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Many of them hoped for a return to the golden age of Tajik history, as seen by nationalist historians: the Samanid Empire.

Bukhara lay behind me, distilled into a memory of one sublime building, a Samanid mausoleum, which seemed to tie together all the different strands of Silk Road religion and history.

It had been built by the Samanid dynasty around the 10th century at the pinnacle of this region’s glory — when men like Avicenna and Al-Biruni walked the earth — and it was a miracle, having been buried in sand, that it survived the 13th-century onslaught of Genghis Khan.

After the renovated excesses of blue and cyan, and the overworked turquoise tile, the austerity of the Samanid tomb, utterly innocent of the use of color, was as refreshing as an unpainted beam of wood.

As Tajik people develop a sense of nationhood, they have, for the most part, associated themselves with the Samanid Empire, the first Tajik-ruled state, which flourished in the 9th and 10th centuries and supported the revival of the Persian language.