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Kunya-Urgench
| Site number: | 1199 |
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| Type of site: | Cultural | |
| Date: | 11-16th century | |
| Date of Inscription: | 2005 | |
| Location: | Asia, Turkmenistan, Dashoguz Vilayet (Province) | |
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| Description: | Kunya-Urgench is located in northwestern part of Turkmenistan, south of the Amu Daria River. At one point Urgench was the capital of the Khorezm region (part of the Achaemenid Empire). 11th to 16th century monuments grace the old town, consisting of a mosque, the caravanserai gates, fortresses, mausoleums and a minaret. The monuments bear witness to exceptional accomplishments in architecture and craftsmanship, which held a strong influence on Iran and Afghanistan, and soon after also on the Mogul Empire’s architecture in 16th-century India. --WHMNet paraphrase from the description at WHC Site, where additional information is available. | |
| Kunya Urgench (Turkmen: Köneürgenç, from Persian Kohna Urganj, "old Urgench") also known as Konya-Urgench, Old Urgench or Urganj, is a municipality of about 30,000 inhabitants in north-eastern Turkmenistan, just south from its border with Uzbekistan. It is the site of the ancient town of Urgench, which contains the unexcavated ruins of the 12th-century capital of Khwarezm. Since 2005, the ruins of Old Urgench have been protected by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. Formerly situated on the Amu-Darya River, Old Urgench was one of the greatest cities on the Silk Road. Its foundation date is uncertain, but the extant ruins of the Kyrkmolla fortress have been dated (rather ambitiously) to the Achaemenid period. The 12th and early 13th centuries were the golden age of Urgench, as it surpassed in population and fame all other Central Asian cities barring Bukhara. In 1221, Genghis Khan razed it to the ground in one of the bloodiest massacres in human history.Kutlug Timur Minaret.The city was revived after Genghis's assault, but the sudden change of Amu-Darya's course to the north and the town's destruction again in the 1370s, this time by Timur, forced the inhabitants to leave the site forever. A new town of Urgench was developed to the north, in present-day Uzbekistan. First archeological research on the old city site was conducted by Alexander Yakubovsky in 1929. --Wikipedia. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. | ||
| Source: | http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1199 | |
| Reference: | 1. UNESCO World Heritage Center, Site Page. | |