InayatShah on DeviantArthttps://www.deviantart.com/inayatshah/art/Kalyan-Minaret-RW12-682237765InayatShah

Deviation Actions

InayatShah's avatar

Kalyan Minaret - RW12

By
Published:
571 Views

Description

The Kalyan minaret: Bukhara Uzbekistan

The Kalyan minaret is a minaret of the Po-i-Kalyan mosque complex in Bukhara, Uzbekistan and one of the most prominent landmarks in the city.

The minaret, designed by Bako, was built by the Qarakhanid ruler Mohammad Arslan Khan in 1127 to summon Muslims to prayer five times a day. An earlier tower collapsed before completion. It is made in the form of a circular-pillar baked brick tower, narrowing upwards. It is 45.6 metres (149.61 ft) high (48 metres including the point), of 9 metres (29.53 ft) diameter at the bottom and 6 metres (19.69 ft) overhead.

The body of the minaret is topped by a rotunda with 16 arched fenestrations, from which the muezzins summoned the Muslims in the city to prayer. There is a brick spiral staircase that twists up inside around the pillar to the rotunda. Once the minaret was believed to have had another round section above the rotunda, but now only the cone-shaped top remains. The tower base has narrow ornamental strings belted across it made of bricks which are placed in both straight or diagonal fashion. The frieze is covered with a blue glaze with inscriptions.

In times of war, warriors used the minaret as a watchtower to lookout for enemies.

About a hundred years after its construction, the tower so impressed Genghis Khan that he ordered it to be spared when all around was destroyed by his men. It is also known as the Tower of Death, because until as recently as the early twentieth century criminals were executed by being thrown from the top. Fitzroy Maclean, who made a surreptitious visit to the city in 1938, says in his memoir Eastern Approaches, "For centuries before 1870, and again in the troubled years between 1917 and 1920, men were cast down to their death from the delicately ornamented gallery which crowns it."
Image size
800x600px 401.91 KB
Make
SONY
Model
SLT-A77V
Shutter Speed
1/200 second
Aperture
F/5.6
Focal Length
16 mm
ISO Speed
100
Date Taken
Jun 6, 2012, 9:27:49 AM
Sensor Size
3mm
© 2017 - 2024 InayatShah
Comments13
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
AfricanObserver's avatar
You are amazingly - and exhaustingly - prolific Mr Shah. I have been to a bunch of places in Sri Lanka, London, Islamabad, and now Uzbekistan. In the last 10 minutes!