Free A Carpet Ride to Khiva: Seven Years on the Silk Road by Christopher Aslan Alexander

Instead, the bulk of carpets were made in factories, and most Khivans still preferred a standardised factory carpet over a hand-made kilim for their floors.
    The Mayor arrived – sober and obviously keen to impress. We were ushered to the door with promises of wonderful madrassahs, whichever one we mightfancy. The first madrassah on show was the Kutluq Mohammed Inaq madrassah, and I had noticed during my guidebook research the significant cracks in the turrets on either side, and the odd angles at which they jutted out. I was sure the Mayor hoped Barry would choose this madrassah and save the local government a small fortune in restoration. The brickwork on this one was beautiful, and as oneof the larger madrassahs it contained two storeys of student cells. We passed between the carved wooden gates into a corridor with doors to the right and left and archways leading to the main courtyard. An enormous old woman with a rolling gait and a perpetual grimace was there nominally to collect tickets, swathed angrily in headscarves, skirts and vast baggy pants. She had not been informed of ourvisit.
    Barry investigated the room to our right, pushing open the small, carved wooden door, and quickly retreated, retching, at the stench. The Mayor, alarmed, peered into the gloom where curled dollops littered the floor of what had become a makeshift toilet. I stared at the old woman I knew to be the perpetrator, having once interrupted her mid-squat.
    ‘My God! This is a madrassahand they let old grannies shit all over it!’ Barry muttered. Komiljan did not translate.
    Handkerchief to his mouth, Barry led us inside. It was a magnificent room with an enormously high ceiling that had once been a winter mosque for the students living here. The plaster was crumbling and extensive building work was needed, but this didn’t detract from its overall grandeur.
    ‘This wouldmake a good show room, wouldn’t it?’ I ventured. ‘We could hang all the carpets up on the walls and install some spotlights.’
    ‘We’d have to get rid of this appalling stench first,’ Barry observed from behind his handkerchief.
    The opposite room was slightly smaller and smelt a good deal better, and we warmed to the place. Out in the courtyard we poked our heads down some stairs leadingto a cool, spacious cistern, and then looked into some of the empty cells around the courtyard.
    ‘They’re not that big, but I think we could probably fit at least two looms into each one,’ said Barry. ‘Let’s have a look at the corner cells – they’re generally a lot larger.’
    He went over to a corner cell and opened the door part-way – enough to see a dirty mattress on which a girl hidher face as a naked young man attempted to wrest the door shut.
    ‘Good God!’ Barry was visibly shaken. ‘That old witch has turned this place into a brothel! This is a madrassah, for God’s sake! A historic site, a holy site, and she shits all over it and rents out rooms by the hour!’
    Komiljan, keen to avoid a scene with the Mayor who was pottering in one of the other cells, blissfullyunaware, hurried us out to view our next site.
    We turned past the Islom Hoja minaret towards the Pakhlavan Mahmud mausoleum – Khiva’s holiest site. Pakhlavan Mahmud, known by Khivans as Palvan Pir, the Strongman Saint, was buried here. He was a curious combination of poet, hat-maker and wrestler, said to be the strongest man in Central Asia. Today he was the patron saint of barren women,who would come from afar and weep at his tomb, cupping their hands in prayer and making offerings of diamond-shaped fried dough called borsok .
    The Mayor stopped outside the mausoleum and presented us with the madrassah opposite it. This was the oldest madrassah in Khiva and had been built by slaves including a remnant from the first unsuccessful army of invading Russians. Today, the ShirGazi Khan madrassah was famous among Khivans not for its history but for its bottled conjoined twins. The madrassah had