Sepia tinted Bukhara is rich with history. Its tones are those of dust and mud, raw bronze and copper highlighted by lustrous tilework; delicate facades and awe inspiring minerets. The place was once considered so holy that it was thought light ascended from Bukhara to the heavens. At the turn of the 1st millennium Islamic scholars believe that Bukhara housed 250 medrassas supporting students from as far away as Andalucía and Yemen – not to mention being the fore front of teaching on astronomy, philosophy, maths and medicine.
We arrived after breaking down in the middle of the desert. Handy tip that if that happens again all you have to do is lift up the back seat and hit the floor with a spanner to make the car work again! We then had to sidestep the dodgy taxi driver’s attempt to get us to stay at his mate's place (he “got lost” and just happened upon his mate’s guest house - what a coincidence…) followed by a claim that we'd short changed him....and him invoking Allah and his umpteen children in an attempt to extort more money from us. It was hard to prove we were in the right, but we did learn the lesson to always count money out in front of people to avoid that happening again. We ended up where we wanted to be on a University friend’s recommendation from several years ago (his friend said it was the best place she’d ever had dysentery in) staying with a chap called Mubinjon at his family's house (now a B&B) which was built in 1766 - and hardly changed since. It is beautiful - if decrepit - with highly intricate carvings in wood and a lovely courtyard in the middle with populated by a multitude of doves. The Aussie and I had a lovely room with delicate wooden filigree and a scene painted around the walls, however it did have rather thin mattresses on the floor and ants that got into everything.
We were forced to indulge in a little dodgy black-market money changing with Mubinjon’s mate on a street corner after dark…it felt rather seedy but Bukhara is not exactly a place where you can pop down to a cashpoint. On our first night we were ushered to a restaurant in the ‘non touristy area’ by Mubinjon. We worked out why he was quite so helpful when it emerged that we were paying for his meal as well as our own and then had a rather depressing conversation about how hard business was in Uzbekistan. Despite wanting a free feed I think he was also pining for foreign company. Looking through the guest book at his house it was obvious that the once healthy stream of visitors to Bukhara has fallen to a mere trickle.
Buhkara is the city where the Charles Stoddart and Arthur Conolly met their ends during the Great Game between Russia and the British Empire. Stoddart, a colonel in the British Army, had been sent to Bukhara to persuade the Emir to ally with Queen Victoria rather than Tsar Nicholas I of Russia. This mission was not wholly successful. Emir Nasrullah was not a man to be trifled with, having assassinated his own father and four bothers for the throne. He took offence when Stoddart ‘unschooled in the sycophantic ways of Oriental diplomacy’ failed to dismount from his horse and threw him into the Bug Pit.
Whilst musing on his bug infested fate, Stoddart was visited by the executioner who produced a persuasive argument in favour of becoming a Muslim: convert or loose your head. After pondering on his options Stoddart came to the conclusion that Islam did have its merits. This led to a rapid improvement in his lodgings! However, news of this conversion reached England and scandalised the government. On learning of this, the British government sent Conolly, of the Bengal Light Infantry, to rescue him. Again, it wasn’t going great. Conolly arrived to find that Stoddart had been kept in the Bug Pit at the Zindan (city jail) for the past 4 years. The Emir soon dropped round for tea and promptly chucked Conolly into the same pit. He had become even more narked at not receiving a private letter from Queen Victoria and instead putting up with a note from Lord Palmerston saying the letter had been forwarded to Calcutta for consideration by local British colonial officials. To make matters worse, the British government had taken to describing the two officers as "private travellers."
It didn’t get any better after that. In 1842 a British force was massacred in Kabul – with only one man escaping to tell of their fate (later shown in a famous painting) and the British reputation was sunk as far as the Emir was concerned. Both men were forced to dig their own graves in the main square. As a band played from the fortress walls, Stoddart denounced the Emir and was swiftly dispatched. The executioner then invited Conolly to convert to Islam, but seeing how much good it did his compatriot Conolly declined and was duly beheaded on charges of spying for the British Empire.
One final person was sent, in 1845, to discover the fate of these two men. This was Rev. Joseph Wolff, and he had slightly better luck. As Wolff later described, he narrowly escaped with his life on account of the Emir laughing uncontrollably at Wolff’s appearance in full canonical garb! Wolff retreated to England and published a highly successful account of his journey, making Connolly & Stoddard household names.
The Ark now houses a museum on the city’s history, and the Zindan is a tourist attraction, showcasing such skin-crawling rooms as the Bug Pit, a torture chamber and the dungeons. Although full of dodgy waxworks of figures from days on gone – the Bug Pit is still an evocative place, and it does not take a huge stretch of the imagination to begin to invoke form of the feelings of loneliness and desperation these Brits must have felt, so far from home.
Wednesday, 20 February 2008
Through the desert - musings on the fate of the Aral Sea
The Aussie and I left Khiva to take a shared taxi for the 5 hour trip across the desert to Bukhara. Our first mission was to catch a minibus from Khiva to Urgench which we managed – and at the locals’ price too! This caused rather strong discontent amongst the other minibus drivers and our driver had to rev up and head off before he got dragged out of the vehicle! Obviously setting a bad precedent. The other passengers didn’t seem to mind though – despite finding themselves buried by our rucksacks – from the amused looks we were getting I don’t we were their usual travelling companions.
Having found a taxi to hire to Bukhara, we shared the journey with our new Russian/American friend Sergei (a Russian speaker is handy for haggling) and a random Uzbek teenager - rather a squish in a hatchback. The desert is a total wasteland and very, very flat. The road runs along the boarder with Turkmenistan which meant plenty of border posts to check we weren't smugglers - luckily we passed those easily - although The Aussie did gain a 21 year old customs official as an admirer. I offered to leave her with him in the middle of the desert but strangely she seemed none too keen, even though she’d have had some very friendly looking goats for company. It was a slightly odd journey belting down the road (driving on which ever side of the road had the least potholes) with the windows wide open as it was boiling and so getting covered in red dust. We suspected that some form of smuggling was going on. Our car was stopped several times in the middle of nowhere by other cars for “things” to be handed across to the diver….anything from empty water bottles (?) to passports with cash inside. We decided that it is easier to ask no questions – not that we’d understand the answer in any case.
We were rather hoping that the road would take us into Turkmenistan for a quick look as it rates very highly on the weirdness scale – even with such tough local competition in Central Asia. The President is a chap called Saparmurat Niyazov – who has declared himself President for Life. He styles himself Turkmenbashi, or Father of the Turkmen and has taken the rather unprecedented step of renaming days of the week after his friends and family and ensuring that his face appears not only on stamps and bank notes – but also on the dials of all clocks and watches. He is slightly suspicious of foreigners and regularly has them followed around the country by secret service men complete with dark suits and dark classes driving unmarked Ladas – makes me think of the Pink Panther in terms of professionalism.
The cult of personality is evident everywhere – including a giant 50 foot tall gold statue of the man himself in the capital that rotates to face the sun. Original. Turkmens are expected to take spiritual guidance from his book, Rhuknama, a collection of thoughts on Turkmen culture and history published in lurid pink and lime green, and are also told that anyone who reads it thrice will "become more intelligent, will recognise the divine being and will go straight to heaven" – you certainly don’t get that sort of claim from the Labour party manifesto! You would be forbidden for thinking that he has a touch of a sense of humour though as he has built the oil and gas ministry in the shape of a cigarette lighter and insists on learner drivers being tested on his own thoughts and philosophies rather than their ability to drive a car. Basically, this man has brought about a whole new level of weirdness – and aspiring despots have some way to go before they can challenge him!
We stopped for tea half way through the day and a trip to possibly the worst loo I've ever had the misfortune of seeing. I don't mind long drop loos - but prefer it when they haven't been filled to the brim already and aren't gently steaming in the sun. We acquainted ourselves with the desert instead. Although hungry, there was no way we were eating at this truck stop. It was a tiny chai house in the middle of nowhere with a raised platform outside to sit on and swarms of black flies all over the food we could see. A motley collection of drivers and randoms was lounging around suspiciously appraising our arrival; slurping tea, scoffing greasy kebabs and stopping only to belch or scratch. It seemed to be a family run concern with a young girl doing most of the work trying simultaneously to mind a small baby who was crawling through the refuse and gut a large fish rather too far from the sea….
Soon we were on the move again, crossing over the fabled River Oxus. In my mind this sits along side the Euphrates, Nile and Amazon as being watercourses that have shaped history. The Oxus is the longest river in Central Asia (1,500 miles) and is locally known as the Amu Darya. Many local people refer to the river as Jayhoun which was thought to be a derivative of Gihon, the biblical name for one of the rivers of the Garden of Eden. The river is also known by this name to most of the medieval Islamic writers and is (from the pictures in the Khiva museum) is still spanned by the same bridge as in 1900. It felt like it.
The Oxus is the main source of water in this dry region and is very broad and shallow. It was coming to the end of the dry summer and had been reduced to a number of channels winding timorously across the sandy bed, this gave a very false impression of the real might of the river which would prove a definite obstacle in full spate, especially to a people for whom a donkey is the most sophisticated form of transport.
