Bukhara - the fate of Conolly & Stoddart

Sepia tinted Bukhara is rich with history. Its tones are those of dust and mud, raw bronze and copper highlighted by lustrous tilework; delicate facades and awe inspiring minerets. The place was once considered so holy that it was thought light ascended from Bukhara to the heavens. At the turn of the 1st millennium Islamic scholars believe that Bukhara housed 250 medrassas supporting students from as far away as Andalucía and Yemen – not to mention being the fore front of teaching on astronomy, philosophy, maths and medicine.

We arrived after breaking down in the middle of the desert. Handy tip that if that happens again all you have to do is lift up the back seat and hit the floor with a spanner to make the car work again! We then had to sidestep the dodgy taxi driver’s attempt to get us to stay at his mate's place (he “got lost” and just happened upon his mate’s guest house - what a coincidence…) followed by a claim that we'd short changed him....and him invoking Allah and his umpteen children in an attempt to extort more money from us. It was hard to prove we were in the right, but we did learn the lesson to always count money out in front of people to avoid that happening again. We ended up where we wanted to be on a University friend’s recommendation from several years ago (his friend said it was the best place she’d ever had dysentery in) staying with a chap called Mubinjon at his family's house (now a B&B) which was built in 1766 - and hardly changed since. It is beautiful - if decrepit - with highly intricate carvings in wood and a lovely courtyard in the middle with populated by a multitude of doves. The Aussie and I had a lovely room with delicate wooden filigree and a scene painted around the walls, however it did have rather thin mattresses on the floor and ants that got into everything.

We were forced to indulge in a little dodgy black-market money changing with Mubinjon’s mate on a street corner after dark…it felt rather seedy but Bukhara is not exactly a place where you can pop down to a cashpoint. On our first night we were ushered to a restaurant in the ‘non touristy area’ by Mubinjon. We worked out why he was quite so helpful when it emerged that we were paying for his meal as well as our own and then had a rather depressing conversation about how hard business was in Uzbekistan. Despite wanting a free feed I think he was also pining for foreign company. Looking through the guest book at his house it was obvious that the once healthy stream of visitors to Bukhara has fallen to a mere trickle.

Buhkara is the city where the Charles Stoddart and Arthur Conolly met their ends during the Great Game between Russia and the British Empire. Stoddart, a colonel in the British Army, had been sent to Bukhara to persuade the Emir to ally with Queen Victoria rather than Tsar Nicholas I of Russia. This mission was not wholly successful. Emir Nasrullah was not a man to be trifled with, having assassinated his own father and four bothers for the throne. He took offence when Stoddart ‘unschooled in the sycophantic ways of Oriental diplomacy’ failed to dismount from his horse and threw him into the Bug Pit.

Whilst musing on his bug infested fate, Stoddart was visited by the executioner who produced a persuasive argument in favour of becoming a Muslim: convert or loose your head. After pondering on his options Stoddart came to the conclusion that Islam did have its merits. This led to a rapid improvement in his lodgings! However, news of this conversion reached England and scandalised the government. On learning of this, the British government sent Conolly, of the Bengal Light Infantry, to rescue him. Again, it wasn’t going great. Conolly arrived to find that Stoddart had been kept in the Bug Pit at the Zindan (city jail) for the past 4 years. The Emir soon dropped round for tea and promptly chucked Conolly into the same pit. He had become even more narked at not receiving a private letter from Queen Victoria and instead putting up with a note from Lord Palmerston saying the letter had been forwarded to Calcutta for consideration by local British colonial officials. To make matters worse, the British government had taken to describing the two officers as "private travellers."

It didn’t get any better after that. In 1842 a British force was massacred in Kabul – with only one man escaping to tell of their fate (later shown in a famous painting) and the British reputation was sunk as far as the Emir was concerned. Both men were forced to dig their own graves in the main square. As a band played from the fortress walls, Stoddart denounced the Emir and was swiftly dispatched. The executioner then invited Conolly to convert to Islam, but seeing how much good it did his compatriot Conolly declined and was duly beheaded on charges of spying for the British Empire.

One final person was sent, in 1845, to discover the fate of these two men. This was Rev. Joseph Wolff, and he had slightly better luck. As Wolff later described, he narrowly escaped with his life on account of the Emir laughing uncontrollably at Wolff’s appearance in full canonical garb! Wolff retreated to England and published a highly successful account of his journey, making Connolly & Stoddard household names.

The Ark now houses a museum on the city’s history, and the Zindan is a tourist attraction, showcasing such skin-crawling rooms as the Bug Pit, a torture chamber and the dungeons. Although full of dodgy waxworks of figures from days on gone – the Bug Pit is still an evocative place, and it does not take a huge stretch of the imagination to begin to invoke form of the feelings of loneliness and desperation these Brits must have felt, so far from home.