Itchan Kala is the walled inner town of Khiva, in the Khorezm region of western Uzbekistan, fifty monuments and 250 mudbrick houses packed into 26 hectares inside walls ten metres high, the last halt of the caravans before the crossing of the Karakum desert to Persia, and it is the most complete old city in Central Asia, walked in a day and returned to after dark, when the gates and minarets are floodlit and the turquoise tile glows against the desert sky. Khiva was the capital of a khanate that lived on the caravan trade and, until the Russians took it in 1873, on one of the most notorious slave markets in the region, trafficking Persian and Russian captives seized by Turkmen raiders on the roads; legend has the town beginning when Shem, a son of Noah, dug a well here whose water was so sweet that the settlement took its name, Kheivak, and the well is shown in a courtyard. Four fortified gates with twin brick towers mark the cardinal entrances, and inside the lanes run between the khan's palaces, the madrasas and the mausoleum of Pahlavan Mahmud, the town's wrestler saint, under a dome of blue tile.
The landmarks are the towers. The Kalta Minor is a fat, unfinished minaret sheathed in bands of turquoise and green tile, stopped at 29 metres when the khan who started it died in 1855, and the Islam Khoja minaret, the tallest in Khiva at 57 metres, has a viewing platform partway up reached by a steep, unlit spiral stair, with the whole town of flat mud roofs and blue domes below and the desert beyond. The Juma mosque is a forest of 213 carved wooden columns in the dark, about 112 of them older than the mosque itself, salvaged from earlier buildings, some cut a thousand years ago. The madrasa courtyards dissolve into star-and-hexagon majolica, and the covered Allakuli Khan bazaar still sells suzani embroidery, fur hats and ikat. Itchan Kala is a caravan town kept whole inside its walls, and the desert is still at the gate.