KOUNIA ARK

The old fortress opens its doors on the west side of the central square. The site of the fortified palace was inhabited in the th century. For more than a millennium, several palaces were periodically destroyed and rebuilt in the same place. The oldest still standing construction is the Ak Baron Bobo Tower, dating from the th century. In the th century, Arang Khan, the son of Anusha Khan, built around the ruins of this fortified tower a throne hall and the walls protecting the palace from the outside and inside the city. The whole was destroyed in the th century. It was under Altuzar Khan, the founder of the Kungrad dynasty at the beginning of the th century, that the construction of the current palace began. The official residence of the//included several inner courtyards where the mosque, the guard, the chancery, the throne Hall, or Kurinish Khana, the Mint and the Harem. The empty space behind the large doors of the palace once included different inner courtyards. In the first, visitors were antichambre, in the second one held custody, and then came the chancery. On the right of this great courtyard, now deserted but in the course of restoration, is the Summer Mosque (1838). Its immense iwan with six columns with walls covered with blue majolica is of breathtaking beauty: epoxy tiles with plant arabesques and geometric drawings made by renowned master craftsmen of the th century, Abdullah and Ibadulla Djinn. The Mint, located at the bottom of the inner courtyard, is now transformed into a museum. In the th century, working in finance at Uzs had only a distant relationship with the life of a "golden boy." In order for their knowledge to be scattered, those who attacked the pieces were prisoners in the old citadel, leaving only after their death. It was in the second inner courtyard, Kurinish Khana, built in 1804, that the khan received his subjects from high walls. The throne hall itself consists of a long empty room with high ceilings. The silver-leaf throne, which was in the large niche of the coin, has unfortunately been «emigrated» in Russia, and the Uzbek authorities are trying to repatriate it. Carved and gilded gantch (wood) decorate the walls and ceiling is also richly decorated with polychrome geometric motifs. The two-column iwan, open to the north to enjoy cooler winds during warm months, is decorated with cold colours made with cobalt powder for blue or copper for green. The ceiling is, in contrast, decorated with warm, yellow and red colours, symboles symbols of the sun and fire. The sun or stars, often symbolized on ceilings, enshrine the tide as an intermediary between earth and heaven, thus God. Wooden doors and columns are completely carved. Their champagne and excavated base allowed them to be mounted on their marble or wood bases, by isolating the stone wood with camel wool to the properties, as they were, resistant. The bases of the two columns of the iwan are in engraved marble; on one of the two blocks one can read a poem by the historian Khivite Agekhi. The yurt in which the khan liked to receive some of his hosts in winter was about the rise of bricks in the middle of the courtyard. Some claim that this iwan was the harem, but the women's apartments were actually in the northern part of Kounia Ark. They were built at the end of the th century by Muhamad Rakhim Khan II and are unfortunately closed to the public. From the interior of Kounia Ark, one accesses through a little staircase at Ak-Sheikh-Bobo, «the tower of the white Sheikh», built in the th century and thus named in memory of the Sheikh who lived there in the fourteenth. Both a royal residence, a tower of custody and a watchtower, it offers a panoramic view from its iwan on the floor. Look at all the monuments of Ichan Kala and, to the west, part of Dichan Kala.