In 1863, a Hungarian arrived at the gates of Khiva disguised as a wandering Sunni beggar, having crossed the desert on a donkey. A European face had no other way to enter this city and live to write about it afterward.
Khiva sat far enough out, cut off enough from European power, that getting caught here as an infidel spy would get you killed on the spot, and the weary traveller knew that well enough to keep his mouth shut for months.
The remoteness of Khiva is a feature of geography, the whole point to the place. Khiva sits sandwiched between the Karakum and Kyzylkum deserts, and traders used it as the last stop before crossing into Persia. At the gates, caravans were stopped, inspected, taxed, and given whatever protection the khan was selling before they went out into the desert proper. Coming the other direction, out of Persia, Khiva was the first sign the worst of the crossing was over. Either way this was the city of rest for some, and a city of nightmares for others.
Inside, one particular market gave the whole city its reputation. The English word “slave” exists because Slavic peoples were the population most commonly enslaved across Europe and the Islamic world - the word comes directly from “Slav.” It started with Vikings paddling down the Volga, selling Slavic captives to to middlemen who brought them here, and later toward Baghdad in exchange for silver, which is why coins from Baghdad keep turning up buried in Scandinavian soil.
Khiva, along with Bukhara, was where that whole system ended up running longest. The slave market itself sat right by Itchan Kala’s East Gate, its niches built specifically to display people up for sale, trafficking captured Russians and Persians well into the 1800s, at a scale of up to a hundred thousand people a year. This modern history was still running when railways existed elsewhere.
The walled inner town where all that happened, Itchan Kala, is still standing. The old city is ringed by mud-brick fortifications rising more than ten meters high. Inside, the streets are narrow enough that two camels can’t easily pass. It still looks close enough to what it always looked like.
The city’s own monuments are also a testament to the pettiness of men. Khan Muhammad Amin started building a monumental minaret in the 1850s meant to be tall enough to see clear across the desert to competing Bukhara - pure one-upmanship against the neighbour with the taller tower. He died in battle against Turk raiders before it got past the second story, and nobody with the same ambition picked it back up. It still sits there today, wide, squat, and turquoise - the stump of somebody’s insecurity.
Khiva finally won that argument in 1910, decades too late to matter. Khodja built a minaret that genuinely out-heighted Bukhara’s - the tallest in the country - right as the khanate was running out of time to be its own country at all. Russia had already swallowed its foreign policy, and would soon swallow the country. It’s the last thing this particular civilisation got to build on its own terms, and it happens to be the tallest thing for hundreds of kilometres in every direction - including, finally, toward Bukhara.