Sadly, use of water from the Oxus for irrigation has been a major contributing factor in the shrinking of the Aral Sea. The Soviet Union decided in 1918 that the two rivers that fed the Aral Sea, the Oxus (Amu Darya) in the south and the Jaxartes (Syr Darya) in the northeast, would be diverted to try to irrigate the desert in order to grow rice, melons, cereal, and also, cotton; this was part of the Soviet plan for cotton, or "white gold", to become a major export. (This did eventually end up becoming the case, and today Uzbekistan is one of the world's biggest exporters of cotton.) The irrigation canals began to be built on a large scale in the 1930s. Many of the irrigation canals were poorly built, letting water leak out or evaporate; from the Qaraqum Canal, the largest in Central Asia, perhaps 30–70% of the water went to waste. Today only 12% of Uzbekistan's irrigation canal length is waterproofed, maybe it’s run by Thames Water?
From 1961 to 1970, the Aral's sea level fell at an average of 20 cm a year; in the 1970s, the average rate nearly tripled to 50–60 cm per year, and by the 1980s it continued to drop, now with a mean of 80–90 cm each year. Despite this, the rate of water usage for irrigation continued to increase: the amount of water taken from the rivers doubled between 1960 and 1980; cotton production nearly doubled in the same period. The disappearance of the sea was no surprise to the Soviets; they expected it to happen long before. The Soviet Union apparently considered the Aral to be "nature's error", and a Soviet engineer said in 1968 that "it is obvious to everyone that the evaporation of the Aral Sea is inevitable".
This once vibrant environment is also heavily polluted, largely as the result of weapons testing, industrial projects, and fertiliser runoff before and after the breakup of the Soviet Union. It has also become hugely more saline as a direct result of the decreasing water volume. Even the recently discovered inflow of about 4 billion cubic metres of submarine groundwater per year into the Aral Sea will not in itself be able to stop the desiccation. This groundwater originates in the Pamirs and Tian Shan mountains and seeks its way through geological layers to a fracture zone at the bottom of the Aral Sea.
In 1987, the continuing shrinkage split the lake into two separate bodies of water, the North Aral Sea and the South Aral Sea; an artificial channel was dug to connect them, but that connection was gone by 1999 as the two seas continued to shrink. In 2003, the South Aral further divided into eastern and western basins; but the evaporation of the North Aral has since been partially reversed.
Work is being done to restore, in part, the North Aral Sea. Irrigation works on the Syr Darya have been repaired and improved to increase its water flow, and in October 2003, the Kazakh government announced a plan to build a concrete dam separating the two halves of the Aral Sea. Work on this dam was completed in August 2005; since then the water level of the North Aral has risen, and its salinity has decreased. Economically significant stocks of fish have even been returned, and observers who had written off the North Aral Sea as an environmental catastrophe have been surprised by unexpected reports that in 2006 its returning waters already were partly reviving the fishing industry and producing a catch for export as far as Ukraine. The South Aral Sea, which lies largely in Uzbekistan, was generally abandoned to its fate, but the project in the North Aral has brought at least a faint glimmer of hope.
As of summer 2003, the South Aral Sea was vanishing faster than predicted. In the deepest parts of the sea, the bottom waters are saltier than the top, and not mixing. Thus, only the top of the sea is heated in the summer, and it evaporates faster than would otherwise be expected. Based on the recent data, the western part of the South Aral Sea is expected to be gone within 15 years; the eastern part could last indefinitely.
The ecosystem of the Aral Sea and the river deltas feeding into it have been nearly destroyed, not least because of the much higher salinity.
The receding sea has left huge plains covered with salt and toxic chemicals, which are picked up and carried away by dust storms as toxic dust and spread to the surrounding area. The land around the Aral Sea is heavily polluted and the people living in the area are suffering from a lack of fresh water and other health problems, including high rates of certain forms of cancer and lung diseases, just to name a few. Crops in the region are destroyed by salt being deposited onto the land. The town of Moynaq in Uzbekistan had a thriving harbour and fishing industry that employed approximately 60,000 people; now the town lies miles from the shore. Fishing boats are scattered on the dry land that was once covered by water, many have been there for 20 years. The only significant fishing company left in the area has its fish shipped from the Baltic Sea, thousands of kilometres away.
In 1948, a top-secret Soviet bio weapons laboratory was established on the island in the middle of the Aral Sea (now disputed territory between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan). The exact history, functions and current status of this facility have not yet been disclosed. The base was abandoned in 1992 following the disintegration of the Soviet Army. Scientific expeditions proved that this had been a site for production, testing and later dumping of pathogenic weapons. According to the Kazakh Scientific Centre for Quarantine and Zoonotic Infections (who wouldn’t want that on their business cards?), all burial sites of anthrax were decontaminated. I’m not sure that fills me with a huge about of assurance….
Despite a huge desire to visit what remains of the Aral Sea – the lure of bio-weapons laboratories encouraging The Aussie – we weren’t able to make it out there. It is just so far from civilisation that it would have been a monumental – and expensive - diversion. There is one other draw to the local town (Nukus) which is rightfully weird – the Karakalpakstan Art Museum which houses some of the best Russian art from 1918 – 1935 in existence. Although quite believable (in a Central Asian kind of way) that a museum be sited in the middle of a desert next to a shrinking, highly polluted inland sea, the real reason for its existence is that Stalin did his best to destroy all Soviet art from this period. Adding insult to injury he also sent all the artists to the gulag – however he managed to overlook this windswept corner of the Union, so in a fairytale sort of way is escaped unharmed.
Having found a taxi to hire to Bukhara, we shared the journey with our new Russian/American friend Sergei (a Russian speaker is handy for haggling) and a random Uzbek teenager - rather a squish in a hatchback. The desert is a total wasteland and very, very flat. The road runs along the boarder with Turkmenistan which meant plenty of border posts to check we weren't smugglers - luckily we passed those easily - although The Aussie did gain a 21 year old customs official as an admirer. I offered to leave her with him in the middle of the desert but strangely she seemed none too keen, even though she’d have had some very friendly looking goats for company. It was a slightly odd journey belting down the road (driving on which ever side of the road had the least potholes) with the windows wide open as it was boiling and so getting covered in red dust. We suspected that some form of smuggling was going on. Our car was stopped several times in the middle of nowhere by other cars for “things” to be handed across to the diver….anything from empty water bottles (?) to passports with cash inside. We decided that it is easier to ask no questions – not that we’d understand the answer in any case.
We were rather hoping that the road would take us into Turkmenistan for a quick look as it rates very highly on the weirdness scale – even with such tough local competition in Central Asia. The President is a chap called Saparmurat Niyazov – who has declared himself President for Life. He styles himself Turkmenbashi, or Father of the Turkmen and has taken the rather unprecedented step of renaming days of the week after his friends and family and ensuring that his face appears not only on stamps and bank notes – but also on the dials of all clocks and watches. He is slightly suspicious of foreigners and regularly has them followed around the country by secret service men complete with dark suits and dark classes driving unmarked Ladas – makes me think of the Pink Panther in terms of professionalism.
The cult of personality is evident everywhere – including a giant 50 foot tall gold statue of the man himself in the capital that rotates to face the sun. Original. Turkmens are expected to take spiritual guidance from his book, Rhuknama, a collection of thoughts on Turkmen culture and history published in lurid pink and lime green, and are also told that anyone who reads it thrice will "become more intelligent, will recognise the divine being and will go straight to heaven" – you certainly don’t get that sort of claim from the Labour party manifesto! You would be forbidden for thinking that he has a touch of a sense of humour though as he has built the oil and gas ministry in the shape of a cigarette lighter and insists on learner drivers being tested on his own thoughts and philosophies rather than their ability to drive a car. Basically, this man has brought about a whole new level of weirdness – and aspiring despots have some way to go before they can challenge him!
We stopped for tea half way through the day and a trip to possibly the worst loo I've ever had the misfortune of seeing. I don't mind long drop loos - but prefer it when they haven't been filled to the brim already and aren't gently steaming in the sun. We acquainted ourselves with the desert instead. Although hungry, there was no way we were eating at this truck stop. It was a tiny chai house in the middle of nowhere with a raised platform outside to sit on and swarms of black flies all over the food we could see. A motley collection of drivers and randoms was lounging around suspiciously appraising our arrival; slurping tea, scoffing greasy kebabs and stopping only to belch or scratch. It seemed to be a family run concern with a young girl doing most of the work trying simultaneously to mind a small baby who was crawling through the refuse and gut a large fish rather too far from the sea….
Soon we were on the move again, crossing over the fabled River Oxus. In my mind this sits along side the Euphrates, Nile and Amazon as being watercourses that have shaped history. The Oxus is the longest river in Central Asia (1,500 miles) and is locally known as the Amu Darya. Many local people refer to the river as Jayhoun which was thought to be a derivative of Gihon, the biblical name for one of the rivers of the Garden of Eden. The river is also known by this name to most of the medieval Islamic writers and is (from the pictures in the Khiva museum) is still spanned by the same bridge as in 1900. It felt like it.
The Oxus is the main source of water in this dry region and is very broad and shallow. It was coming to the end of the dry summer and had been reduced to a number of channels winding timorously across the sandy bed, this gave a very false impression of the real might of the river which would prove a definite obstacle in full spate, especially to a people for whom a donkey is the most sophisticated form of transport.
