Posted on 19.07.2012, 15.09.2015
"It was now near midnight, and the silent, sleeping city lay bathed in a flood of glorious moonlight. The place was transformed. The flat mud roofs had turned to marble; the tall, slender minarets rose dim and indistinct, like spectre sentinels watching over the city. Here and there little courts and gardens lay buried in deepest shadow, from which arose the dark masses of the mighty elms and the still and ghostly forms of the slender poplars. Far away, the exterior walls of the city, with battlements and towers, which in the misty moonlight looked as high as the sky and as distant as the horizon. It was no longer a real city, but a leaf torn from the enchanted pages of the Arabian nights." Thus described in 1873 the American journalist Januarius MacGahan the city of Khiva, then the capital of the khanate with the same name, which the Russians had just occupied it. Of course, the 13,000 soldiers of General Von Kaufman (Governor-General of Turkestan) didn't entered in the fairytale city on flying carpets, but have opened the way with their German-manufactured cannons.
Located on the edge of the Khorezm Oasis, flanked by the the Karakum Desert (Black Sands) to the West and the Kyzyl Kum Desert (Red Sands) to the East, not far from the Oxus River (now called the Amu Darya), Khiva was, along with Samarkand and Bukhara, an important historical site on what was once the Great Silk Road. The city was first recorded by Muslim travellers in the 10th century. In the 12th century was founded the Khwarezmid Empire, the most powerful in Central Asia, which in the early 13th century ruled over all of Persia, being later brutally decimated by Genghis Khan. In the 16th century Khiva was made capital of an khanate. For a long period of time (until 1917), Khiva was also one of the most important markets of slaves in Central Asia.
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