Kara - tepa

Karatepa is a Buddhist place of worship built on three hills situated in the north-west part of Old Termez.

It includes a number of temples and monasteries that appeared in the beginning of the 2nd century A.D. The architecture of Karatepa is characterized by a combination of caves made of pahsa and unbaked brick.

Interiors of the shrines were decorated with topical and ornamental paintings on stucco plaster and sculptures made of loess and clay. In the architectural decor marble-like limestone and carved stucco were widely used.

During the Kushan period, as witness dedicatory inscriptions on ceramics, the Buddhist centre in Karatepa (or part of it) could have had the name of Khadevakavihara, or King's Monastery (according to V.V. Vertogradova). Thanks to support from the Kushan administration, the Karatepa centre achieved the peak of flourishing in the 2nd-3rd centuries. In the 4th-5th centuires a considerable part of the shrines stopped functioning. During that period caves were used as burial places, and entranceways were usually bricked up. However, it is highly probable that some shrines, or at least their surface parts continued to exist as Buddhist places of worship till the 6th century. In the 9th-12th centuires hermits called "sufi" settled in semi-destroyed caves.

The walls of Karatepa caves still carry numerous grafitti drawings and visitors inscriptions (Bactrian, Middle Persian, Brahmi, Soghdian, Syrian (?), Arabic), made both when the Buddhist centre was functioning and in the period of its decline when caves were still accessible.