I used to think wooden columns were just, you know, structural things.
Then I walked into the Juma Mosque courtyard in Khiva one October afternoon, and honestly, the entire concept of what a column could be just sort of dissolved. The interior prayer hall—this sprawling, dim space that feels older than memory—contains 212 wooden columns, and no two are identical. Some date back to the 10th century, carved when the Abbasid Caliphate was still flexing its architectural muscles across Central Asia. Others were added in the 18th century during renovations, but here’s the thing: they didn’t try to match them. The craftsmen just brought in whatever ancient pillars they could salvage from ruined caravanserais, forgotten palaces, maybe even pre-Islamic structures nobody wanted to talk about. The result is this forest of mismatched wood—some columns thick as tree trunks, others slender and nervous-looking, all of them carved with patterns that range from geometric precision to something that looks like someone got bored halfway through and started doodling.
The ceiling rests on all this chaos somehow. You stand there and your eyes adjust slowly, and the columns multiply in the gloom.
When Architecture Becomes a Time-Collapsed Archive of Central Asian Craftsmanship Traditions
What gets me is that this wasn’t some deliberate museum project. The Juma Mosque—full name Juma Masjid, which just means Friday Mosque because that’s when everyone gathered—was rebuilt around 1788 after a fire, and the builders needed columns fast. Khiva sits on the Silk Road, or what was left of it by then, and the city had been sacked, rebuilt, sacked again roughly a dozen times over the centuries. So there were piles of carved wood just lying around in the desert, half-buried. The builders grabbed them. Some of the column capitals show Zoroastrian motifs, pre-Islamic stuff that should’ve been destroyed but somehow survived because, I guess, waste not want not. There’s one column—I’m pretty sure it’s near the eastern section, though the whole space disorients you—that has carvings scholars think might date to the 7th century, which would make it older than Islam’s arrival in the region. The mosque itself doesn’t advertise this. There are no plaques, no explanations, just this silent accumulation of centuries standing in rows.
I’ve seen a lot of hypostyle halls. The ones in Cordoba, in Cairo, they’re magnificent and uniform and kind of exhausting in their perfection.
This one feels like it’s holding secrets it doesn’t even know it has.
The Structural Logic of Reusing What Survives When Empires Crumble Around You
The courtyard itself is open to the sky, which creates this strange rhythm: blinding Central Asian sunlight, then you step inside and it’s all shadow and wood grain. The columns aren’t arranged in a perfect grid either—they’re close, but not quite, like someone was eyeballing it. Which they probably were. Modern structural analysis suggests the column placement actually follows an intuitive understanding of load distribution that predates engineering manuals by centuries. The wood is mostly elm and mulberry, which grow along the Amu Darya river, and the dry climate preserved them in ways that would never work in, say, monsoon Asia. Some of the columns have worn smooth at hand-height from centuries of people brushing past them. Others still have sharp edges on the carvings, untouched, too far from the main traffic flow.
There’s this one column I keep thinking about—it has a simple geometric pattern, just interlocking hexagons, but someone carved a tiny bird into one of the corners. You wouldn’t notice unless you were looking hard. Maybe a craftsman’s signature, maybe just boredom during a long afternoon in the 1200s. The bird’s wings are asymmetrical, definately not professional work.
Anyway, the mosque still functions. Locals pray there on Fridays, stepping between these historical accidents like it’s no big deal.
Which I guess it isn’t, to them. But standing there as a visitor, you feel the weight of all that accumulated time—not in some abstract way, but physically, in the smell of old wood and dust, in the way light barely penetrates past the first few rows of columns. The forest metaphor isn’t mine originally; Russian archaeologists in the 1920s called it a “forest of columns,” and the name stuck because nothing else quite captures that sense of being lost among wooden trunks that stretch back into darkness. You lose track of exits. The columns multiply, or seem to. It’s disorienting in a way that feels intentional, even though it probably wasn’t.
I used to think preservation meant keeping things unchanged. Khiva’s Juma Mosque suggests maybe it means reusing, mismatching, letting history pile up in layers that don’t quite align but somehow still stand.
