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Latest Khiva hotel reviews
Pro
Quiet - beautiful - excellent conserved buildings - lot to see and learn about architecture
Con
a bit of an open air museum - lacks the real daily life
In a nutshell
preference should be given to Samarkand and Bukhara
Everywhere you turn in Khiva....
TheWanderingCamel Says: ....main streets, back streets, you'll find something interesting to catch your eye.Your guide will probably trot you past some of these places without a word, others may be identified in passing - some you'll remember, some you'll forget, there are so many of them - Khiva...
TheWanderingCamel Says: The lavishly decorated courts and iwans of the Tash Hauli (the Stone Palace) are connected by and to a maze of over 160 rooms -all built in a mere 8 years -although Allah Kuli Khan, the khan who commissioned it, wanted the job done in 2 and promptly impaled the original...
TheWanderingCamel Says: Getting his priorities right, the Khan saw to it that the Harem was the first part of the Tash Hauli to be completed. Here a row of 5 stunningly beautiful iwans (one for the Khan and one for each of his wives) faces a somewhat more spartan complex of rooms (for the...
With a little help from our friends
TheWanderingCamel Says: The will to help Uzbekistan regain its lost heritage of wonderful ctafts is as strong in Khiva as it is throughtout the country but years of Sovie domination has taken a heavy toll both intellectually and financially. Sponsorship from abroad has played an inportant part in...
TheWanderingCamel Says: A visit to Khiva's Unesco-sponsored silk workshop in the Kazi Kalyan medressa is both fascinating and inspiring. Here young women (not children) are taught the old skills of carpet making by hand. Using natural dyes and unique patterns derived from the motifs found in the...
A memorial for a mathematician
TheWanderingCamel Says: New heroes are needed for a newly independent nation, and elsewhere in Uzbekistan the conqueror, Temur, and his scholarly grandson , Ulugh Beg, are much lauded. Here in Khiva though, the local boy made good is al-Khorezmi - the 9th century mathematician whose Latinized name...
TheWanderingCamel Says: The Islam Khodja may well be the tallest minaret in Khiva, but had the Kalta Minor (the Short Minaret, also known as both the Guyok Minor - the Green Minaret and the Kok Minor - the Blue Minaret) been completed it would have dwarfed it, and any other minaret, in all Central...
A mausoleum for a muscular saint
TheWanderingCamel Says: Wrestler, poet, strongman, doctor, saint are all rolled in to one man, Pakhlavan Mahmoud, who lived and died in Khiva some 400 years ago and whose mausoleum is the major place of pilgrimage in Khiva. The saint's is not the only tomb inside the chamber with its dazzlingly...
2 Reviews and 9 Opinions I was quite happy that the taxi driver who brought me from Urgench airport suggested this hotel. He...
TheWanderingCamel Says: Churches converted into restaurants, whilst not exactly common, are not unknown in the west. I'd never seen a mosque converted in this way however until I ate in the Bir Gumtaz in Khiva's Ichin Kala. Our first visit was in 2005, when the cool interior was just what we were...
Khorezm Art Restaurant: The lightest touch
TheWanderingCamel Says: Begun in a project sponsored by the German Embassy in Tashkent, the Institute for International Cooperation of the German Adult Education Association (DVV), the German Development Service (DED) and the Centre for Business and Tourism Development Khiva, the Khorezm Art...
josephescu Says: If you’d ask me, the best nightlife activities in Khiva are incomparable with what one can normally do:(1) - wandering around the empty streets to soak up its mysterious atmosphere and shades(2) - find a high spot to marvel at the stars on a clear desert night
TheWanderingCamel Says: Khiva is some 1200 km north-west of Tashkent, and if your time in Uzbekistan is limited, flying there is an option you should consider. Most tours that take in Khiva make the flight one way, and then travel by road between Khiva, Bukhara, Samarkand and Tashkent. Flights are...
josephescu Says: Historic Khiva is located in the middle of the dessert, near the Uzbek town of Urgench, reasonably far from the main populated areas of Uzbekistan. Khiva – Urgench means 20 minutes ride by taxi, for about 5 euros, or 40 minutes by public bus. From Bukhara, there were no...
Khiva traders: To buy or not to buy ...
TheWanderingCamel Says: I was all shopped out by the time I got to Khiva, my bags were full and I had firmly resolved not to be tempted - at all! by anything!! And then I saw the suzani in the photo here - it was so, so beautiful, quite THE most stunning piece I had seen outside a museum in the...
TheWanderingCamel Says: Long before the arrival of Islam, Central Asia was a world where Zoroastrianism held sway. Centuries later, there are still vestiges of this, the world's first monotheistic belief, to be found throughout the region. Noruz, the celebration of the New Year according to the...
josephescu Says: Outside pressure turned Khiva more or less faithless during the last century, so despite dozens of large madrassahs, mosques and palaces, you won’t hear muezzins shouting their call for prayer from the magnificent minarets, nor will you hear bustling bazaars and traders in...
toonsarah Says: As you wander through the sun-baked streets and lanes of Khiva do take time to notice not just the architecture but also the details which will provide variety and add atmosphere to your photos. A carved door, an especially beautiful piece of tile work, a small window...
TheWanderingCamel Says: Guidebooks and tour companies all mention Misha (photo 4) - Khiva's lone camel - who spent years standing in the city's main square and who probably ended up featuring in every tourist's photo album. He was there on our first visit in 2005, looking as bored and as grumpy as...
TheWanderingCamel Says: There were so many 'favourite things" about Khiva, I could write a list, but high on that would be the little turrets and towers at the corners of so many buildings, gates and iwans. You'll need to look up as you walk down the streets - or across if you're up in the Ark's...
TheWanderingCamel Says: For a city in in the middle of a desert, the amount of wood used in Khiva is prodigious and the quality of the carving seen everywhere is extraordinary. Along with Kokand in the east, the woodcarvers of Khiva are acknowledged as the country's best. Whether it's the 200+...
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Plan a Khiva vacation with reviews, tips and photos posted by real travelers and Khiva locals
Built between 1908-1910As Khiva slowly emerged blinking into the 20th century, the pressing need for reform became apparent to certain members of the court. At...
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Khiva - Fairy Tale of 1001 Nights
Please make sure that you don’t miss what Leyle of the WanderingCamels wrote about Khiva . She was the one who “brought” me to Uzbekistan and Khiva with what she wrote here on VT. As of October 16, I...
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...or so it seems in Khiva, the smallest and the most complete of the famous oasis cities of Uzbekistan . Ringed entirely by mud-brick walls, its madrassas and palaces overlooked by a soaring minaret...
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Think, in this battered Caravanserai Whose doorways are alternate night and day, How sultan after sultan with his pomp Abode his hour or two, and went his way The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam The old......
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Khiva is two-faced: there is Dishon Kala, the "new" city that has developped around the "old city" and which is the real heart-beat of the town, where people live, work, eat, sleep... And then there...
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Lost in romantic imagination for a renegade city
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