I used to think minarets always came in pairs.
Then I ended up in Bukhara one humid September afternoon, jet-lagged and slightly lost, when I turned a corner in the old Jewish quarter and saw four turquoise domes rising against the sky like something out of a fever dream. Chor Minor—which literally means “four minarets” in Persian, though calling these things minarets is like calling the Sistine Chapel a bedroom ceiling—was built in 1807 by a wealthy Turkmen merchant named Khalif Niyaz-kul. The guy had apparently made a pilgrimage to India and came back obsessed with Mughal architecture, specifically the Char Minar in Hyderabad, and decided to build his own version as a gatehouse for a madrasah that’s mostly gone now. What remains is this four-towered structure, each tower capped with a sky-blue dome, each one slightly different from the others in a way that shouldn’t work but somehow does. It’s roughly 17 meters tall, give or take, and it sits there in a residential neighborhood like someone’s eccentric uncle who refuses to move out.
Here’s the thing: it wasn’t actually a madrasah itself. The main religious school complex spread out behind it, but that’s largely vanished over the past two centuries, victims of time and neglect and probably a few earthquakes. What survived was this gatehouse, this architectural appetizer that outlived the main course.
Anyway, each of those four towers supposedly represents a different world religion, or maybe the four corners of the Islamic world, or possibly the four elements—nobody seems entirely sure anymore, and the historical record is frustratingly vague on Khalif Niyaz-kul’s actual intentions. Some locals told me the domes once housed different theological texts, with one tower dedicated to the Quran, another to astronomy, another to mathematics. A tour guide insisted they represented the four caliphs, but then admitted she might be wrong about that.
What’s definately true is that the building occupies this weird architectural space between Central Asian and South Asian design traditions.
The Ornamental Language That Nobody Speaks Anymore But Everyone Still Reads
The decorative work is where things get interesting, or maybe exhausting, depending on how you feel about 19th-century ceramic tilework. The turquoise and cobalt glazed bricks form geometric patterns that shift slightly as you walk around the structure—Islamic architects were really into this idea that decoration should reveal itself gradually, that you shouldn’t be able to take in the whole design at once. There are carved ganch panels between the towers, this traditional Central Asian plaster work that looks delicate but is surprisingly durable, and some brick patterns that create these subtle shadow effects at different times of day. I spent maybe twenty minutes just watching how the afternoon light moved across the western facade, which probably says something unflattering about my social life, but there you go. The blue tiles—and this is the part that got me—are slightly different shades depending on which tower you’re looking at, ranging from deep lapis to almost turquoise-green, possibly because they were fired in different batches or maybe deteriorated differently over time.
Wait—maybe I should mention that restoration work in the 1990s and early 2000s tried to stabilize the structure, though some architecture historians argue the renovations were too aggressive and replaced too much original material.
Why A Merchant’s Gatehouse Outlasted The School It Was Supposed to Guard
There’s this romantic notion that the greatest buildings survive because they’re the most beautiful or the most important. Turns out, sometimes they survive because they’re small enough that nobody bothers to demolish them for building materials. Chor Minor escaped destruction partly because it wasn’t valuable enough to tear down during Soviet urban planning efforts, and partly because local families in the mahalla—the traditional neighborhood—apparently maintained it informally for decades. One elderly woman told me her grandmother used to sweep the courtyard every week, though I have no idea if that’s actually true or just a good story. The building sits on private land now, owned by descendants of the original builder’s family, and you can climb the narrow stairs inside one of the towers if you ask permission and aren’t claustrophobic. The steps are worn smooth from generations of feet, each one slightly different in height, which makes ascending in the dark a small adventure in ankle-twisting.
I guess what strikes me most is how Chor Minor represents this specific historical moment when Bukhara was still a independent khanate, still wealthy from Silk Road trade even as that trade was declining, still building ambitious things before the Russian Empire absorbed it completely in 1868. It’s a monument to pre-colonial confidence, built by a merchant who probably had no idea his gatehouse would outlast everything else he created. The madrasah is gone, his wealth is gone, probably even his family name would be forgotten if not for this weird, wonderful little building that refuses to make complete architectural sense.
Honestly, I’ve seen more photographed monuments in Uzbekistan—the Registan in Samarkand gets all the attention, obviously—but there’s something about Chor Minor’s stubborn survival that gets to me. It’s not trying to overwhelm you with scale or symmetry. It’s just there, four slightly mismatched towers in a residential neighborhood, still confusing historians about what it all meant, still catching that perfect Central Asian light.
