Khorezm Province: Beyond the Walls of Khiva

Khiva does not end at the walls of Itchan Kala. The outer town, Dichan Kala, is the living city — markets, tea houses, schools and homes — and wandering its lanes, or watching the walled town from a rooftop café as the light goes, shows a side of Khiva that the monument core, largely given over to tourism, does not. Staying a night inside or just outside the walls lets you have the inner town to yourself at dawn and see the ordinary town wake up around it. Urgench, the provincial capital half an hour away, is a Soviet-planned city of broad avenues that most travellers use only as the gateway — its airport and railway station are the practical way in and out of the far north-west — but it is a useful, unfussy base with the region's best transport links.

Long before Khiva, this oasis was the heart of Khorezm, a distinct Central Asian civilisation whose mud-brick fortresses still stand out in the desert to the north, in the border country toward Karakalpakstan. Known collectively as the Elliq-Qala, the “fifty fortresses”, the best-preserved of them — Ayaz-Kala on its bluff above the sands, and the huge ruined citadel of Toprak-Kala — date back around two thousand years and rise from the flat desert as eroded ramparts and towers, empty and unrestored. Visited on a half- or full-day loop from Khiva, usually by hired car with a driver, they are among the most atmospheric ancient sites in the country precisely because they are left raw: no ticket gates, no crowds, just wind, sand and enormous walls.

Khorezm is defined by water in a dry land: the Amu Darya, Central Asia's greatest river, built and still feeds the oasis, and the province is a patchwork of cotton fields, poplars and irrigation channels ringed by desert. It also sits at a crossroads — the road and rail line west lead on into Karakalpakstan and the vanished Aral Sea, making Khiva a natural staging point for travellers pushing further into the remote north-west. For many, a stay in Khorezm is the pivot of the whole western loop: the last of the great Silk Road towns, and the gateway to the stranger, emptier country beyond.