On the 20th of June, 1941, Soviet scientists in Samarkand raised the jade slab over the tomb of Timur the conqueror. At dawn on the 22nd of June, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. And the cameraman who filmed the opening swore, for the rest of his long life, that they had been warned.

Timur, whom the West calls Tamerlane, conquered half of Asia in the fourteenth century and was buried in 1405 beneath a slab of dark jade in the Gur-e-Amir mausoleum at Samarkand. For five hundred and thirty six years, nobody touched him. Then, in June 1941, Moscow sent a scientific expedition to open the tomb, confirm the remains, and let the great anthropologist Mikhail Gerasimov, the man who could rebuild a face from a skull, show the world what the conqueror had looked like. With them came a young newsreel cameraman named Malik Kayumov, to film everything.

What happened next, Kayumov told the same way for over sixty years, on the record and on camera as an old man. As the work began, three white-bearded elders came to the mausoleum carrying an old book, and asked the scientists to read what it said: that whoever disturbed the resting conqueror would release upon his country an invader more terrible than Timur himself. Be honest about the book: it was a nineteenth century collection of legends, not some ancient curse carved in stone. The scientists had deadlines, and Moscow was not going to be told by a book of folk tales. On June the 20th, the jade slab came up. On the 21st, they lifted the skeleton, and the withered right leg confirmed him: Timur the Lame. And at dawn on June the 22nd, three million men crossed the Soviet border in the largest invasion in the history of the world.

Kayumov spent the war filming at the front, and said he carried the warning as far up the chain of command as a cameraman could reach. And in November 1942, the conqueror's remains were reburied at Samarkand with full Islamic rites. Within days, the Red Army closed the ring at Stalingrad, and the whole war turned. A book of legends is not evidence, and the episode does not pretend it is. But a calendar is. June the 20th. June the 22nd. And a cameraman who never once changed his story.

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