One of the oldest continuously inhabited cities of Central Asia, in present-day Uzbekistan — the ancient Sogdian Maracanda that Alexander the Great took in 329 BCE, a great Silk Road oasis hub devastated by Genghis Khan’s armies in 1220, and above all the imperial capital that Timur (Tamerlane) rebuilt with the plunder and captive artisans of a continent into a vision of turquoise domes and soaring tiled portals, so dazzling its name became Western shorthand for the unreachably exotic East.
Samarkand is the city Timur built to be the center of the world. He had no claim to the throne by blood, so he made his capital itself the argument: he dragged the finest tile-cutters, masons, and painters of every land he conquered back to one oasis in Central Asia and set them to raising turquoise domes and tiled gateways so vast they seem to lean over the visitor. The result was so beautiful that the name detached from the place. For Europeans who would never go, "Samarkand" stopped meaning a real city in present-day Uzbekistan and became a word for the golden, half-legendary East at the end of an impossibly long road. But Samarkand is real, and far older than Timur. Alexander the Great took it seventeen centuries before him; Genghis Khan’s armies devastated the old city. Timur later rebuilt Samarkand into the most splendid monument to his own name.