Nick Hunt | Noema | 30th January 2025 | U
Nick Hunt is the author of three travel books about walking in different parts of Europe, two of which were finalists for the Edward Stanford Travel Book of the Year.
All photography by Hassan Kurbanbaev for Noema Magazine.
MIZDARKHAN, Uzbekistan — On a hill at the edge of the desert stands a wooden edifice above a simple tomb. It consists of four slanting poles that come together in a frame, inside of which are bundled sticks that resemble kindling. It seems a puzzling marker for a grave until you learn the legend of whose body lies inside: Gayōmart, the first human, neither woman nor man, who was created from mud by the Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda. Zoroastrians venerate fire, so the structure makes sense. It is a symbolic beacon waiting for its flame.
Not far away, past crumbling graves and cairns of mud bricks stacked in sevens — an auspicious number in the comparatively recent religion of Islam — stands another monument, a ruined mausoleum. Its roof long ago collapsed, and only three slumped walls remain. According to tradition, one brick falls from it every year. It is dedicated to Khalif Erejep, a medieval Sufi saint, but pious Muslims believe it is built on top of Adam’s grave, a cosmological rival to the tomb of Gayōmart.
The mausoleum itself, meanwhile, is known as the Apocalypse Clock. When its last brick falls, the end of the world will come.
Pilgrims in their thousands bring bricks to pile around the walls of this sprawling necropolis in the west of Uzbekistan, a superstitious hack to forestall the end of days. Eschatological themes — creation and apocalypse, the beginning and the end — run through this city of the dead, and through the region in which it lies. A hundred miles to the north is the site of one of the modern world’s worst ecocides. I have come to Uzbekistan to visit a vanished sea.
The Mizdakhan necropolis, with the mausoleum dedicated Khalif Erejep in the center.
The wooden edifice above Gayōmart’s tomb.The ruins of Gyaur-Kala, also called “Fortress of the Infidels.”
My journey started far from here, in the ancient city of Samarkand. I landed shortly after dawn and walked toward its center. The famous madrassas with their minarets and blue-tiled domes, UNESCO World Heritage sites that draw tourists from around the world, were hidden by Soviet tenement blocks, gaudy shopping malls and urban sprawl. It wasn’t quite the Silk Road oasis I had been expecting. But underneath a pink sky, a more mysterious sight emerged. The highway from the airport passed a barren area seemingly stranded by development: curiously eroded hills grazed by skinny sheep. I assumed it was pastureland or else a vast demolition zone, but it turned out to be the ruin of an even older settlement.
The site, Afrasiyab, dates back at least 2,500 years. Within canyons of cracked dirt, which hint at vanished walls and streets, are layers of archaeology almost 40 feet deep. Murals discovered in the 1960s show opulent processions and feasts; camels, swans and elephants; ambassadors arriving from courts as distant as China and Tibet. Inhabited by the Sogdians, an Eastern Iranian merchant culture, and situated roughly midway between Beijing and Rome, the fortunes of this thriving city rested upon trade. In 1220, the invading Mongols wiped it off the map.
Even by the standards of Genghis Khan, the destruction was impressive. Almost every trace of the city’s existence was erased. Samarkand grew rich again — in the 14th and 15th centuries, it was one of Central Asia’s wealthiest centers, a magnet for scholars and artisans from across the world — but the ruins of the earlier city were left alone. Its mud-brick walls crumbled back into the land. Subsequent inhabitants never built upon the rubble. The modern suburbs that have crept around it only emphasize its void; it stands preserved as an architectural memento mori.
Much of Uzbekistan, I saw as I traveled on, is littered with the remains of vanished civilizations. From Samarkand, my route led west for 500 miles by train, from the country’s more fertile east to the vast, arid region of Karakalpakstan. The track parallelled the Amu Darya, the river that divides two forbidding deserts: the Kyzylkum (“Red Sand”) to the north and Turkmenistan’s Karakum (“Black Sand”) to the south. There was nothing red or black in the vastness I could see, nothing but low, wind-sculpted dunes stretching on and on. But then in the distance a grey silhouette appeared, a kind of flat-topped mountain with symmetrically sloping sides. Even from afar it was clearly not natural. After watching it for a while — the only thing to focus on in the horizontal endlessness — I recognized it as Chilpik Kala.
Atop Chilpik Kala.
A cleft in the rock atop Chilpik Kala.Saxaul, a large shrub that thrives in the desert, not far from Chilpik Kala.
A gargantuan “tower of silence,” Chilpik Kala was a site for the mortuary practice of excarnation. Two millennia ago, bodies were laid on top of it to be picked apart by carrion birds, keeping the decomposing flesh from polluting the sacred elements of earth, water and particularly fire. Before Arab invasions from the west spread Islam across the continent, this region — ancient Khwarazm — was a heartland of Zoroastrianism. The Arabs characterized its people as “fire-worshippers.”
Zoroastrians do not worship fire — like Muslims, they recognize one god — but the sacredness of fire is central to their faith. From Iran to India, where Parsi (Persian) refugees fled from religious persecution, fire temples are dedicated to eternally burning flames fed by priests with sandalwood to ensure they never fade. But the supply of worshippers is less sustainable than wood — there are fewer than 200,000 in the world today.
Far to the south of Chilpik Kala, across the border in Turkmenistan, is another site that houses an eternal flame. On my map it was marked as “Door to Hell (Tourist Attraction).” Also known as the “Shining of Karakum,” the Darvaza gas crater is a collapsed natural gas field 230 feet wide that has been continuously burning for half a century. Its origin is debated — some say it was caused by a drilling accident, others that the pit formed naturally — but it was flared deliberately by engineers in the 1980s to burn off methane escaping into the atmosphere. Since at least 2010, Turkmenistan’s government has planned to extinguish it, but this will be difficult and expensive; for now it provides a source of income to local tour guides. Visitors take selfies against a bowl of orange flames. A Canadian explorer, descending the crater in 2014 protected by a Kevlar suit, described it as a roaring “coliseum of fire.”
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