Sadly, use of water from the Oxus for irrigation has been a major contributing factor in the shrinking of the Aral Sea. The Soviet Union decided in 1918 that the two rivers that fed the Aral Sea, the Oxus (Amu Darya) in the south and the Jaxartes (Syr Darya) in the northeast, would be diverted to try to irrigate the desert in order to grow rice, melons, cereal, and also, cotton; this was part of the Soviet plan for cotton, or "white gold", to become a major export. (This did eventually end up becoming the case, and today Uzbekistan is one of the world's biggest exporters of cotton.) The irrigation canals began to be built on a large scale in the 1930s. Many of the irrigation canals were poorly built, letting water leak out or evaporate; from the Qaraqum Canal, the largest in Central Asia, perhaps 30–70% of the water went to waste. Today only 12% of Uzbekistan's irrigation canal length is waterproofed, maybe it’s run by Thames Water?
From 1961 to 1970, the Aral's sea level fell at an average of 20 cm a year; in the 1970s, the average rate nearly tripled to 50–60 cm per year, and by the 1980s it continued to drop, now with a mean of 80–90 cm each year. Despite this, the rate of water usage for irrigation continued to increase: the amount of water taken from the rivers doubled between 1960 and 1980; cotton production nearly doubled in the same period. The disappearance of the sea was no surprise to the Soviets; they expected it to happen long before. The Soviet Union apparently considered the Aral to be "nature's error", and a Soviet engineer said in 1968 that "it is obvious to everyone that the evaporation of the Aral Sea is inevitable".
This once vibrant environment is also heavily polluted, largely as the result of weapons testing, industrial projects, and fertiliser runoff before and after the breakup of the Soviet Union. It has also become hugely more saline as a direct result of the decreasing water volume. Even the recently discovered inflow of about 4 billion cubic metres of submarine groundwater per year into the Aral Sea will not in itself be able to stop the desiccation. This groundwater originates in the Pamirs and Tian Shan mountains and seeks its way through geological layers to a fracture zone at the bottom of the Aral Sea.
In 1987, the continuing shrinkage split the lake into two separate bodies of water, the North Aral Sea and the South Aral Sea; an artificial channel was dug to connect them, but that connection was gone by 1999 as the two seas continued to shrink. In 2003, the South Aral further divided into eastern and western basins; but the evaporation of the North Aral has since been partially reversed.
Work is being done to restore, in part, the North Aral Sea. Irrigation works on the Syr Darya have been repaired and improved to increase its water flow, and in October 2003, the Kazakh government announced a plan to build a concrete dam separating the two halves of the Aral Sea. Work on this dam was completed in August 2005; since then the water level of the North Aral has risen, and its salinity has decreased. Economically significant stocks of fish have even been returned, and observers who had written off the North Aral Sea as an environmental catastrophe have been surprised by unexpected reports that in 2006 its returning waters already were partly reviving the fishing industry and producing a catch for export as far as Ukraine. The South Aral Sea, which lies largely in Uzbekistan, was generally abandoned to its fate, but the project in the North Aral has brought at least a faint glimmer of hope.
As of summer 2003, the South Aral Sea was vanishing faster than predicted. In the deepest parts of the sea, the bottom waters are saltier than the top, and not mixing. Thus, only the top of the sea is heated in the summer, and it evaporates faster than would otherwise be expected. Based on the recent data, the western part of the South Aral Sea is expected to be gone within 15 years; the eastern part could last indefinitely.
The ecosystem of the Aral Sea and the river deltas feeding into it have been nearly destroyed, not least because of the much higher salinity.
The receding sea has left huge plains covered with salt and toxic chemicals, which are picked up and carried away by dust storms as toxic dust and spread to the surrounding area. The land around the Aral Sea is heavily polluted and the people living in the area are suffering from a lack of fresh water and other health problems, including high rates of certain forms of cancer and lung diseases, just to name a few. Crops in the region are destroyed by salt being deposited onto the land. The town of Moynaq in Uzbekistan had a thriving harbour and fishing industry that employed approximately 60,000 people; now the town lies miles from the shore. Fishing boats are scattered on the dry land that was once covered by water, many have been there for 20 years. The only significant fishing company left in the area has its fish shipped from the Baltic Sea, thousands of kilometres away.
In 1948, a top-secret Soviet bio weapons laboratory was established on the island in the middle of the Aral Sea (now disputed territory between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan). The exact history, functions and current status of this facility have not yet been disclosed. The base was abandoned in 1992 following the disintegration of the Soviet Army. Scientific expeditions proved that this had been a site for production, testing and later dumping of pathogenic weapons. According to the Kazakh Scientific Centre for Quarantine and Zoonotic Infections (who wouldn’t want that on their business cards?), all burial sites of anthrax were decontaminated. I’m not sure that fills me with a huge about of assurance….
Despite a huge desire to visit what remains of the Aral Sea – the lure of bio-weapons laboratories encouraging The Aussie – we weren’t able to make it out there. It is just so far from civilisation that it would have been a monumental – and expensive - diversion. There is one other draw to the local town (Nukus) which is rightfully weird – the Karakalpakstan Art Museum which houses some of the best Russian art from 1918 – 1935 in existence. Although quite believable (in a Central Asian kind of way) that a museum be sited in the middle of a desert next to a shrinking, highly polluted inland sea, the real reason for its existence is that Stalin did his best to destroy all Soviet art from this period. Adding insult to injury he also sent all the artists to the gulag – however he managed to overlook this windswept corner of the Union, so in a fairytale sort of way is escaped unharmed.
Echoes of the Silk Route
One of the major reasons for me wanting to explore this part of the world was the lure of the legendary Silk Route, illustrated by a cheerily decorated sign outside the city walls to give you a very rough idea of where Khiva is. This bill board owed more in its heritage to the ancient sea faring maps that declaimed “There be dragons!” wherever their knowledge was rather sketchy, than to modern cartography. Britain was depicted – roughly the same size as Spain, a war horse leapt across the Caucasus, as elephants stormed through Afghanistan, and a man with a donkey cart trekked stolidly through Russia. This display of amateur optimism appealed to me and consolidated the feeling that we had stepped back in time: albeit to a time when plastic sandals were in abundance.
In terms of history and anthropology, rather than romantic aberration, the Silk Route describes a series of inter linking trade routes plied by caravan and sailing vessel that cross Asia from Xi’an in China to the heart of Europe. Not exactly the super highway of its day, but the impact of the journeys across these routes was monumental. It was the cornerstone of the success of the great ancient civilisations of China, ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, India and Rome, thereby shaping the essence of the modern world.
The evolution of the Silk Route is a story worthy of a Hollywood epic. With the advent of domesticated animals enabling greater mobility (the ox, horse and camel) in additional to greater advancement in waterborne transport, water and land routes opened up allowing passage across the great landmass of Asia to Europe without disturbance to established agricultural lands, creating practical conditions for entrepreneurial merchants to branch out. By 4,000 BC communities living in the Sahara had imported domestic animals from Asia; Egyptians were trading with Palestinians and lapis lazuli was being traded from its only known source in the ancient world Badakstan (modern Afghanistan) as far as Mesopotamia and Eqypt! The establishment of a recognised trading route was given a huge boost by the Persian Royal Road. In Herodotus’ time (475BC) this was already 2,800km long, running from Susa on the lower Tigris to Smyrna (Izmir) on the Turkish turquoise coast. This was efficiently maintained and protected by the Achaemenid Empire with such facilities as postal stations and relays along its length. By using fresh horses and riders, royal couriers could transport a message from one end to the other in just nine days, a journey that an average traveller would take three months to make.
The next great expansion of the ancient transport network occurred under the aegis of Alexander the Great who moved deep into Central Asia, founding Alexandria Eschate (“Alexandria the Furthest”, which is no under statement) in what is now Tajikistan. His legacy was promulgated by the Ptolemies in Egypt (promoting trade with Mesopotamia, India and East Africa) as well as the Greeks acting through their administration of the Seleucid Empire and their establishment of the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom.
For many of the tribes along the Silk Route, Greek rule was replaced by the Kushana - Chinese hoards from the East having been displaced from their homelands by Hun invasions from Mongolia. This race exacted power from the Ganges to the Caspian Sea and from the Tarim Basin to Northern Iran thus linking Eastern China and India with the Greek and Roman worlds of the West. The Roman historian Florus describes the cosmopolitan nature of court life in the days of the Roman Emperor Augustus (27 – 14BC): "Even the rest of the nations of the world which were not subject to the imperial sway were sensible of its grandeur, and looked with reverence to the Roman people, the great conqueror of nations. Thus even Scythians and Samarians sent envoys to seek the friendship of Rome. Nay, the Seres [Chinese] came likewise, and the Indians who dwelt beneath the vertical sun, bringing presents of precious stones and pearls and elephants, but thinking all of less moment than the vastness of the journey which they had undertaken, and which they said had occupied four years. In truth it needed but to look at their complexion to see that they were people of another world than ours."
The Silk Route villages weren’t just mud hut outposts either. Embassies of the Han dynasty sprang up along the route in around 130 BC, alert to the opportunities emerging and new ways of making money! The Chinese Emperor Wudi recognised the potential of the Silk Route and is credited with remarking: “The Son of Heaven….reasoned thus: Ferghana and the possessions of Bactria and Parthia are large countries, full of rare things, with a population living in fixed abodes and given to occupations somewhat identical with those of the Chinese people, but with weak armies, and placing great value on the rich produce of China.”
