Shergozikhon Madrasa

History

Work began in 1719, while Shergozi Khan was campaigning in Khorasan, and finished in 1726; the building was set to face the shrine of Pahlavon Mahmud. Its dedicatory inscription records that historians and poets called it “Maskan-i fazilan”, the abode of scholars — a phrase whose letters, read as numbers, give the building date, and which became the madrasa’s second name. Among its students were the Turkmen poet Magtymguly, the poet Pahlavonqul Ravnaq, the Kazakh Sufi poet Beket Ata and the great Karakalpak poet Ajiniyaz.

Legend has it that the builders were Persian craftsmen the khan had carried off from Mashhad, promised freedom on completion; when he kept spinning out the work, the enslaved builders killed him on site. Shergozi Khan lies in a small chamber on the west side of the madrasa, reached by steps because the ground has subsided.

Architecture

The two-storey main façade opens through a great portal into a domed vestibule with a domed mosque and lecture hall at its corners. Fifty-five single-storey cells with small porches surround the courtyard, which once had a pool at its centre, and the cells still have their wall niches. The tiles have not survived, giving the building a plain, weighty look among Khiva’s showier 19th-century madrasas.