We spent a day looking around Samarkand. Everything is pretty close together, and a day is probably enough to see much of the city. Samarkand is most famous as the capital of Timur's kingdom. He built many amazing architectural monuments there.
The "Registan" is right in the middle of Samarkand. It is a collection of three medresehs (Islam high schools), one with an amazing golden mosque. This is one of the buildings.
This is the gold mosque. It was recently restored. It is covered with the most amazing gold leaf.
I've put the pictures of Gur Emir, where Timur is buried, along with Ulug Bek, his grandson and great astronomer, on another page.
Here are some pictures of daily life in Samarkand.
What is this? It is part of the remains of a massive sextant, which the noted astronomer Ulug Bek built on the top of a hill near Samarkand. It was excavated in the early 1930's by some Russian guy. Ulug Bek used this sextant to measure the location of the stars very accurately. He also computed the length of the year to within something like 15 seconds.