The Chinese were also exceptionally impressed by the Heavenly Horses of the Dayan people. These horses actually exist and are now known as the Akhal Teke. Alexander’s insurmountable Bucephalus was said to be one. They have an unusual metallic sheen to their coat and were described as having; ‘a back like a tiger, sweat[ing] blood, able to cover 300 miles a day and be descended from heaven.’ To the Chinese – used to sturdy Steppe ponies – they must have been the equivalent of a massive advance in speed and style, any Emperor worth his salt would have coveted them.
Given that the Chinese were a huge driving force behind this international trade and communication is can be no surprise to see evidence of Chinese goods scattered along the way. Silk was an invention of the Chinese, its discovery attributed to Empress Xi Ling-Shi, the wife of the Yellow Emperor (2800 BC) who found some silkworms eating her husband’s mulberry leaves. She collected some cocoons and was sitting down to tea when a cocoon dropped into the boiling water. She then noticed a fine thread detach itself from the cocoon and found that she was able to wind it around her finger. Following this discovery she persuaded her husband to give her a grove of mulberry trees where she worked to domesticate the worms and invented the silk spinning wheel and loom. Using the Silk Route, trade in Chinese silk made its way as far as the Roman empire and was the favoured form of dress amongst the nobility, even though they didn’t’ really understand where it came from: “The Seres [Chinese], are famous for the woollen substance obtained from their forests; after a soaking in water they comb off the white down of the leaves….” (Piny the Elder) - a fertile imagination. Silk was so in vogue in Rome, so expensive and so racy, that many Romans objected on moral and economic grounds. The Roman Senate indeed issued edicts to ban silk clothing in vain – complaining that they were decadent and immoral: “I can see clothes of silk, if materials that do not hide the body, nor even one’s decency, can be called clothes….wretched frocks of maids’ labour so that the adulteress may be visible through her thin dress, so that her husband has no more acquaintance than any outsider or foreigner with his wife’s body!” (Seneca the Younger.). Wow! And people think mini skirts are racy!
But it wasn’t just mercurial trade that was going on. As people passed along the route they brought with them all other aspects of their lives; language, religion, art and innovation – and naturally, being away from home for quite so long, some of them fell prey to the charms of local girls as evidenced by paintings of a blue eyed Central Asian monk from 9C BC and sculpture of a Westerner sitting on a camel from the Tang dynasty – the Silk Route equivalent of a souvenir donkey from Spain perhaps? Importantly, this route also facilitated the spread of Buddhism from its emergence in the Indian sub continent, east into China and later introduced Islamic religions into Central Asia.
It is often in art that this cultural, religious and political melange asserts itself. It is possible to trace the journey of the Buddha in art from its origin in northern India, through Central Asia and China, reaching Korea in 4C AD and Japan in 6C AD. By this stage Buddha statues were being manufactured in China, but dressed in a style derived from Pakistan! Other, more subtle influences may be discovered as well, such as in Hercules’ inspiration in the Nio guardian deities in Japanese Buddhist temples and Herakles’ use in representing Vajrapani – the protector of the Buddha in China, Korea and Japan. The Greek god of the wind – Boreas – also pops up in Japan as the Shinto wind god Fujin and the Greek motif of the floral scroll was an extremely popular export, appearing in wooden archaeological remains in the Tarim Basin (2C AD), on Chinese tiles (4 – 6C AD) and on Japanese roof tiles (7C AD) still depicting vines and grapes – hardly everyday images to the average Japanese.
At this stage, and later into the Middle Ages, the East was rich in innovation and the Silk Route hastened its entrance into Europe. Through this route came printing, gunpowder, the astrolabe and the compass – having far reaching effects on our own civilisations. Sight of the inventions making their way west acted as catalysts to European inventors determined not to be undermined by the yellow barbarians. Fra Mauro’s map (1469) – one of the first practical world maps was described by a cotemporary as being: “an improved copy of the one brought from Cathy by Marco Polo” and the Chinese junks observed by travellers added enthusiasm to the movement to develop larger ships in Europe.
This didn’t last. With the disintegration of the Mongol Empire came a gradual diminution in the Silk Route’s hegemony. This situation was hastened by the effect of the Black Death, the decay of the Byzantine Empire and the increase in sedentary powers throughout this region leading to a rise of more fragmented and territorial nation states. The Silk Route ceased trade in silk around 1400 AD thereafter entailing arduous naval voyages to take advantage of the riches of the East.
In terms of history and anthropology, rather than romantic aberration, the Silk Route describes a series of inter linking trade routes plied by caravan and sailing vessel that cross Asia from Xi’an in China to the heart of Europe. Not exactly the super highway of its day, but the impact of the journeys across these routes was monumental. It was the cornerstone of the success of the great ancient civilisations of China, ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, India and Rome, thereby shaping the essence of the modern world.
The evolution of the Silk Route is a story worthy of a Hollywood epic. With the advent of domesticated animals enabling greater mobility (the ox, horse and camel) in additional to greater advancement in waterborne transport, water and land routes opened up allowing passage across the great landmass of Asia to Europe without disturbance to established agricultural lands, creating practical conditions for entrepreneurial merchants to branch out. By 4,000 BC communities living in the Sahara had imported domestic animals from Asia; Egyptians were trading with Palestinians and lapis lazuli was being traded from its only known source in the ancient world Badakstan (modern Afghanistan) as far as Mesopotamia and Eqypt! The establishment of a recognised trading route was given a huge boost by the Persian Royal Road. In Herodotus’ time (475BC) this was already 2,800km long, running from Susa on the lower Tigris to Smyrna (Izmir) on the Turkish turquoise coast. This was efficiently maintained and protected by the Achaemenid Empire with such facilities as postal stations and relays along its length. By using fresh horses and riders, royal couriers could transport a message from one end to the other in just nine days, a journey that an average traveller would take three months to make.
The next great expansion of the ancient transport network occurred under the aegis of Alexander the Great who moved deep into Central Asia, founding Alexandria Eschate (“Alexandria the Furthest”, which is no under statement) in what is now Tajikistan. His legacy was promulgated by the Ptolemies in Egypt (promoting trade with Mesopotamia, India and East Africa) as well as the Greeks acting through their administration of the Seleucid Empire and their establishment of the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom.
For many of the tribes along the Silk Route, Greek rule was replaced by the Kushana - Chinese hoards from the East having been displaced from their homelands by Hun invasions from Mongolia. This race exacted power from the Ganges to the Caspian Sea and from the Tarim Basin to Northern Iran thus linking Eastern China and India with the Greek and Roman worlds of the West. The Roman historian Florus describes the cosmopolitan nature of court life in the days of the Roman Emperor Augustus (27 – 14BC): "Even the rest of the nations of the world which were not subject to the imperial sway were sensible of its grandeur, and looked with reverence to the Roman people, the great conqueror of nations. Thus even Scythians and Samarians sent envoys to seek the friendship of Rome. Nay, the Seres [Chinese] came likewise, and the Indians who dwelt beneath the vertical sun, bringing presents of precious stones and pearls and elephants, but thinking all of less moment than the vastness of the journey which they had undertaken, and which they said had occupied four years. In truth it needed but to look at their complexion to see that they were people of another world than ours."
The Silk Route villages weren’t just mud hut outposts either. Embassies of the Han dynasty sprang up along the route in around 130 BC, alert to the opportunities emerging and new ways of making money! The Chinese Emperor Wudi recognised the potential of the Silk Route and is credited with remarking: “The Son of Heaven….reasoned thus: Ferghana and the possessions of Bactria and Parthia are large countries, full of rare things, with a population living in fixed abodes and given to occupations somewhat identical with those of the Chinese people, but with weak armies, and placing great value on the rich produce of China.”
The Chinese were also exceptionally impressed by the Heavenly Horses of the Dayan people. These horses actually exist and are now known as the Akhal Teke. Alexander’s insurmountable Bucephalus was said to be one. They have an unusual metallic sheen to their coat and were described as having; ‘a back like a tiger, sweat[ing] blood, able to cover 300 miles a day and be descended from heaven.’ To the Chinese – used to sturdy Steppe ponies – they must have been the equivalent of a massive advance in speed and style, any Emperor worth his salt would have coveted them.
Given that the Chinese were a huge driving force behind this international trade and communication is can be no surprise to see evidence of Chinese goods scattered along the way. Silk was an invention of the Chinese, its discovery attributed to Empress Xi Ling-Shi, the wife of the Yellow Emperor (2800 BC) who found some silkworms eating her husband’s mulberry leaves. She collected some cocoons and was sitting down to tea when a cocoon dropped into the boiling water. She then noticed a fine thread detach itself from the cocoon and found that she was able to wind it around her finger. Following this discovery she persuaded her husband to give her a grove of mulberry trees where she worked to domesticate the worms and invented the silk spinning wheel and loom. Using the Silk Route, trade in Chinese silk made its way as far as the Roman empire and was the favoured form of dress amongst the nobility, even though they didn’t’ really understand where it came from: “The Seres [Chinese], are famous for the woollen substance obtained from their forests; after a soaking in water they comb off the white down of the leaves….” (Piny the Elder) - a fertile imagination. Silk was so in vogue in Rome, so expensive and so racy, that many Romans objected on moral and economic grounds. The Roman Senate indeed issued edicts to ban silk clothing in vain – complaining that they were decadent and immoral: “I can see clothes of silk, if materials that do not hide the body, nor even one’s decency, can be called clothes….wretched frocks of maids’ labour so that the adulteress may be visible through her thin dress, so that her husband has no more acquaintance than any outsider or foreigner with his wife’s body!” (Seneca the Younger.). Wow! And people think mini skirts are racy!
