The cathedral of St Alexis of Moscow sits in what was the Russian colonial quarter of Samarkand, laid out by Tsarist planners in the 1870s on a separate grid south-west of the old town. The current building is a 1909 brick reconstruction of an earlier wooden church, in a sober neo-Byzantine style; the small belltower and onion dome are still in everyday use by Samarkand's surviving Russian and Tatar Orthodox communities.
The cathedral is worth a brief look in itself but the more interesting reason to come this way is the surrounding district: gridded streets of single-storey Russian colonial houses, a quietly faded continental Europe in the middle of Central Asia. The University Boulevard and the Park of Culture are within a few minutes' walk.