Hello and thank you for downloading witness on the BBC World Service with me Dean and Human.

Today we go back to August 1920 to the fall of the Central Asian Muslim Kingdom of

Bukhara for centuries, a center of Islamic culture.

Buhara was famous because traditionally some of the most forward-thinking people of the middle ages

came out of Bojara, big names in science and medicine and literature and poetry.

Monica Whitlock is an expert on Central Asia.

And that continued for many hundreds of years and the city really grew up around that intellectual legacy.

So if you imagine it as something parallel to Heidelberg or Oxford or Salzburg in the European tradition.

But in August 1920 the Bolshevik Red Army besieged the old city of Buchara, the capital of the ancient Central Asian Emirates.

The Red Army had been invited by a group of radical Bukharan reformers keen to modernize the kingdom.

These reformers got their wish but at a price.

After four days of artillery shelling and even an aerial bombardment, more than 150,000

residents had died or fled the shattered capital.

Finally, the Bukharan ruler Amir alim Khan realized that his kingdom was lost forever.

Amir al-Ilim Khan leaves bohara because he

had to understand that he cannot hold it so he takes some of his wives he had more than 100 wives but he takes I don't know 20 or 25 of them

and some parts of Treasury on dankies then he goes to Dushanbe and from

there he goes to Kabul in Afghanistan. Timur Hojaglu is a historian of Central Asia, the son of one of those radical reformers who,

together with the Bolsheviks, kicked out their mere.

They brought about the end of a whole culture which had sprung up centuries earlier at the heart of the silk road, but the

reformers wanted to help Bukhara a Russian protectorate to find its identity in the modern

world. You have to imagine Bokara at that time is still a city state and still controlling territories all the way up to China and Afghanistan and the east.

...