But it wasn’t just mercurial trade that was going on. As people passed along the route they brought with them all other aspects of their lives; language, religion, art and innovation – and naturally, being away from home for quite so long, some of them fell prey to the charms of local girls as evidenced by paintings of a blue eyed Central Asian monk from 9C BC and sculpture of a Westerner sitting on a camel from the Tang dynasty – the Silk Route equivalent of a souvenir donkey from Spain perhaps? Importantly, this route also facilitated the spread of Buddhism from its emergence in the Indian sub continent, east into China and later introduced Islamic religions into Central Asia.
It is often in art that this cultural, religious and political melange asserts itself. It is possible to trace the journey of the Buddha in art from its origin in northern India, through Central Asia and China, reaching Korea in 4C AD and Japan in 6C AD. By this stage Buddha statues were being manufactured in China, but dressed in a style derived from Pakistan! Other, more subtle influences may be discovered as well, such as in Hercules’ inspiration in the Nio guardian deities in Japanese Buddhist temples and Herakles’ use in representing Vajrapani – the protector of the Buddha in China, Korea and Japan. The Greek god of the wind – Boreas – also pops up in Japan as the Shinto wind god Fujin and the Greek motif of the floral scroll was an extremely popular export, appearing in wooden archaeological remains in the Tarim Basin (2C AD), on Chinese tiles (4 – 6C AD) and on Japanese roof tiles (7C AD) still depicting vines and grapes – hardly everyday images to the average Japanese.
At this stage, and later into the Middle Ages, the East was rich in innovation and the Silk Route hastened its entrance into Europe. Through this route came printing, gunpowder, the astrolabe and the compass – having far reaching effects on our own civilisations. Sight of the inventions making their way west acted as catalysts to European inventors determined not to be undermined by the yellow barbarians. Fra Mauro’s map (1469) – one of the first practical world maps was described by a cotemporary as being: “an improved copy of the one brought from Cathy by Marco Polo” and the Chinese junks observed by travellers added enthusiasm to the movement to develop larger ships in Europe.
This didn’t last. With the disintegration of the Mongol Empire came a gradual diminution in the Silk Route’s hegemony. This situation was hastened by the effect of the Black Death, the decay of the Byzantine Empire and the increase in sedentary powers throughout this region leading to a rise of more fragmented and territorial nation states. The Silk Route ceased trade in silk around 1400 AD thereafter entailing arduous naval voyages to take advantage of the riches of the East.
Khiva - desert outpost
Khiva itself is amazing. It lies in the Khorezm oasis of the Kara-Kum Desert and was the capital of the Khivan Khanate, ruled over by a branch of the Astrakhans (a Genghisid dynasty) from 1592 until the Bolshevik take-over in 1920. Nobody seems to know exactly how old this ancient city is, although it was first recorded by Arabic travellers in the 10th century. The story goes that Khiva was founded by none other than Shem, the son of Noah (of “and the Ark” fame). At the very least, the city dates back to the 7th century, and probably much earlier. Despite its seemingly romantic history as a Silk Road oasis, the city became most notable as Central Asia’s biggest slave trade centre.
Khiva is split into two parts. The outer town, called Dichan Kala, was formerly protected by a wall with 11 gates. The inner town, or Itchen Kala, is encircled by brick walls, whose foundations are believed to have been laid in the 10th century. The crenellated walls seen today date back to the late 17th century and reach 10 metres. Although quite touristy in the centre, just outside the city walls you are back in the world of butchers with VERY fresh meat (the legs with hooves attached stacked up) and anything under the sun - all being sold by local Tajik women with penciled in mono brows (a great sign of beauty) and a full set of gold teeth.
One thing that struck me was the traditional local craft of wood carving. All the doors and pillars in the city – from the ancient crumbling ones guarding the entrance to a shed, to the brand new doors at the renovated hotel, are intricately carved in a filigree style using Islamic images that are incredibly detailed. Absolutely beautiful and showing an exceptionally high degree of skill passed down through hundreds of generations and still being practiced today.
The B&B we stayed at was a typical mud brick courtyard house and hidden down a back alley within the city walls. In order to find it; from the town centre you walk past the camel (known as Micha and tied under a tree for the ubiquitous photo calls), turn left at the goats, right at the bath in the street, left at the wash basin in the alleyway and straight past the bedstead with children climbing all over it – and its at the end of the road….But if anyone moves any of those objects we’d have been stuffed!
It was run by a young Uzbek chap called Mohammed who told us of his quest to learn English, which he has to do using 3 dictionaries, translating everything from English to Russian to Uzbek, as he can’t find an English/Uzbek dictionary. At least he’s determined. Mohammed was about 19, a gangly youth with features suggesting an ancient romp with members of the Golden Hoard. He was very open and accepting, explaining that he had failed the exams for entry to university and was likely to have to go off to military service (not a barrel of laughs in Uzbekistan). In the meantime, he was running the B&B for an uncle and clearly took pride in this responsibility. Daily, he produced enormous breakfasts for us, ignorant of their unusual composition… We got used to cake for breakfast (rather tasty) and tons of green tea, but were rather perplexed by the instance of cold oven chips and rice pudding….
We also met a new random at the B&B, a nice Russian chap called Sergei from San Francisco and who gave us a few tips of places to eat and where to see the sun go down over the old city walls. He liked the ubiquitous plastic slippers so much that he arranged to buy a pair from Mohammed and wore them as much as possible. Mohammed was slightly confused, and probably considering the potential for exporting shiny plastic slippers to California.
Just wandering around Khiva was great fun. It is a compact citadel of masjids, minarets, madrassas and maqbaras (tombs). A child of the desert, its bones are bleached by the sun and scoured by the sand; but surrounding you are blue and green iridescent tiles and Arabic script surrounding towers and set into the buildings. They stand out in the arid desert with the sand coloured structures and reflect the starling blue of the sky and the lush green of the oasis. In such a hot environment they are strangely cooling and bring harmony to a place that was the wild west of Central Asia.
Khiva is also a bit of an eccentric shopper’s paradise. There are stands throughout selling wonderful woolly hats – made from tightly curled Astrakhan wool (the fleeces of newly born lambs from Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea) that look like round afros. Seem too daft to be real – but we are assured they are actually worn in the winter and have seen photos to prove it. We also ventured outside into the locals’ bazaar to have a look around and found the equivalent of Saville Row (but outdoors, with suits proudly displayed all over the front of the stall) and all sorts of household goods. There were far fewer tourists here than in the city but everyone was very welcoming, although they did tend to laugh at us. When The Aussie and I misunderstood the price of water and gave the stall holders too much money they laughed and insisted on giving us the money back – you wouldn’t get that everywhere. The women dress according to Islamic tradition, not showing the shape of their bodies and covering their hair, but in quite a relaxed way. Married women seem to wear a loose headscarf and all ages wear tunics with coordinating harem pants underneath, finished off with very fetching plastic slippers (worn with socks of course!). These tunics can be very colourful and vary from leopard print (not just found in the Middle East!) to a zig zag stripe of all sorts of purples, greens, yellows and cream that bleed into one another along the edges of the colours.
We also found the equivalent of the local department store, housed in the dome that was once used for the slave market. You can still see the recesses in the walls where the slaves were chained up for inspection – the most valuable being healthy Russians captured from the Russian frontier by local tribesmen. If you ever want to furnish a house in the worst possible taste – this is the place to go: gaudy chandeliers, melamine furniture, vast and awful wardrobes, not to mention the displays of simply appalling wedding dresses. Somehow I worry that when The Aussie gets her own place she will be decorating it Khiva-style.
This blend of old and new is complemented by the ancient mosques and medrassas. However the atmosphere is somewhat diminished but the lack of the call to prayer, which is banned in Uzbekistan. So many mosques, many of the used, but lacking something….like having churches at home with no church bells ringing out – it felt odd and a bit disrespectful.
One night we had a meal at another B&B (hidden in the family’s back room as they had a party next door ) – good food, if unidentifiable and tons of delicious almonds that I was gorging on. Walking back was rather magical as most people had gone home and you couldn’t see any signs of modern life in the dark. The long echoing passages and tall intimidating mud brick buildings gave us some idea of what the place was like in its hey day and enabled our imaginations to run riot about what a colourful, if dangerous place it once was.
Khiva is split into two parts. The outer town, called Dichan Kala, was formerly protected by a wall with 11 gates. The inner town, or Itchen Kala, is encircled by brick walls, whose foundations are believed to have been laid in the 10th century. The crenellated walls seen today date back to the late 17th century and reach 10 metres. Although quite touristy in the centre, just outside the city walls you are back in the world of butchers with VERY fresh meat (the legs with hooves attached stacked up) and anything under the sun - all being sold by local Tajik women with penciled in mono brows (a great sign of beauty) and a full set of gold teeth.
One thing that struck me was the traditional local craft of wood carving. All the doors and pillars in the city – from the ancient crumbling ones guarding the entrance to a shed, to the brand new doors at the renovated hotel, are intricately carved in a filigree style using Islamic images that are incredibly detailed. Absolutely beautiful and showing an exceptionally high degree of skill passed down through hundreds of generations and still being practiced today.
