Magoki-Attari Mosque (12th–16th centuries)

Magoki-Attori — the mosque in the pit — stands at the very heart of protected Bukhara and reaches back to pre-Islamic times. At the start of our era a fire temple stood here, with the Moon Bazaar busy around it: spices and medicinal remedies were traded, and at Navruz images of Zoroastrian fertility deities were sold. When Islam took hold in the region, a mosque was built on the ruins of the fire worshippers' temple.

Twentieth-century excavation showed the first mosque went up here in the ninth century: the roof rested on four load-bearing layers, and the bases of the walls and fragments of tenth-century carved ganch survive. A fire at the end of the tenth century destroyed the mosque; in the twelfth a new one was built to the same plan, and that fell in the fifteenth — but its magnificent south portal, with rare monochrome decoration, came through. The cultural layer rose faster than the building, so the portal now sits below street level: hence the mosque in the pit.

It was originally a six-pillared mosque roofed with twelve domes. The main entrance lay on the long side and is noticeably off axis; a portal and an arch on two carved stone columns marked it. The principal decorative material is carved polished brick, laid into scrolls, spirals and meanders. The masters combined bow-shaped bricks, mosaic of terracotta bars and glazed inserts; small vertical panels carry Arabic inscriptions and relief girih — geometric ornament — set on the diagonal.

Inscriptions on the eastern portal date the mosque's revival to the sixteenth century. Both portals today — with alabaster carving, glazed majolica, polished brickwork and carved terracotta — count as models of twelfth-century architectural decoration and the finest pre-Mongol work left in Bukhara.