Konye-Urgench

 ( Archaeological Sites In Turkmenistan ) 

According to an 1893 writerGloukhovsky, Alexandr Ivanovitch, The Passage of the Water of the Amu-Darya by its Old Bed into the Caspian Sea, St Petersburgh, 1893, pages 8,10,15,28. Djordjania or Jorjania was the "second capital" of the country. It was on the Wadak canal which seems to be the east end of the Kunya-Darya which seems to be the river bed that now leads to the Sarykamysh Lake. Just east of the town was the Gurganj Dam that irrigated the area and blocked the flow of the Oxus into the Caspian Sea. In 1221 both town and dam were destroyed by the Mongols and the surrounding area became a marsh. Konya-Urgench was soon built on or near the site of Jorjania.

In 1221, Genghis Khan destroyed the city in the Mongol invasion of Central Asia, in what is considered to be one of the bloodiest massacres in human history. Most if not all the ancient Iranic Khwarazmian people were killed or pushed out, paving the way for the Turkification of Khwarazm. Despite the devastating effects of the invasion, the city was revived and it regained its previous status. It was described by the 14th-century Berber traveller Ibn Battuta as "the largest, greatest, most beautiful and most important city of the Turks. It has fine bazaars and broad streets, a great number of buildings and abundance of commodities".

In 1373, Timur attacked Khwarezm, and its ruler Yusef Sufi of the Sufi Dynasty surrendered to Timur. In 1379, Yusef Sufi rebelled against Timur, who sacked Urgench, and Yusef Sufi was killed. In 1388, the Sufi dynasty of Urgench again revolted against Timur; this time Timur razed Urgench to the ground and massacred its population, destroyed the city's irrigation system, and had barley planted over the ground where the city had once stood, leaving only one mosque standing. This, coupled with the sudden change of the Amu-Darya River's course, constituted the beginning of Kunya-Urgench's decline until the 16th century, when it was replaced as a regional capital by Khiva and was ultimately abandoned.

The area was later inhabited by the Turkmen people from the early 19th century, but they mostly developed outside the old town, utilising the latter as a graveyard. However, this use has now stopped, and efforts have been made to remove the decaying grave stones that can be encountered at the site.

The new town of Urgench was developed to the southeast, in present-day Uzbekistan. Some of the first archeological research on the old city site was conducted by Alexander Yakubovsky in 1929.Government of Turkmenistan, January 2004. Nomination of the Ancient Town of Kunya-Urgench for the Inclusion on the World Heritage List /ref>

On the basis of its decorative brickwork, including Kufic inscriptions, the minaret is thought to be an earlier construction, only restored by Kutlug-Timur around 1330.Golombek, L. 2011. 'The Turabeg Khanom Mausoleum in Kunya Urgench: Problems of Attribution, in Muqarnas. An Annual on the Visual Cultures of the Islamic World, Volume 28, 133-156.

The original building was composed of two chambers: a large domed hall and a smaller one behind it. The large chamber is twelve-sided on the exterior and hexagonal on the interior, being preceded by an entrance portal and a vestibule.

One of the most impressive architectural features of the mausoleum is the circular dome covering the main hall, whose surface is covered in colourful mosaic which forms intricate ornamental patterns consisting of flowers and stars, creating a visual metaphor for the heavens. No comparable contemporary parallels can be found at Urgench, as some of the architectural features, such as the decorations mentioned above, do not appear in other monuments built during the lifetime of Turabek-Khanum, around 1330. Thus, it is difficult to date the building so early. These features do, however, appear in Central Asia later, during the reign of Timur, a warlord of Turco-Mongol descent. New technologies, such as mosaic faience, show up in Timur's earliest buildings, such as the Aq Saray palace in Shahrisabz, in Uzbekistan, which was begun in 1379 but was still unfinished in 1404.

The building is made of bricks and consists of a square hall with walls which are 11,45 meters high, a massive round drum and a conical roof with an inner dome hidden under it. The dome is connected to the square walls it rests upon by an octagonal belt. The structure between the dome and the octagon is decorated with 16 shallow niches. Their form is not lancet-like as those commonly found in the Islamic architecture of Central Asia, but rather semicircular. This is a motif that can be found in the marble 8th-century mihrab at the Baghdad Museum, and has seldom been used in Central Asia: another comparable case that can be found in Turkmenistan is that of the mihrab of Muhammad Ibn Zayd's 11th-century mosque, from Merv. However, the two are located too far away to be considered .

The external conical roof is built of horizontal layers using the technique of a false dome. From the inside, it is strengthened with 12 standing upon the internal dome. Although this might seem like a risky construction technique, the roof is not in bad condition: only the top is destroyed, and the blue majolica decoration slightly damaged.

One of the special features of the building's architecture is its façade. It presents a high portal niche with the main archway, which has now lost its original form. The lancet arch of the portal is filled by a complicated system of stalactite -like forms, which is a decorative motif made of terracotta and fixed on wooden sticks within the brickwork.

Research concerning this structure has given rise to speculations that the Mausoleum of Tekesh might have stood at the centre of some large construction that consisted of a multitude of buildings. Thus, certain scholars would argue that the building served a different purpose from that of a mausoleum, such as, for example, a House of Government or a Palace of the Great Khwarzm-shahs.Chmelnizkij, S. 1995 'The Mausoleum of Tekesh in Kunya Urgench', in International Congress of Turkish Art: Art Turc, Turkish Art, Geneve, Fondation Max Van Berchem, 217-221.

The Mausoleum of Sultan Ali, who ruled in the 16th century, is located across. It is a hexagonal monument, with a dome measuring 9.5 meters in diameter.

The Mausoleum of Piryar Vali, a contemporary of Najm al-Din al-Kubra, is located to the west of the latter's mausoleum, and was built in the 13th and 14th centuries. It is 6.5 meters high and measures 7.5 meters in length.

The building has a cuboidal structure of baked brick similar to the earliest existing Islamic mausoleum in Central Asia, the early 10th-century mausoleum of the Samanid Empire in Bukhara, but instead of a hemispherical dome it has a faceted conical roof. The structure is decorated with a motif carved in relief into brick panels, a frieze containing an aphorism written in beautiful script, and with carved vegetal motifs displaying variations of an arabesque pattern. The decorative scheme of the dome presents a tiling technique executed in turquoise glazed brick tiles, forming a geometric pattern.Kuehn, S. 2007. 'Tilework on 12th to 14th century funerary monuments in Urgench (Gurganj)', in Arts of Asia, Volume 37, Number 2, 112-129

According to some of the latest scientific discoveries, one of the structure's functions, at a certain point, was that of storing water.