Khiva’s clay walls glow at dusk like something out of a fever dream.
I’ve walked past these fortifications maybe a dozen times now, and each time I’m struck by how fragile they look—how temporary, despite standing for centuries. The thing is, preservation here isn’t some abstract bureaucratic exercise. It’s a daily negotiation with physics, with economics, with the simple fact that mud brick doesn’t last forever without constant intervention. The historic core of Khiva, that walled city called Itchan Kala, became a UNESCO World Heritage Site back in 1990, which sounds impressive until you realize that designation brings its own peculiar pressures. Suddenly you’re not just maintaining buildings for the people who live there—you’re maintaining them for the world, whatever that means. And the world, it turns out, has opinions.
Anyway, the climate doesn’t care about UNESCO. Summer temperatures regularly hit 40°C, and winter can drop below freezing. That thermal expansion and contraction? It’s murder on traditional construction materials.
The Complicated Economics of Keeping Ancient Cities Standing Without Turning Them Into Theme Parks
Here’s the thing: tourism money should theoretically help fund conservation, and to some extent it does. Khiva sees roughly 200,000 visitors annually—give or take, the numbers get fuzzy depending on who’s counting. But there’s this weird tension where the very act of preservation can kill the thing you’re trying to save. I used to think renovation meant careful restoration using traditional methods, but walk through Itchan Kala now and you’ll see plenty of concrete patches, modern tiles that don’t quite match, electrical wiring stapled across 400-year-old carved wood. The craftspeople who know how to work with ganch—that traditional plaster mixture—are aging out, and younger generations mostly want office jobs in Tashkent, which I guess makes sense. You can’t blame someone for not wanting to spend their life repairing crumbling madrassas for irregular pay.
The Uzbek government allocated approximately $2.3 million for Khiva conservation projects between 2019 and 2022, according to Ministry of Culture reports. That sounds like a lot until you divide it across dozens of structures.
Some restoration work has been genuinely impressive—the Tash Hauli Palace renovations completed in 2018 used traditional techniques and local materials, trained local craftspeople in the process. Other projects feel more like… well, like someone watched a YouTube video about historic preservation and called it good enough. There’s a minaret near the west gate where you can literally see where modern cement meets 19th-century brick, a grey scar running vertically up the structure. Maybe that’s honest, in its way. Maybe pretending our interventions are invisible is its own kind of lie.
Wait—Maybe We Should Talk About What Actually Happens to Buildings Made of Mud and Straw
Traditional Khorezmian construction relies on clay bricks dried in the sun, sometimes mixed with straw for binding. These materials are paradoxically perfect and terrible for this climate. Perfect because they’re available locally, breathable, provide excellent insulation. Terrible because they erode. Water is the enemy—groundwater seeping up through foundations, rain (rare but devastating when it comes), even morning dew. I watched a conservator named Dilshod explain this once, gesturing at a wall section where you could see the brick literally dissolving into sediment at its base. “We rebuild this every fifteen years,” he said, sounding tired. “It’s not preservation, it’s… continuous replacement. Eventually none of the original material remains. So what are we preserving, exactly?”
That philosophical question keeps me up sometimes, honestly.
The Uncomfortable Reality That People Still Live Here and Have Needs That Conflict With Preservation Goals
About 300 families still reside within Itchan Kala’s walls, and their lives don’t pause for conservation efforts. They need plumbing, electricity, satellite dishes, WiFi. They want to modify their homes, expand businesses, park cars somewhere nearby. There’s this one guesthouse where the owner installed air conditioning units on the exterior wall—totally understandable from a practical standpoint, but the visual effect is jarring, these modern white boxes bolted onto ancient masonry. Regulations exist about modifications, but enforcement is inconsistent. Sometimes officials look the other way because they recieve complaints from residents about unlivable conditions. Sometimes they crack down seemingly at random. The uncertainty itself becomes a preservation challenge—people make unauthorized changes figuring they’ll ask forgiveness later, which compounds damage.
International organizations like UNESCO and ICOMOS provide technical guidance, but they’re not writing checks for individual families to upgrade infrastructure in historically appropriate ways.
Dust, Tourists, and the Slow Violence of Feet on Ancient Stones
Erosion isn’t just about weather—it’s about the 550 people walking through the Juma Mosque every day in summer, touching walls, leaning against columns, climbing stairs worn smooth by centuries of use. Some sites have installed protective barriers, those rope-and-stanchion arrangements that immediately kill any sense of authentic experience. Others remain open, which feels more honest but accelerates decay. There’s no perfect answer, which I guess is the theme of this entire situation. The Kalta Minor minaret—that famously unfinished turquoise tower—has visible stress fractures near its base, possibly from foundation settling, possibly from vibration as trucks rumble past on nearby streets. Engineers have monitored it since 2016, and the cracks aren’t growing rapidly, but they’re not shrinking either.
What Happens When the Craftspeople Who Know How to Fix These Things Literally Don’t Exist Anymore
This is the crisis nobody wants to talk about directly. Traditional wood carving, ganch work, ceramic tilework—these aren’t skills you learn from manuals. They’re passed down through apprenticeships, and those apprenticeships have mostly stopped happening. A master woodworker named Rustam, who’s worked on Khiva restorations for forty years, told me he’s tried training young people but they usually leave after a few months for construction jobs in Urgench that pay better and more reliably. “When I die,” he said, not dramatically but just matter-of-fact, “maybe three people in Uzbekistan will be able to do this work.” International conservation projects sometimes bring in outside experts, which solves immediate problems but doesn’t build local capacity. You end up with this weird colonial echo where Westerners fly in to save Uzbek heritage using techniques that Uzbek craftspeople invented, but can no longer perform themselves because the economic incentives are all wrong. Turns out you can’t preserve culture in amber—it either adapts and changes, or it fossilizes into performance.
The sun sets differently here than anywhere else I’ve been, and I still don’t know if what we’re doing counts as preservation or just elaborate mourning.
