Chor-Bakr stands in the village of Sumitan, about five kilometres west of the old town — far enough that it is often missed, close enough to reach in fifteen minutes.

It began as a burial place around the graves of revered scholars of the Bukhari lineage and grew into something unusual: not a single mausoleum but a whole necropolis of courtyards, portals, domes and family plots. The ensemble you walk through today took its present shape in the sixteenth century under the Shaybanid ruler Abdullakhan II, which means tenth-century intellectual history and sixteenth-century architecture stand in the same courtyards.