The B&B we stayed at was a typical mud brick courtyard house and hidden down a back alley within the city walls. In order to find it; from the town centre you walk past the camel (known as Micha and tied under a tree for the ubiquitous photo calls), turn left at the goats, right at the bath in the street, left at the wash basin in the alleyway and straight past the bedstead with children climbing all over it – and its at the end of the road….But if anyone moves any of those objects we’d have been stuffed!
It was run by a young Uzbek chap called Mohammed who told us of his quest to learn English, which he has to do using 3 dictionaries, translating everything from English to Russian to Uzbek, as he can’t find an English/Uzbek dictionary. At least he’s determined. Mohammed was about 19, a gangly youth with features suggesting an ancient romp with members of the Golden Hoard. He was very open and accepting, explaining that he had failed the exams for entry to university and was likely to have to go off to military service (not a barrel of laughs in Uzbekistan). In the meantime, he was running the B&B for an uncle and clearly took pride in this responsibility. Daily, he produced enormous breakfasts for us, ignorant of their unusual composition… We got used to cake for breakfast (rather tasty) and tons of green tea, but were rather perplexed by the instance of cold oven chips and rice pudding….
We also met a new random at the B&B, a nice Russian chap called Sergei from San Francisco and who gave us a few tips of places to eat and where to see the sun go down over the old city walls. He liked the ubiquitous plastic slippers so much that he arranged to buy a pair from Mohammed and wore them as much as possible. Mohammed was slightly confused, and probably considering the potential for exporting shiny plastic slippers to California.
Just wandering around Khiva was great fun. It is a compact citadel of masjids, minarets, madrassas and maqbaras (tombs). A child of the desert, its bones are bleached by the sun and scoured by the sand; but surrounding you are blue and green iridescent tiles and Arabic script surrounding towers and set into the buildings. They stand out in the arid desert with the sand coloured structures and reflect the starling blue of the sky and the lush green of the oasis. In such a hot environment they are strangely cooling and bring harmony to a place that was the wild west of Central Asia.
Khiva is also a bit of an eccentric shopper’s paradise. There are stands throughout selling wonderful woolly hats – made from tightly curled Astrakhan wool (the fleeces of newly born lambs from Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea) that look like round afros. Seem too daft to be real – but we are assured they are actually worn in the winter and have seen photos to prove it. We also ventured outside into the locals’ bazaar to have a look around and found the equivalent of Saville Row (but outdoors, with suits proudly displayed all over the front of the stall) and all sorts of household goods. There were far fewer tourists here than in the city but everyone was very welcoming, although they did tend to laugh at us. When The Aussie and I misunderstood the price of water and gave the stall holders too much money they laughed and insisted on giving us the money back – you wouldn’t get that everywhere. The women dress according to Islamic tradition, not showing the shape of their bodies and covering their hair, but in quite a relaxed way. Married women seem to wear a loose headscarf and all ages wear tunics with coordinating harem pants underneath, finished off with very fetching plastic slippers (worn with socks of course!). These tunics can be very colourful and vary from leopard print (not just found in the Middle East!) to a zig zag stripe of all sorts of purples, greens, yellows and cream that bleed into one another along the edges of the colours.
We also found the equivalent of the local department store, housed in the dome that was once used for the slave market. You can still see the recesses in the walls where the slaves were chained up for inspection – the most valuable being healthy Russians captured from the Russian frontier by local tribesmen. If you ever want to furnish a house in the worst possible taste – this is the place to go: gaudy chandeliers, melamine furniture, vast and awful wardrobes, not to mention the displays of simply appalling wedding dresses. Somehow I worry that when The Aussie gets her own place she will be decorating it Khiva-style.
This blend of old and new is complemented by the ancient mosques and medrassas. However the atmosphere is somewhat diminished but the lack of the call to prayer, which is banned in Uzbekistan. So many mosques, many of the used, but lacking something….like having churches at home with no church bells ringing out – it felt odd and a bit disrespectful.
One night we had a meal at another B&B (hidden in the family’s back room as they had a party next door ) – good food, if unidentifiable and tons of delicious almonds that I was gorging on. Walking back was rather magical as most people had gone home and you couldn’t see any signs of modern life in the dark. The long echoing passages and tall intimidating mud brick buildings gave us some idea of what the place was like in its hey day and enabled our imaginations to run riot about what a colourful, if dangerous place it once was.
Across the Hungry Steppe to Khiva
Our flight to Khvia was early. Not leaving anything to chance, and with a healthy cynicism of Uzbek Air’s pre flight information we headed off at dawn reasoning that we might be early, but there was likely to be some quality people watching to be had. Dropped off at the gate with our rucksacks we were fleeced for $20 (the extortionate going rate) and trudged blinking through the dawn light into the departure hall. Inside we were met with a wall of noise and a scene as chaotic as we’d imagined. Each travelling family was studiously ignoring any western style rules over the amount of luggage permissible and herding enormous packages wrapped, as many developing countries do, in yards of vacuum packed plastic. Whilst the men were striding through Departures with male tunnel vision focusing on the trip ahead; the women, enveloped in yards of modest cloth were simultaneously trying to marshal their luggage, feed recalcitrant toddlers, guide toothless, ageing relatives and apprehend louche teenagers who were doing their best to ignore the proceedings. It looked tiring. For some reason every other person seemed to be toting one of those tartan printed, square, plastic carry-alls that are sold at the dodgy pound shops along Shepherd’s Bush Green. I have seen these tatty bags almost everywhere I’ve been in the world and thoroughly believe that there is a man somewhere growing fat on the empire he’s built on his monopoly on dodgy tartan bags.
Despite the early morning we were not to be put off by our 1st challenge – finding out where we had to go. This was made more challenging as all the signs (and departures boards) were in Cyrillic. They weren’t going to trick us that easily. We decided to use our first weapon: female logic – perhaps it would be some match for Uzbek common sense. We narrowed down the destinations on the departure boards to the shortest Russian words (after all, Khiva is only 5 letters long), discounted those we recognised as being instructions (such as ‘Exit’ and ‘Flight’) and began a laborious process of translating letter for letter. Finally, we tried to pronounce the results with a heavy Russian accent. We did get looked at strangely, but this worked, and we identified our queue for Khiva.
At that point we noticed to our consternation that we weren’t the only westerners in the establishment! Being the gateway to the Silk Road, and a UNESCO world heritage site as the last resting place of ancient caravans before their crossing of the Iranian desert, Khiva has historically attracted tourists. Although the majority have been frightened away by more recent events, a few sparse and diverse groups remain.
Wherever you visit, you will observe clusters of tourists. In South America groups of Israelis fresh out of National Service are prevalent; in Turkey you cannot move for Antipodeans en route to Gallipoli, and throughout Eastern Europe you stumble across unfeasibly tall Dutch couples kitted out in iridescent cagoules. Amongst the travellers in Central Asia there appeared to be 4 core groups:
1. The slightly misguided backpacker (us);
2. The provincial Russian hooker (they might not actually be professional prostitutes, but you wouldn’t guess it from their outfits and peroxide hair);
3. The ubiquitous Japanese tourist, with the very small, highly complicated cameras (assisted by confusing frequent direct flights between Tashkent and Tokyo);
4. And most surprising – the elderly French tour – accessorised by irate tour guide and waistcoats with an inordinate amount of pockets.
I had a wonderful mental image of a new natural history programme tracking the progress of these tourist species along their international migratory routes – obviously with a voice over from David Attenborough.
Surprisingly, check in went smoothly and at the appointed time we found ourselves ensconced in a kitsch 70s plane - complete with leather fold down seats in 1st class and stewardesses called the "Guardian Angels of the Skies". There was even an in flight magazine. This was an eccentric publication containing a wonderful article informing passengers that Uzbek Air had recently undertaken their first servicing of half their aircraft - it did leave you wondering which half of the fleet the plane you were on fell into…. A few pages on was an interview with a nationally famous actor entitled: “I’m not a Megalomaniac!” – page turning. But they got us here in one piece and without as many detours as our earlier BA flight.
Upon landing in the middle of an airfield in Urgench the hold doors were opened and a mêlée of taxi drivers appeared scrummaging for our luggage and our business. We waded in and rescued our rucksacks from the throng and then tried to find a taxi to share for the 35km drive to Khiva itself. Brilliantly, we were approached by a bald British chap in his 50s with navy cords, a navy blazer and a battered leather briefcase who introduced himself as "David, David Matthews" as if I was supposed to know him. “David, David Matthews" was a banker who’d just flown in from Moscow to go to the art museum in Nukus for a couple of days. However, hereafter he was known as Dr. Evil (Austin Powers films) due to his remarkable resemblance and the fact that he looked as though he was considering taking over the world. We then had a great journey in a trusty Russian Lada through cotton fields lined with hedges of flowing roses, hearing stories of "The Empire" and "when I lived in Peking". Priceless and the sort of character you couldn't invent.
It was an interesting journey as President Karimov was in town. We saw his private plane at the airport (the UK gave Uzbekistan 2 planes as aid and he appropriated one of them) and ran into a road block just outside Urgench. All roads to Khiva were being closed off using makeshift roadblocks of local tractors and trailers and the guard told our driver that to get to Khiva without getting stuck he'd have to drive like the clappers - which we duly did. Hair raising - but we got here! There were guards all over the city due to the President’s visit, and they looked as though they meant business….except maybe the one we discovered behind a mosque stretched out on a well and fast asleep with his hat over his eyes. I managed to get a photo by posing The Aussie in front of him, but we woke him up and I think he was a tad embarrassed. Not a good idea to annoy a man with an automatic weapon….
