Suzani textiles from Bukhara are famous worldwide. This one was made before 1850. Bukhara coinage of Abbasid caliph al-Mahdi. Bukhara was under Caliphate control until AD 861. Coin belonging to the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom found in Bukhara

The history of Bukhara stretches back millennia. Along with Samarkand, Bukhara was the epicentre of the Persian culture in medieval Asia until the fall of Timurid dynasty.

By 850, Bukhara served as the capital of the Samanid Empire,[1] and was the birthplace of Imam Bukhari. The Samanids, claiming descent from Bahram Chobin, rejuvenated Persian culture far from Baghdad, the centre of the Islamic world. New Persian flourished in Bukhara and Rudaki, the father of Persian poetry, was born and raised in Bukhara and wrote his most famous poem about the beauty of the city. For this purpose, Bukhara had continuously served as the most important of cities in many Persianate empires, namely Samanids, Khwarazmids, and Timurids.

The influence of Bukhara in the wider Islamic world started to diminish starting from the arrival of Uzbeks in the 16th Century. Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar was the last Persian emperor who attempted to retake the city just before his assassination, and by the 19th century the city had become a peripheral city in the Persian and the Islamic world, being ruled by local Emirs of Bukhara, who were the last Persianate princes before the fall of the city to the red army.

At the beginning of the 11th century, Bukhara became part of the Turkic state of the Karakhanids. The rulers of the Karakhanids built many buildings in Bukhara: the Kalyan minaret, the Magoki Attori mosque, palaces and parks.[2]

Bukhara lies west of Samarkand and was previously a focal point of learning eminent all through the Persian and the Islamic world. It is the old neighborhood of the incomparable Sheik Naqshbandi. He was a focal figure in the advancement of the mysterious Sufi way to deal with theory, religion and Islam.[3]

It is now the capital of Bukhara Region (viloyat) of Uzbekistan. Located on the Silk Road, the city has long been a center of trade, scholarship, culture, and religion. During the golden age of the Samanids, Bukhara became a major intellectual center of the Islamic world,[4] and was renowned for its numerous libraries.[5] The historic center of Bukhara, which contains numerous mosques and madrassas, has been listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.

 Amir Alim Khan, the last emir of Bukhara, circa 1911

Genghis Khan besieged Bukhara for 15 days in 1220.[6][7] As an important trading centre, Bukhara was home to a community of medieval Indian merchants from the city of Multan (modern-day Pakistan) who were noted to own land in the city.[8]

 Bukhara under siege by Red Army troops and burning, September 1, 1920

Bukhara was the last capital of the Emirate of Bukhara and was besieged by the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. During the Bukhara operation of 1920, Red Army troops under the command of Bolshevik general Mikhail Frunze attacked the city of Bukhara. On 31 August 1920, the Emir Alim Khan fled to Dushanbe in Eastern Bukhara (later he escaped from Dushanbe to Kabul in Afghanistan). On 2 September 1920, after four days of fighting, the emir's citadel (the Ark) was destroyed and the red flag was raised from the top of Kalyan Minaret. On 14 September 1920, the All-Bukharan Revolutionary Committee was set up, headed by A. Mukhitdinov. The government—the Council of People's Nazirs (see nāẓir)—was presided over by Fayzulla Xoʻjayev.

The Bukharan People's Soviet Republic existed from 1920 to 1924 when the city was integrated into the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. Fitzroy Maclean, then a young diplomat in the British Embassy in Moscow, made a surreptitious visit to Bokhara in 1938, sight-seeing and sleeping in parks. In his memoir Eastern Approaches, he judged it an "enchanted city" with buildings that rivalled "the finest architecture of the Italian Renaissance". In the latter half of the 20th century, the war in Afghanistan and civil war in Tajikistan brought Dari- and Tajik-speaking refugees into Bukhara and Samarkand. After integrating themselves into the local Tajik population, these cities face a movement for annexation into Tajikistan with which the cities have no common border.[9]