Tegizamin: The Invisible Engineering of Ichan-kala, Khiva

Abstract

Khiva, a UNESCO World Heritage city, is widely known for its monumental architecture, but beneath its iconic madrasahs and minarets lies a lesser-known legacy: an intricate underground water infrastructure based on cisterns known as tegizamins. This article investigates the historical logic and material construction of Khiva’s traditional buried cistern systems, essential for drainage, rainwater harvesting, and potable water storage from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, together with proposed pathways for studying and reviving them. The tegizamin, in conjunction with drainage elements such as those known as gulbidav and adan, exemplifies how Khivan builders developed climate-adaptive and circular water infrastructure using regionally available materials and passive engineering. The rediscovery of several cisterns during infrastructure works in recent decades has sparked renewed interest in their conservation. This in turn contributes to broader discussions on vernacular engineering, heritage-based sustainability, and the recovery of embedded environmental knowledge for contemporary urban resilience. Through archival manuscripts, historical cartography, and comparative analysis of Central Asian water systems, we reconstruct the tegizamin’s layered typology and hydraulic functions, proposing a methodological framework for stratigraphic investigation, material sampling, and non-invasive geophysical surveying to map Khiva’s buried cistern networks.