Dear friends,

You’ll have heard me speak often of “The Golden Road to Samarkand”. It’s a phrase and a concept which has inspired generations of travellers, poets, and artists to make their way across Asia along the Great Silk Road. But what many of them fail to realise is that there is a greater treasure still. It’s the city of Bukhara, a World Heritage Site every bit as spectacular as Samarkand, but somehow more complete, more perfect than its more famous neighbour.

Bukhara’s UNESCO-listed Old City is every bit as vibrant, as impressive, as the much-trodden streets of Istanbul or Rome. But in this strange time of COVID, I almost have the streets and squares to myself.

Picture me here. I am sat beneath the shade of a tree in Lyabi Hauz, a picturesque square which l surrounds the city’s original drinking water reservoir. A few elderly gentlemen are playing backgammon and drinking tea; a couple of ladies are strolling by, dazzling in their rainbow coloured silks. When I look up, I see the most graceful of historic monuments. The Nadir Divan Beghi Madrassa was originally a religious school, its elegant facade decorated inspiringly with mosaics depicting two soaring simurghs, mythical birds rather like phoenixes.

Every day, late in the afternoon when the temperature starts to cool, I take a walk (and, more often than not, stop for a drink or a snack) in another part of Bukhara. Much of the time I feel as if I am wandering in an open air museum, but the fact that people still live here, their homes squeezed into labyrinthine streets between the countless historic monuments, means that there is still a living, breathing community. If there are ghosts of the past here, they are competing for space and attention with the school girls running down the street, the women taking a break from shopping to gossip on the street, two old men sitting quietly watching the world go by, and a street dog rolling on her back to have her tummy tickled.