Chor Chinor park

Chor-Chinor is a sacred garden on the edge of the town of Urgut, roughly 40 kilometers southeast of Samarkand, whose name means "four plane trees" in Tajik and Persian. It is known for extraordinarily old chinar trees, the youngest around 600 years old and several believed to exceed a thousand years, with some trunks over 16 meters in circumference and crowns rising to 35 meters. One enormous hollow trunk has long served as a gathering space, reputedly used by students of Sufism in the past and able to hold around forty people; today it shelters a small museum. Local legend holds that a cool, clear spring appeared when an Arab commander remembered as Khoja Abu Talib Sarmast planted the first trees here in the ninth century, and the water is still considered to carry healing properties. The grove also contains a small early-20th-century mosque, a memorial pavilion, and several tombs that together continue to draw pilgrims from across the country.