Registan

The Registan is the historic public square at the heart of Samarkand, Uzbekistan, framed on three sides by monumental Islamic madrasas built between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries under Timurid and later Bukharan rule. The oldest of the three, the Ulugh Beg Madrasa, was built around 1420 by the Timurid ruler and astronomer Ulugh Beg; the Sher-Dor Madrasa and the Tilya-Kori Madrasa were added directly opposite and alongside it in the early seventeenth century by the Bukharan governor Yalangtush Bahadur, deliberately mirroring the older building's scale and monumental portal to complete one symmetrical ensemble. Each madrasa combines a soaring, tiled entrance portal with an internal courtyard ringed by two stories of student cells, and their surfaces carry some of the most extensive surviving mosaic and majolica tilework of the Timurid architectural tradition, including the Sher-Dor Madrasa's unusual figurative tigers, a rare departure from the aniconic norm of Islamic religious decoration. The Registan and the historic center of Samarkand were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2001.