1656
Yalangtush Bahadur
Military commander, governor of Samarkand
A commander of the Bukhara Khanate and governor of Samarkand in the 17th century, who built the Sher-Dor and Tilya-Kori madrasas and gave the Registan its present three-madrasa form.
© Alaexis, CC BY-SA 2.5
A warrior of the Alchin clan
Yalangtush Bahadur — in documents Yalangtush Biy, in full Nizam al-Din Abd al-Karim Yalangtush Biy, son of Bay Khoja — was born in the late 1570s, most sources say in Bukhara in 1578. He came from the Uzbek Alchin clan and learned soldiering at the Bukharan court. In 1611 he helped place the Ashtarkhanid Imam Quli Khan on the throne, was rewarded with the governorship of Samarkand and the rank of ataliq, and from the 1620s ran the city as a virtually independent ruler.
He fought in almost every campaign of the khanate — against Kazakh sultans, the Dzungars, the Safavids and the Mughals who seized Balkh — and earned the epithet Bahadur, 'the valiant'. In Kazakhstan he is also honoured as a folk hero under the name Zhalantos Batyr.
Builder of the Registan
Yalangtush spent lavishly on Samarkand. Between 1619 and 1636 the architect Abd al-Jabbar built for him the Sher-Dor madrasa, facing Ulugh Beg's. Its portal, with lions chasing deer beneath a sun with a human face — figurative imagery rare in Islamic architecture — has become the emblem of the city. In 1646–1660 the Tilya-Kori rose on the north side of the square, serving both as a madrasa and as Samarkand's Friday mosque; its interior is so richly gilded that it was named tilla-kori, 'gold-covered'. With it, the Registan took on the three-madrasa form we see today.
According to the sources, Yalangtush dedicated his Registan buildings to his spiritual master, Khwaja Hashim Dahbedi, a descendant of Makhdumi Azam. He died in 1656 and was buried at the Makhdumi Azam complex in Dahbed, at his master's feet; the Tilya-Kori was finished after his death.
