The fortress at Nurata was allegedly built by Alexander the Great but very little remains of its mud brick structure now. Built on a hill overlooking the town the fort was a barrier between the untamed steppe and the farming lands to the south.
Visiting Nurata Fortress
We visited as part of a tour with GAdventures, detailed in my travel blog here. Uzbekistan seemed pretty easy to get around, road quality was variable and long distances between towns but doable in a private car. I wouldn’t make a special trip here but it’s worth a stop if travelling between Samarkand and Bukhara.
My Experience
The drive continued on to Nurata, a small town famous for another mausoleum and a huge, but very ruined, fortress that was attributed to Alexander the Great. Deb stayed in the shade at the bottom of the hill but Hsien and I climbed to the top – rather sweaty and slippery but the views were quite expansive.
We saw what I assume were the Nuratau Mountains but the fort had just eroded away so the mounds we were climbing was actually mud brick walls and towers that had collapsed and then been trampled. There were a few bits of towers still standing but nothing to give any sense of what it really looked like. There were no information boards at all or in fact anything to point out the fortress.
Nurata Fortress Photo Gallery
History
First and foremost, if you are sightseeing in Nurata you will want to visit Alexander’s Fort. It is strategically located on the top of a hill to the south of the town, and Uzbek sources suggest that Alexander The Great instructed one of his generals to build an inpenetrable fortress here while he continued his conquest of Bactria and Sogdiana. When Alexander returned, his troops could neither break down the gates nor scale the walls, such was the strength of the construction.
It is a steep climb to the top of the site. What appears to be clay underfoot is, in fact adobe bricks, compacted by thousands of sandalled feet and the elements over two millennia. In places you can still make out their individual shapes, and it’s slightly eerie if you’re on your own to think of the men who built it, lived and worked here. It’s timeless. The central citadel, once measuring half a kilometre in each direction, has long gone, but one glance at the view, across the mountains and across Nurata itself, reveals exactly why Alexander (if indeed it was he) chose this spot, and why it was such a good decision.
References
Uzbek Travel has an interesting page here and I have used their history information above.
Global Connect has a good page on the fortress too and additional historical information.