Mausoleos de Bolgar

Bolgar lies on the Volga about 40 km south of the Kama confluence². In May 922 envoys of the Abbasid caliph al-Muqtadir reached the Volga Bolgars; one of them, Ibn Fadlan, described the journey³. UNESCO dates the Bolgars’ official adoption of Islam to that year¹. The Mongols sacked the city in 1236, yet Batu Khan made it the first capital of the Golden Horde in 1242². After the capital moved to Sarai in the 14th century, Bolgar remained an important northern centre, and many of its mausoleums and bathhouses were built then². The nomination dates the Northern and Eastern Mausoleums to the 1330s and links them to the Cathedral Mosque’s second rebuilding³.

ICOMOS links the city’s ruin to a Muscovite campaign of 1431, after which Bolgar remained a small settlement². In 1712, as an Orthodox monastery was being founded there, the official Andrey Mikhaylov recorded more than 70 medieval buildings³. The monks made the Eastern Mausoleum a small church of St Nicholas and used the Northern one as a cellar³. Peter I visited in 1722 and ordered the stone buildings preserved³. Villagers kept taking stone from the ruins; by the 1760s only 44 buildings remained³. UNESCO inscribed the complex in 2014, linking it with the Volga Bolgars’ acceptance of Islam in 922, and notes that Tatar Muslims still make an annual pilgrimage there¹.

The Northern and Eastern Mausoleums stand in front of the northern and eastern façades of the ruined Cathedral Mosque, and both are built of white limestone and tuff³. They share one scheme: a square room that turns into an octagon, outside through triangular bevels at the upper corners and inside through squinches, with a hemispherical dome on top^3,7. Valeeva-Suleimanova likens these bevels to the “Mamluk cut” of Cairo’s buildings and notes that, on the evidence of field surveys, an outer eight-sided pyramidal roof covered the inner dome of the Eastern Mausoleum and of the Khan’s Shrine⁷. The Eastern Mausoleum is 10.8 m square, with its portal on the south, traces of decorative niches on the octagon and pottery resonators built into the walls in places³. The nomination notes that tombs with projecting portals were being built at the same time in Khorezm, among them Najm al-Din Kubra and Turabek Khanum in Kunya-Urgench³.

The Northern Mausoleum is the largest of the three, about 13 m a side; the nomination describes its foundations and wall core, with some original facing, rising to the base of the lost dome, and its pointed-arch door and window openings^3,7. The Khan’s Shrine, 15 m north of the Small Minaret, is a domed cube of white limestone without a portal, 8.5 m square, and its octagonal tier exists only inside^3,7. ICOMOS places it in the cubic, centrally domed type that it describes as popular all over the Islamic world². The nomination cites historical sources saying it was enlarged in the mid-14th century into a row of four tombs; the museum-reserve says only this one survives and that it held members of the khan’s family^3,6. All three tombs were excavated and partly restored between 1964 and 1971³. In 2014 ICOMOS noted that the Eastern Mausoleum had been restored since 2001 and given a new roof, called the restoration measures at Bolgar “extensive, sometimes without clear justification” and judged the state of conservation generally acceptable but “often rather too perfect following extensive restorations”².

In the Eastern Mausoleum a circular gallery runs round the opened burial area, where excavators found seven wooden and stone crypts of the Golden Horde period; the room holds a display of the excavation and of Bolgar’s history from the 10th to the 18th century^3,4. Squinches in its corners lead up to the octagon and the dome³. The Northern Mausoleum houses an exhibition of Bolgar gravestones, whose inscriptions give a Qur’anic phrase, the name, the lineage and the date of death of the deceased⁵. In the Khan’s Shrine, pyramidal squinches lead from the square room to the dome, and excavators found eight graves there in box coffins (tabut), some under brick gravestones^3,7. According to Valeeva-Suleimanova, the interiors of these tombs were plastered white, with an ornamental band below the dome⁷.