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Wandered out to Konye Urgench in northern Turkmenistan . In the thirteenth century the city was known as Gurganj. Then located on the lower Amu Darya (the river has since changed course), Gurganj was the original capital of the Khwarezm Empire and one of the largest and most prosperous cities in Inner Asia. It  may have reached the height of its florescence during the first two decades of the thirteenth century. The well-travelled Syrian geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi (1179–1229), who visited the city in 1219, deemed it perhaps the richest and most highly developed city he had ever seen. Thus it was only natural that it had attracted the attention of Chingis Khan. In the summer of 1220 he dispatched his two sons  Ögedei and Chagaadai to the lower Amu Darya with orders to seize Gurganj and other cities in the area, including Khiva and  Gyaur Qala .   His oldest son, Jochi, who was then leading his own campaign on the lower Syr Darya River, was to rendezvous with his brothers on the lowe

At ten I met Hamid and Masud in the lobby for our trip to the Church St. Stephanos. Although of course mainly concerned with the history of the Ilkhanate in Iran, I am also interested in monuments which pre-date the Mongol occupation and have managed to survive down to the present day. There are wildly differing opinions about how old St. Stephanos Church is, but it is possible that at least some parts of it were built before the Ilkhanate period.  An inch of fresh snow has fallen overnight, but the roads are bare by the time we start out. Just beyond our hotel we pass by a large parking lot where an Ashura ceremony is taking place. In front of a flat-bed truck with loudspeakers a group of actors in notionally seventh century costumes play out the deaths of Muhammad’s grandson Husain and his family and supporters at the hands of the Umayyad s. The Umayyad villains are dressed in red. In a ring around the actors are several hundred spectators, almost all the women dressed in black chado