What is intended as homage to this splendid city and the gifted artisans who built it turns out to be a kind of well-meaning vandalism. Today Samarkand is being turned into an theme park, a too-perfect copy of a lost world that might fit in Las Vegas but seems painfully out of place here. But the ancient walkways themselves are newly paved with smooth flagstones, and gaps in the tile work are being filled with poorly matched modern copies. The original work gave you such a warm feeling, a connection to the old days. But someone has decided that tourists want everything to look perfect.
Every year more is rebuilt here, which means that every year more is lost.
Since its construction in the 15th and 16th centuries, the most spectacular monument here has been the breathtaking Registan complex, a courtyard nearly the size of a football field surrounded on three sides by soaring arches, towering minarets and turquoise domes. Today the glorious ruin is gone and with it much of Registan's nobility, obscured by glitz. The facades of the mosques and religious schools are so garishly bright, the paint and tiles so glitteringly new, that they seem to be covered by psychedelic wallpaper. It is as if the Greeks had reconstructed the Parthenon to look as it did the day it was completed, or as if the Romans had patched up the craggy walls of the Coliseum that have crumbled over the centuries. The photos, taken around the turn of the century, depict a city living amid the aging but still magnificent ruins of a civilization that placed supreme value on tangible beauty.