Travel Guide Ouzgen

60 km east of Osh, on the road to Jalalabad. In the 8th century, Uzgen was a fortified city of the khanat türk, located on the Silk Road. At the end of the 10th century, the Karakhanids made it the regional capital of their state. The city controlled the entire Ferghana Valley. At the end of the 12th century, the Karakhanids were repulsed by the Kara-Kitai who took over the city. It was destroyed, like the others, by Genghis Khan in the 13th century. Of its glorious Karakhanid past, one minaret and three mausoleums remain. The minaret, built at the end of the 10th or beginning of the 11th century, is almost 20 metres high and must have been twice as long when it was built. Its bare brick decoration is characteristic of the decorative art of the pre-Mongolian period. Similarly, the mausoleums are decorated with a subtle and harmonious arrangement of bare bricks and terracotta chiselled like monochrome mineral lace. The three mausoleums are placed side by side. In the centre, the mausoleum of Nasr-ibn Ali is the oldest of the three, and is thought to have been built in the early 11th century for the first khan of the Karakhanid dynasty. The northern mausoleum, built in 1152-1153, is that of Hassan ibn Hussein ibn Ali. The chiseled terracotta of the southern mausoleum, built in 1187, are the finest and most admirable; they would have influenced the (glazed) terracotta that can be seen in Samarkand.