Despite the early morning we were not to be put off by our 1st challenge – finding out where we had to go. This was made more challenging as all the signs (and departures boards) were in Cyrillic. They weren’t going to trick us that easily. We decided to use our first weapon: female logic – perhaps it would be some match for Uzbek common sense. We narrowed down the destinations on the departure boards to the shortest Russian words (after all, Khiva is only 5 letters long), discounted those we recognised as being instructions (such as ‘Exit’ and ‘Flight’) and began a laborious process of translating letter for letter. Finally, we tried to pronounce the results with a heavy Russian accent. We did get looked at strangely, but this worked, and we identified our queue for Khiva.
At that point we noticed to our consternation that we weren’t the only westerners in the establishment! Being the gateway to the Silk Road, and a UNESCO world heritage site as the last resting place of ancient caravans before their crossing of the Iranian desert, Khiva has historically attracted tourists. Although the majority have been frightened away by more recent events, a few sparse and diverse groups remain.
Wherever you visit, you will observe clusters of tourists. In South America groups of Israelis fresh out of National Service are prevalent; in Turkey you cannot move for Antipodeans en route to Gallipoli, and throughout Eastern Europe you stumble across unfeasibly tall Dutch couples kitted out in iridescent cagoules. Amongst the travellers in Central Asia there appeared to be 4 core groups:
1. The slightly misguided backpacker (us);
2. The provincial Russian hooker (they might not actually be professional prostitutes, but you wouldn’t guess it from their outfits and peroxide hair);
3. The ubiquitous Japanese tourist, with the very small, highly complicated cameras (assisted by confusing frequent direct flights between Tashkent and Tokyo);
4. And most surprising – the elderly French tour – accessorised by irate tour guide and waistcoats with an inordinate amount of pockets.
I had a wonderful mental image of a new natural history programme tracking the progress of these tourist species along their international migratory routes – obviously with a voice over from David Attenborough.
Surprisingly, check in went smoothly and at the appointed time we found ourselves ensconced in a kitsch 70s plane - complete with leather fold down seats in 1st class and stewardesses called the "Guardian Angels of the Skies". There was even an in flight magazine. This was an eccentric publication containing a wonderful article informing passengers that Uzbek Air had recently undertaken their first servicing of half their aircraft - it did leave you wondering which half of the fleet the plane you were on fell into…. A few pages on was an interview with a nationally famous actor entitled: “I’m not a Megalomaniac!” – page turning. But they got us here in one piece and without as many detours as our earlier BA flight.
Upon landing in the middle of an airfield in Urgench the hold doors were opened and a mêlée of taxi drivers appeared scrummaging for our luggage and our business. We waded in and rescued our rucksacks from the throng and then tried to find a taxi to share for the 35km drive to Khiva itself. Brilliantly, we were approached by a bald British chap in his 50s with navy cords, a navy blazer and a battered leather briefcase who introduced himself as "David, David Matthews" as if I was supposed to know him. “David, David Matthews" was a banker who’d just flown in from Moscow to go to the art museum in Nukus for a couple of days. However, hereafter he was known as Dr. Evil (Austin Powers films) due to his remarkable resemblance and the fact that he looked as though he was considering taking over the world. We then had a great journey in a trusty Russian Lada through cotton fields lined with hedges of flowing roses, hearing stories of "The Empire" and "when I lived in Peking". Priceless and the sort of character you couldn't invent.
It was an interesting journey as President Karimov was in town. We saw his private plane at the airport (the UK gave Uzbekistan 2 planes as aid and he appropriated one of them) and ran into a road block just outside Urgench. All roads to Khiva were being closed off using makeshift roadblocks of local tractors and trailers and the guard told our driver that to get to Khiva without getting stuck he'd have to drive like the clappers - which we duly did. Hair raising - but we got here! There were guards all over the city due to the President’s visit, and they looked as though they meant business….except maybe the one we discovered behind a mosque stretched out on a well and fast asleep with his hat over his eyes. I managed to get a photo by posing The Aussie in front of him, but we woke him up and I think he was a tad embarrassed. Not a good idea to annoy a man with an automatic weapon….
Tashkent - restaurant experiences
In all we spent two days in Tashkent drinking in its curious Russian flavour. Apart from wandering around we spent most of the second day sorting out travel arrangements and getting flights to Khiva.
We worked out that we were going to have to get a Kazahk transit visa (I’d tried to get Kazahk visas in London but not had time enough to wait in the rather long queue, especially when the Kazakh man in front of me had actually got out War & Peace to read….). We were very lucky. Getting up rather late – trusting the information in The Book (Lonely Planet) - we headed down the road to find the Kazakh Embassy. Unfortunately it wasn’t where the map said it was. Cue mad dash around neighbouring roads and through sprinkler systems until we found it and a few large and scary guards outside who kept attempting to speak to us in German. We arrived 10 minutes before it was due to shut for the extended lunch hour and promptly had our phones and cameras confiscated before being ushered through into the visa department. Amazingly the people working there actually wanted to help us! After a while of working out what we wanted in broken English and Russian we discovered that all we needed were copies of our passports, other visas and a photo – and amazingly had it all on us! We popped back in the afternoon and voila - we had visas – an unusual example of ex-Russian efficiency.
We managed to get to grips with the Tashkent metro system as well - the only such system in Central Asia - which is fantastic. The stations are all extravagantly decorated with chandeliers, statues and murals. Unfortunately you can't take photos as they are also the city's nuclear bunkers and as such protected by the army at all times - lots of men in uniform with ridiculously large brimmed hats. Imagine taking the Italian military uniform (already pretty silly) and just carrying on along that theme…. But the trains are very regular and clean and even have air con - not bad.
In trying to understand more about the Uzbek nation we took a look around the ‘Uzbek Museum of the History of the Peoples of Uzbekistan’, housed in the ex-Lenin museum, which was surprisingly interesting. Luckily there were English translations for a lot of it and it was fascinating to read about the more recent history and how the country gained its independence in 1991 - not that long ago. Although we were a bit confused when, standing by one exhibit about the factories and dams of Uzbekistan, we heard a kafuffle behind the screens followed by a handful of pale feathers being suddenly expelled from a gap in the curtains…. Moved on swiftly!
We met a few randoms (The Aussie likes collecting them) after playing "spot the Westerner" - you can normally tell from the lack of socks with the sandals (The Aussie being an exception) or the non-Russian haircut…. but there haven't been many. On our second night we joined up with Daniela, a German girl writing her PHd thesis on the politics of Central Asia who was out there to learn Uzbek (handy) and Oliver, a very odd Dutch/Swiss chap who had taken his annual holiday and rented an apartment in Bishkek for the summer. He kindly, but oddly, bought all of us supper. Really must have been desperate for company! It made a change from the odd drunk Ukrainian in our hotel who, after buying us ice creams, asked our Uzbek receptionist whether it was alright to invite the two of us back to his room for the night… luckily the receptionist said no it was not alright at all! We also had a narrow escape from a potentially awkward conversation when our receptionist started asking: “When do girls become ‘women’ in Britain?” I decided to take this as a cue to discuss the UK voting age and ignore anything else he might have been getting at.
Trying to get a beer was fraught with difficulties as well, with the conversation going along the lines of:
The Aussie: "Beer?"
Waiter: "water?"
The Aussie: "Beer?”
Waiter: "apple juice?"
The Aussie: "Beer?"
Waiter: "orange juice"
The Aussie: "Beer?"
Waiter: "tea?"
The Aussie: "Beer?"
Waiter: "Beer?"
Eventually we got a beer each, but he didn’t approve and insisted in serving it to us in wine glasses and hovering around to pour it out for us when ever the level dipped. This was in “The Flamingo!” a restaurant that came with live entertainment – of the waiter singing karaoke in a corner next to the kitchen with his back to us. Interesting. Not as good as the portly waitress at the “Green House” next door wearing a Russian shell suit with a fag permanently hanging out of her mouth – great customer service!
There were some great menu translations as well - one night I could have chosen from "fruit madness", "salty lard", "lumpy pork kebab" or my 2 personal favourites "fur coat" or "sibilant mushrooms" - no idea what they were - but it almost made you want to try.
We worked out that we were going to have to get a Kazahk transit visa (I’d tried to get Kazahk visas in London but not had time enough to wait in the rather long queue, especially when the Kazakh man in front of me had actually got out War & Peace to read….). We were very lucky. Getting up rather late – trusting the information in The Book (Lonely Planet) - we headed down the road to find the Kazakh Embassy. Unfortunately it wasn’t where the map said it was. Cue mad dash around neighbouring roads and through sprinkler systems until we found it and a few large and scary guards outside who kept attempting to speak to us in German. We arrived 10 minutes before it was due to shut for the extended lunch hour and promptly had our phones and cameras confiscated before being ushered through into the visa department. Amazingly the people working there actually wanted to help us! After a while of working out what we wanted in broken English and Russian we discovered that all we needed were copies of our passports, other visas and a photo – and amazingly had it all on us! We popped back in the afternoon and voila - we had visas – an unusual example of ex-Russian efficiency.
