The Samanid Mausoleum stands in a park at the edge of Bukhara's old city and is easy to underestimate from a distance — it is a cube roughly 10 metres on a side, modest compared to the later Timurid monuments. Up close, however, it is astonishing. The entire exterior surface is woven from fired brick in a pattern that shifts depending on the angle of light: in the morning it reads as flat lattice, by afternoon it becomes almost three-dimensional. The decorative vocabulary — basket-weave courses, engaged columns, a projecting frieze — was new in the Islamic world when it was built around 905 AD.
Inside, the tomb of Ismail Samani, the ruler who unified the eastern Islamic world under his dynasty, lies beneath a plain dome. The building is considered the founding monument of the Central Asian architectural tradition that would eventually produce the Registan in Samarkand and the Shah-i-Zinda necropolis. It deserves more time than most visitors give it.