Chor Bakr Necropolis
Chor Bakr ('Four Brothers') is a unique sixteenth-century memorial city of the dead situated in the quiet village of Sumitan, just five kilometers west of Bukhara. Built over the tenth-century burial site of Abu Bakr Said and the respected Juybari Sayyid family—descendants of Prophet Muhammad—Chor Bakr is designed as a miniature city for the dead, featuring brick-paved alleyways, family courtyard crypts (haziras), a grand Friday mosque, a madrasa, and lush oriental gardens populated by sacred peacocks. Visitors and local Sufi pilgrims report disembodied Quranic recitations echoing through empty courtyard vaults, white-robed apparitions walking the silent brick lanes, and mysterious warming sensations near the ancient ancestral tombs.