva, in western Uzbekistan: fifty monuments and 250 mudbrick houses packed into twenty-six hectares. It was the last halt before the desert. Caravans crossing to Persia loaded here and went out through the gates into the Karakum, and everything inside the walls was paid for by that road. Four fortified gates with twin brick towers and blue-tiled domes mark the cardinal points, and each was shut at night. Walking through one, under the cool of its archway, is the moment you leave the modern town. Inside, the residential lanes twist between courtyard houses with no obvious logic, and people still live along them.
The monuments stand shoulder to shoulder. Madrasa courtyards dissolve into star-and-hexagon majolica, every tile glazed and set by hand, and a single archway repays more of your time than a whole circuit of the town. The Juma Mosque is a dark hall held up by carved wooden columns, and about 112 of them are older than the mosque, salvaged from earlier buildings, a few cut a thousand years ago. In the covered bazaar the wooden porticoes still shelter stalls of suzani embroidery, fur hats and ikat. The road that fed all this also ran a slave market, one of the most notorious in Central Asia, trafficking Persian and Russian captives taken by Turkmen raiders. Allakuli Khan's palace was reputedly built in the 1830s by more than a thousand of them; Russia used the trade as its pretext, took Khiva in 1873, and made abolition a condition of the peace. After dark the gates and minarets are floodlit from below, the turquoise glaze warms against a black desert sky, and you have the lanes to yourself. A steep unlit stair climbs the Islam Khoja minaret to a platform partway up. From there the town resolves below you into flat roofs, blue domes and minaret tips, and past the ramparts the desert runs flat to the horizon, which is what all of it was built for.