Outer structure

First there was usually more than one city wall. Balkh, for example, by the eighteenth century had a great outer wall, some eleven kilometers in circumference. Nested within that was a smaller, elevated walled area known as the inner city with walls some three kilometers in circumference. In the southeast corner of the inner city on an even higher elevation was the citadel with its own walls, which joined the southeast walls of the inner city. Bukhara had much the same urban plan at this time, as did Samarqand. Mazar-i Sharif, which really only became a city with the demise of Balkh and the shift of administrative functions to it in the middle of the nineteenth century, shows the way in which urban planning was developing under the technological constraints of the age. Laid out on a grid pattern, Mazar-i Sharif has no walls, nor a citadel, the main garrison stronghold being located at Takhtah Pul, a couple of miles to the southwest of the city center. Walls had little future as defenses after the mid-nineteenth century and constricted growth. Tashkent’s walls, fiercely defended when attacked by the Russians in 1865, were quickly rendered obsolete as a new Russian town grew up outside the walls. Today it is nearly impossible to find traces of the nineteenth century walls in the modern city. In Bukhara where walls have been preserved it is only as a matter of historic preservation.

Inside the walls

Inside the cities, commercial activity in the cities was generally scattered. Zoning restrictions tended to focus on rights-of-way and access to light and air rather than on use so most neighborhoods were mixed-use, residential, retail, and crafts operating cheek by jowl. Bukhara has best preserved the more prominent surviving architecture of commerce, shopping arcades (taqs) and caravansaries laid out along the north-south axis running through the center of the town and along the intersecting street paralleling the major canal running from east to west through the city, the “City River” (rud-i shahr). Many of these arcades and caravansaries were built in the sixteenth century and have served their intended purpose in some ways up to the present. In Bukhara and Samarqand, the great open squares called “Rigistan” (“sand plaza”), were where most retail merchants gathered in more or less permanent stalls or under canopies as pictures from the late nineteenth century show. Documents from the period also indicate that most neighborhoods had their retail shops, a bakery being one of the ubiquitous ones, as well as workshops for craftsmen. A study of nineteenth-century Bukhara found the city divided into more than 200 neighborhoods (called “passages” guzar) (see the work of O. A. Sukhareva, especially Kvartal’naia Obshchina Goroda Bukhary). What characterized all these neighborhoods was the presence of a mosque and residences. In addition there might be a small marketplace, small craft workshops, a madrasa, a hostel or hotel, the shrine of a local saint, or a cistern or water tank for which the neighborhood was famous. Many of these neighborhoods would be named after the predominant craft practiced in them or after a saint buried there or an eponymous madrasa or mosque but in all cases commercial and residential space existed side by side.

Houses

Houses varied according to the relative means of the owners. The hawili/howli or compound house, whether in its grander or more modest forms was the style of choice, offering privacy and escape from the hustle and bustle of the city just outside the door. Entries opened into a narrow corridor leading to a courtyard so that one did not directly enter the living quarters from the street. Windows faced the courtyard or overlooked the street from upper floors and casual passersby were barred from glimpsing the life within. Rooms of the house were not connected by internal halls but opened onto a veranda overlooking the courtyard or directly into the courtyard. It is a style of house that remains extremely popular in Central Asia today.

Organization of rural space

The architecture of small towns and villages shows the response to two issues—the need for privacy and the need for security. The need for privacy was general and presumably was a sentiment shared more along economic than regional lines. Rural villages in the mountains of Tajikistan for example rarely have elaborate courtyards and often open directly onto a road. Where women must work outside the home (in the fields and orchards) as part of the economic unit, residential seclusion is of less import. Security on the other hand is more a regional than economic issue. That is, cities provided more security than villages with their walls and gates and their bands of night watchmen, but villages far from main thoroughfares or deep in the mountains had less concern about security, or at least their architecture suggests this. In rural areas near heavily traveled intercity routes, on the other hand, personal security was of obvious concern in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Afghanistan shows this most dramatically in the architecture of the qal‘a or residential fort found all over eastern Afghanistan though more rarely in the north where security concerns arising from inter-tribal fighting were less marked.

Political struggles and political turmoil created less impact in rural areas than in urban ones. The control of a city and its resources required the settling of political disputes, whether by peaceful or violent means, and thus the strengthening of the government’s hand, regardless of who controlled the government. What the rural areas had to fear was the appearance of the tax collector, usually accompanied by armed retainers. In general, the more remote the area, the more secure from the harvest-time visit of the revenuers. Though more uncertainty at the urban center might mean more security from taxes in the countryside, it might also mean more depredation and outright theft of produce and livestock by outlaw elements.