Dynastic History | Ulugh Beg Madrasa — Two Centuries Between One Side of the Registan and the Other

Ulugh Beg held Samarkand for his father Shah Rukh, whose court sat far off in Herat; Mavarannahr was administered from here, on the province's own revenue. Between 1417 and 1420 he put a madrasa on the Registan, the open ground where the state read out proclamations and carried out executions. It taught the religious sciences and also mathematics and astronomy, and he is recorded teaching in it himself.

The square is not one building programme, though it photographs as one. Ulugh Beg's madrasa, on the west side, is the only fifteenth-century building of the three. The Sher-Dor opposite was raised between about 1616 and 1636 for Yalangtush Bahodur, an Uzbek commander governing Samarkand under the Janid dynasty; the Tilya-Kori went up between 1646 and 1660. Two centuries and two dynasties separate one side of the Registan from the other.

Nor is much of the surface old. Elena Paskaleva, who has worked through the restoration record, dates the first Soviet reconstruction project to 1920 under Mikhail Mauer; Vladimir Shukhov straightened the leaning north-eastern minaret in 1932; Boris Zasypkin began work in 1925, arguing for supporting the ancient fabric rather than replacing it. The campaign that produced the square as it now looks ran from 1974 under Konstantin Kriukov, who treated the decoration as a garment worn over the structure and replaced load-bearing brick with reinforced concrete frames and mass-produced tile across all three madrasas. It was shown to the public in 1982.

The Registan is ticketed now, and the study cells along the arcades are mostly craft shops.

📸 Cover: The Ulugh Beg madrasa from the Registan, 2023, Azamat Samatov, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons