Khiva

Itchan Kala, the walled inner town of Khiva, was the first site in Uzbekistan and in the whole of Central Asia to make the World Heritage list, in 1991. The brick walls around it stand on foundations thought to have been laid in the tenth century, and inside is a dense tangle of madrasas, minarets and tiled facades that is close to a complete Khanate town rather than a few surviving monuments. The city is around 2,500 years old and celebrated the anniversary in 1997. It also has a history it does not hide: through the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries Khiva and Bukhara were among the great slave markets of Asia, and in the early 1800s something like 30,000 Persians and an unknown number of Russians were held and sold here, many put to work building the place people now photograph. Over 200,000 visitors a year. Khorazm Region.