Ishratkhana-Mausoleum

Archnet describes the Ishratkhana as a dynastic tomb for the royal women of the Timurid house, probably meant to succeed the Shah-i Zinda, in use until the 1440s⁴. According to Archnet, Abu Sa’id’s eldest wife, Habiba Sultan Begim, commissioned it in 1464 for a daughter who died young⁴. A 2022 article published by UzA, the national news agency, cites the waqf deed known from the archive of the Samarkand State Museum-Reserve: dated to the start of Ramadan 868 AH (May 1464), it bears the seal of Abu Sa’id, ruler of Transoxiana and Khorasan⁵. The deed calls the building the mausoleum of Sultan Khovand Beka, built by Habiba Sultan Begim, daughter of Amir Jalal al-Din Suhrab, beside the tomb of Khoja Abdi Darun⁵.

The endowment, half the lands of Malik Saray village, paid a Qur’an reciter, a supervisor and a servant, all lodged upstairs⁵. The crypt became a family vault: Archnet counts 20 tombstones there in the late 17th century, UzA 20 excavated graves, and the Registan Ensemble Directorate 23 burials of women and children^4,5,6. According to UzA, no source but Abu Tahir Khoja’s Samariya of the 1830s uses the name Ishratkhana, ‘house of pleasure’; Archnet links it to the rich interiors, and the Directorate treats as legend the story that Timur admired the building and made it a house of joy^4,5,6. Specialists of the Samarkand State Museum-Reserve prefer Ashratkhana, ‘ten rooms’, now the form in Uzbekistan’s national heritage register^5,6.

The plan, which Archnet counts among the later Timurid tripartite types, places a tall cruciform domed hall between a three-room mosque on the west and four rooms on the east, the miyan saray, used for funeral rites⁴. Spiral stairs in the corner piers lead to upper rooms, and another stair descends to a vaulted octagonal crypt^4,5. Archnet describes a flat, 16-sided inner dome over the hall, carried on intersecting arches, under a tiled outer dome on a tall drum; V. Vyatkin, a former head of the Samarkand museum, put the top of the outer dome 26.7 m above the ground, as UzA reports^4,5. The tall portal has two-storey loggias, glazed brick and mosaic panels with interlocking hexagonal stars^4,6.

According to UzA, Galina Pugachenkova (1976) and Lisa Golombek and Donald Wilber (1988) compared the design with Gawhar Shad’s mausoleum in Herat⁵. The building was neglected after the Shaybanids replaced the Timurids, and according to UzA its tombstones were moved to the Abdi Darun cemetery in the 17th century and re-inscribed⁵. UzA reports that an earthquake in 1897 brought down four rooms and that the domes of two rooms fell in 1902; Archnet dates the collapse of the central dome and drum to 1903^4,5. Archnet notes that the tomb was left out of the Soviet restoration campaigns of the 1930s to 1970s⁴.

Archnet describes the interior decoration: a mosaic dado to eye level, with kundal above it, a relief of red clay, plaster and glue covered with gold leaf and white lead, and windows of coloured glass, rare in the region at the time⁴. Traces of hexagonal stars in relief remain on the drum, and the nomination file also mentions marble panels and paintings with gold^3,4. According to UzA, Steffen Laue led students from Potsdam in Germany and from the Samarkand State Architecture and Construction Institute in 2007 in analysing the pigments and restoring part of the wall decoration⁵. The same 2022 article describes the building as partly conserved, with its roofs covered, but not yet set up as a museum⁵.