Shirin Beka Oka Mausoleum

The Shirin Beka Oka Mausoleum wears a band of bright, cobalt-blue tilework along the drum of its dome that cuts through the sun-baked landscape of the Shah-i-Zinda necropolis. This fourteenth-century structure holds the remains of a sister to Timur, the empire-builder who shaped much of Samarkand. Builders covered the interior walls in elaborate, embossed terracotta painted in deep shades of azure and white. A single crack runs through the main archway, marking where earthquakes have rattled these delicate, fired-clay patterns for centuries.