State Museum of the Temurids

Uzbekistan opened this museum in 1996 to honor the 660th birthday of Amir Timur, better known as Tamerlane, and crowned the building with a turquoise dome echoing his Samarkand mausoleum. Inside, beneath an 8.5-meter crystal chandelier made of 106,000 pendants, frescos depict the conqueror as a patron of arts and sciences. What they don’t show: the pyramids of skulls he left from Baghdad to Delhi, or that his campaigns may have killed 17 million people. The exhibits focus on manuscripts and miniatures, though visitors note a curious scarcity of original artifacts.

The gap between the dome and the death toll is, in its way, the whole point. Timur’s armies built the towers of skulls and financed Samarkand’s turquoise skyline with the same campaigns, sparing artisans and architects while cutting down everyone else, so a museum devoted to one half of that legacy has plenty of beauty to work with… whereas the other half contains a lot less beauty.