Majar

Majar was the largest Golden Horde city in the North Caucasus, on the banks of the Kuma. At the meeting of roads from the Volga, the Caucasus, Azov and Crimea, it brought caravan traffic into the river valley. Gardens and orchards surrounded a town of brick buildings, mosques and mausoleums, an urban centre amid the neighbouring steppe.

The traveller Ibn Battuta visited in the 1330s and described a large city beside a river, with gardens and plentiful fruit. Archaeologists have uncovered houses of several rooms, religious schools and mosques built of mud brick and fired brick. Glazed tiles, mosaic and inscriptions adorned some of the buildings. Their decoration marked the graves and religious spaces of a Muslim city, while domestic quarters and workshops formed the fabric of everyday life around them. The remains of imposing mausoleums reveal connections between Majar's builders and architectural traditions farther south.

The city belonged to the commercial and political world of the Jochid khans, linking their steppe territories to routes across the Caucasus and to the towns of the Black Sea coast. Its stone and brick monuments survived long enough to be recorded by eighteenth-century travellers, although the town itself had ceased to flourish. The remains on the Kuma preserve the memory of one of the Horde's great urban centres.