Shah-i-Zinda, a Street of Tombs That Grew for Nine Centuries

What makes Shah-i-Zinda unusual is that it grew as a single avenue rather than a single building. Nearly every ruler and noble family that mattered in Samarkand across nine centuries chose to build their own mausoleum along the same short climbing street, so a visitor walking it today passes through a continuous timeline of Central Asian religious architecture rather than one monument frozen at one moment. Archaeological study of the earliest structures dates them to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but the majority of what stands today was built under the Timurid dynasty from the fourteenth century onward, when Timur and his successors used the site as a family and court necropolis and commissioned much of the elaborate blue and turquoise tilework the complex is now famous for. The name Shah-i-Zinda refers specifically to the legend at the top of the hill: Qusam ibn Abbas, a cousin of the Prophet Muhammad, is said to have come to Samarkand in the seventh century to preach Islam and, according to local tradition, to have been attacked while at prayer and to have taken refuge in a well rather than dying, so that he lives on inside the shrine to this day, the living king the site is named for. That legend is what gives the avenue its distinct character among Samarkand's Timurid monuments: local belief holds that visiting his tomb carries the same spiritual merit as the pilgrimage to Mecca, which is why Shah-i-Zinda has remained one of the most visited religious sites in Central Asia even as the political dynasties whose mausoleums line its walls have long since passed.