Latest / The Story of Uzbekistan: Silk Road Kingdoms and Soviet Legacy — Fexingo History / The Khan's Library: Bukhara's Lost Books and the Fate of Knowledge
Transcript
- Lucas: So we've talked a lot about the great buildings of Uzbekistan — the Registan, the Ark, the madrasahs. But I want to zoom in on something you can't see anymore, something that once filled those buildings with life. The libraries of Bukhara. Luna: Libraries? I mean, I've heard of the great library at Alexandria, but Bukhara? That's new to me. Lucas: Oh, absolutely. By the tenth century, Bukhara was one of the intellectual capitals of the Islamic world. The Samanid dynasty — you know, the ones who revived Persian culture — they built a library that was said to hold over forty-five thousand books. For context, the largest medieval European libraries had maybe a few hundred volumes. This was a different scale entirely. Luna: Forty-five thousand. That's staggering. Who was using them? Lucas: Scholars from all over — mathematicians, astronomers, poets. The library was attached to the Samanid court, and it had separate rooms for different subjects, each with its own catalog. Avicenna — Ibn Sina, the great physician and philosopher — he was born near Bukhara and studied there. In his autobiography he says he read through the entire library, every book in it. That's how he mastered everything from medicine to metaphysics by the time he was eighteen. Luna: Wow. So this library was a real engine for the Islamic Golden Age. Lucas: Exactly. And the Samanids were heirs to a longer tradition. The Sogdians, who were the great merchants of the Silk Road before Islam, they had their own written culture — texts in their own language, written in a script derived from Aramaic. Some of those texts survived because people copied them for centuries. But then came the Mongols. Luna: The Mongols. I remember from the Urgench episode — that was brutal. Lucas: Brutal doesn't even cover it. When Genghis Khan's army took Bukhara in 1220, they didn't just slaughter the people and burn the buildings. They deliberately destroyed the libraries. The historian Rashid al-Din, writing a century later, says the Mongols used the books as fuel for their fires. Manuscripts that had taken centuries to accumulate were gone in a day. And it wasn't just here — they did the same in Samarkand, Merv, Nishapur. The scale of loss is hard to overstate. We don't know how many works were lost forever because they existed in only one or two copies. Luna: That's heartbreaking. Do we know what was in those libraries? Lucas: Partially, from catalogs and from works that survived elsewhere. But here's the thing — not everything burned. Some manuscripts were hidden, buried in walls, smuggled away by scholars who fled to India or Persia. And the Mongols themselves eventually became patrons of knowledge. Their successors, the Timurids, rebuilt the libraries. Ulugh Beg — we did a whole episode on him — he had his own library at his observatory in Samarkand, filled with astronomical tables and instruments. The Timurids were obsessed with books. They had calligraphers and illuminators attached to their courts, producing some of the most beautiful manuscripts in Islamic history. Luna: So the libraries came back, but then the Russians came, and then the Soviets. Did they destroy them too? Lucas: In a different way, yes. The Russian Empire in the nineteenth century — when they conquered Bukhara — they started hauling manuscripts to St. Petersburg. That's where a lot of the greatest Central Asian texts ended up, in the Russian National Library. Then when the Soviets came, they had this policy of 'internationalizing' the heritage. They took manuscripts from local libraries and dispersed them to Moscow and Leningrad, to be studied by Soviet academics. On the surface it was about preserving them, but it also severed the living connection between the people and their written past. And in the 1930s, the Soviet authorities purged many local scholars — the Jadids we talked about — and their books were often destroyed or banned. Luna: So the books survived but the culture didn't get to keep them. Lucas: Right. And that's a loss that's still felt today. There are thousands of manuscripts from Bukhara and Samarkand sitting in repositories in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Paris, London. Some have been digitized, so scholars can access them, but the physical objects are scattered. It's a diaspora of paper. Luna: It's like the story of the Basmachi, but for books. Lucas: Exactly. And amid all this, there are these small miracles. Some families kept private libraries, hidden in chests or behind walls, passed down for generations. When I was in Bukhara a few years ago, I met a man whose great-grandfather had been a scribe. He showed me a manuscript from the eighteenth century — a copy of Firdowsi's Shahnameh — that his family had saved from the Soviet purges. He let me hold it. The paper was soft, almost like cloth, and the illuminations still glowed with real gold. That's when I understood: these books aren't just objects. They're living memories. Luna: That's beautiful. But also dangerous, to keep such a thing hidden. Lucas: Oh, it was. The Soviets had informers everywhere. If they'd found it, the man's family could have been labeled as anti-Soviet, sent to a labor camp. But they kept it anyway. They believed that as long as the book existed, their culture had a future. Luna: And now? What's happening with all these manuscripts today? Lucas: There's a real effort now to bring the stories back. The Uzbek government has been digitizing what remains, and there are international projects to catalog and photograph collections in Russia and Europe. But the ultimate goal is repatriation, which is complicated. Some of those manuscripts were legally acquired, others were looted. It's a legal and ethical tangle. But the cultural revival in Uzbekistan is real — people are rediscovering their literary heritage, and libraries in Bukhara are being restored. They don't have the forty-five thousand volumes of the Samanid era, but they have a few precious manuscripts, and they're on display. You can see them, and you can feel that continuity. Luna: I'd love to see that one day. Lucas: You should. And speaking of keeping the past alive, I want to mention something that makes these conversations possible, especially deep dives into things like lost libraries. A couple of dollars a month from listeners is genuinely what keeps this podcast ad-free. If you've been getting something out of these episodes, you could buy me a coffee at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's a small thing, but it really adds up and lets us keep going deeper into stories like this. Luna: Yeah, I think it's easy to forget that this is a labor of love. And it's nice to support that. Lucas: So back to those books. You know what strikes me? The way empires treat libraries tells you everything about their priorities. The Mongols burned them because they didn't care about the ideas. The Russians took them because they wanted to control the narrative. The Soviets banned them because they feared the truth. And the Samanids built them because they understood that power doesn't just come from armies — it comes from knowledge. Luna: And what about today? What does it say about Uzbekistan that they're restoring them? Lucas: I think it says they've decided that their legacy is worth claiming. There's a new library being built in Bukhara, modern, with a manuscript conservation lab. It's not the same as the old ones, but it's a start. And every time someone opens one of those old manuscripts, even if it's just a digitized copy, they're continuing a conversation that's been going on for a thousand years. That's the real legacy of Bukhara's libraries — not the books themselves, but the ideas, the questions, the wisdom. Those can't be burned or taken away. Luna: I think that's a good note to end on.