Zindon

Bukhara


Northeast of the Ark and just behind it is the old Zindon (jail). Morbidly fascinating attractions include a torture chamber, shackles used on prisoners and several dungeons, including the gruesome fourth cell, the 6.5m deep kanakhona (bug pit), accessible only by rope, where Stoddart and Conolly languished for years in a dark chamber filled with lice, scorpions and other vermin. There are also some fabulous early-20th-century photographs of pre-Soviet Bukhara taken by Russian photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky.


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