We managed to get to grips with the Tashkent metro system as well - the only such system in Central Asia - which is fantastic. The stations are all extravagantly decorated with chandeliers, statues and murals. Unfortunately you can't take photos as they are also the city's nuclear bunkers and as such protected by the army at all times - lots of men in uniform with ridiculously large brimmed hats. Imagine taking the Italian military uniform (already pretty silly) and just carrying on along that theme…. But the trains are very regular and clean and even have air con - not bad.
In trying to understand more about the Uzbek nation we took a look around the ‘Uzbek Museum of the History of the Peoples of Uzbekistan’, housed in the ex-Lenin museum, which was surprisingly interesting. Luckily there were English translations for a lot of it and it was fascinating to read about the more recent history and how the country gained its independence in 1991 - not that long ago. Although we were a bit confused when, standing by one exhibit about the factories and dams of Uzbekistan, we heard a kafuffle behind the screens followed by a handful of pale feathers being suddenly expelled from a gap in the curtains…. Moved on swiftly!
We met a few randoms (The Aussie likes collecting them) after playing "spot the Westerner" - you can normally tell from the lack of socks with the sandals (The Aussie being an exception) or the non-Russian haircut…. but there haven't been many. On our second night we joined up with Daniela, a German girl writing her PHd thesis on the politics of Central Asia who was out there to learn Uzbek (handy) and Oliver, a very odd Dutch/Swiss chap who had taken his annual holiday and rented an apartment in Bishkek for the summer. He kindly, but oddly, bought all of us supper. Really must have been desperate for company! It made a change from the odd drunk Ukrainian in our hotel who, after buying us ice creams, asked our Uzbek receptionist whether it was alright to invite the two of us back to his room for the night… luckily the receptionist said no it was not alright at all! We also had a narrow escape from a potentially awkward conversation when our receptionist started asking: “When do girls become ‘women’ in Britain?” I decided to take this as a cue to discuss the UK voting age and ignore anything else he might have been getting at.
Trying to get a beer was fraught with difficulties as well, with the conversation going along the lines of:
The Aussie: "Beer?"
Waiter: "water?"
The Aussie: "Beer?”
Waiter: "apple juice?"
The Aussie: "Beer?"
Waiter: "orange juice"
The Aussie: "Beer?"
Waiter: "tea?"
The Aussie: "Beer?"
Waiter: "Beer?"
Eventually we got a beer each, but he didn’t approve and insisted in serving it to us in wine glasses and hovering around to pour it out for us when ever the level dipped. This was in “The Flamingo!” a restaurant that came with live entertainment – of the waiter singing karaoke in a corner next to the kitchen with his back to us. Interesting. Not as good as the portly waitress at the “Green House” next door wearing a Russian shell suit with a fag permanently hanging out of her mouth – great customer service!
There were some great menu translations as well - one night I could have chosen from "fruit madness", "salty lard", "lumpy pork kebab" or my 2 personal favourites "fur coat" or "sibilant mushrooms" - no idea what they were - but it almost made you want to try.
Tashkent: mobile beer carts and very fresh chicken!
Surprisingly there was a car sent by the hotel waiting to pick us up. Our hotel was in the inner suburbs sandwiched between the crumbly Russian built apartment blocks to the East and the remaining old Uzbek houses that had withstood the earthquake. These houses have wide verandas, imposing doors and delicate filigree on their balconies. They invoke thoughts of a graceful age of civilisation and the arts, which gradually conceded to Russian practicalities and heaved its final sigh during the 1966 earthquake. These houses seem incongruous and slightly embarrassed to be sitting side by side with Russian apartment blocks, turning their tired faces to the autumn sun with the resignation that they won’t be around for much longer.
We were greeted at the hotel by the teenage receptionist – shown to our room and indulged in (semi) hot showers. Bliss. This was followed with a sample of the local beer before we collapsed very satisfactorily into bed.
Setting out to head into town the next morning brought a whole host of first impressions. Wide arterial streets (built for tanks) occupied by turquoise Daewoo cars bustling about to a backdrop of gaudy advertising billboards for products such as mobile phones and the local water park. Overgrown flowerbeds line the roads highlighting the Islamic Uzbek love of flowers and beauty, flavoured with a distinctly Russian soupcon of negligence. The pavements are full of people manning little homemade stalls – usually selling fruit from their gardens, cigarettes, lighters and roasted nuts. Unusually, in cash strapped Uzbekistan you never have to buy whole packets of anything – hence the opportunity to purchase a single cigarette or nappy should the need arise.
Lottery ticket sales are big business here (a dash of the capitalist dream perhaps) often hawked by buxom babushkas or aging military veterans. Local bakeries waft tantalising aromas across greasy countertops and hand out buttery pastry filled with sharp cheese, fresh spinach or spiced meat. The melon season was clearly upon us as evidenced by the heaps of melons blocking side streets with bored teenagers manning their goods, which were all handily wrapped in raffia type stuff to provide a handle with which to carry them. The shops and houses are generously interspersed by tired, dusty parks featuring carbuncled paths and large iron statues of bossy Russians mid speech. Although some of the parks seem to be places of leisure and relaxation, many of their occupants look as though they live there or at least have no where better to spend their days. There are also strange concrete protrusions littered around the place. Now these might be just where the gardeners keep their tools – but they do have a conspicuously ‘nuclear bunker’ look about them.
People watching was perhaps the best fun and we certainly provided entertainment for the locals (perhaps it was the concept of sandals without socks that was proving so amusing). The women were pretty when young in a dark and exotic sort of way with long eyelashes and a coquettish smile, tending towards the Italian Mama look in middle age. The poorer girls dress more traditionally with triangular scarves partly covering their hair, loose kaftan type tops teamed with baggy trousers and a startling collection of plastic slippers and home knitted socks. Trendier teens look misguidedly towards 1980s Russia for fashion inspiration and totter over the potholed streets in high heeled mules and skin tight jeans. In contrast to their demure sisters they are brazen in grabbing attention, plastered in make up with hair inexpertly coiffured to perfection. In essence they are the embodiment of the advertising hoarding models praying on Tashkent’s materialism. Who says advertising doesn’t work?
In contrast, few of the men seem to be going for the Russian look. The odd one or two brush the clinging dust off their baggy suits and polish their pointy toed shoes on the backs of their trousers, but the majority clearly take after their fathers and their grandfathers before them. Straggly moustaches are de rigueur, complemented by close fitting Uzbek caps and jumpers and shirts of indeterminate pattern and origin. This is where Christmas jumpers go to die. Whereas the women catch your eye and giggle or try to sell you something, the men oscillate between leering and ignoring you. The same as men anywhere really.
Our initial wanderings brought us into a smarter park dominated by a stern statue of Timur. Since independence Uzbekistan is doing its best to assert its culture and is choosing to do that by massing behind their favourite warlord – Timur. Just in the way that the Mongols look to Ghengis Khan as their spiritual warrior and the Kyrgyz honour Manas, Uzbeks place their admiration in Timur. This phenomenon is heightened in post Communist Central Asia, for many, filling the gap of organised religion. Although a Muslim nation, outpourings of faith are discouraged for fear the extremism found in the Fergana Valley and due to deep suspicions engendered by generations ground down by communism. So although Islamic virtues are widely practiced, the call to prayer is banned and many mosques are being turned into tourist attractions. It feels secretive, as though faith is tolerated but not talked about, something that ‘other people do’ and a subject you certainly don’t bring up at a dinner party! If, on the other hand, you want to discuss the murderous advances of Timur through the 14th centaury – then go ahead….
Enjoying the cool of this park and listening to the soft playing of the water irrigating the boarders we were especially impressed by the very un-Islamic local beer carts on the corners that come with a helpful bar man and a tap to top up your tankard (you bring your own) for that after work drink…sorely tempting – I’m just waiting for an Uzbek entrepreneur to bring that concept to London.
We also found the central market and get thoroughly lost in the Chorsu Bazaar and looking at the heaps of lovely vegetables. It is situated in a huge covered building that looks a bit like a sports stadium from the distance. A cornucopia of food, clothes and pretty much anything an Uzbek family would want. Despite looking chaotic, the organisation is obvious when you get amongst the stalls. Like a department store there are clear areas for different types of goods – some more familiar to a western visitor: clothes, shoes, meat etc and some less expected – sour cheese balls anyone? The sales people are vociferous but friendly and all too happy to see visitors in their midst.
It doesn’t take much imagination to strip the experience of the plastic bags and other modern accoutrements and go back in time – the market women still wear local costume of brightly coloured, striped shalwar kameez type garments; the men are swarthy with moustaches that declaim their importance and through which they drag on roll ups and the children, dressed as miniature adults, shyly peer around their mothers’ skirts at the weird tourists.
On leaving the bazaar we suddenly noticed we were in even more of a minority than usual – being the only women. We were outside one of the main mosques – the Juma or Friday mosque – a male domain. We were surrounded by bearded supplicants dressed in white robes all queuing for their post prayer meal. Whilst no hostility was evident we were obviously out of place and decided to make our way home.
As the city began to empty at the end of the day we were standing at a cross roads watching the Uzbek commute. We were also wondering what the strange sounds we could hear were, until we noticed that the chap standing next to us with carrier bags full of ingredients for supper also had a bag containing a live chicken - that was understandably a bit unimpressed with being transported that way!
We were greeted at the hotel by the teenage receptionist – shown to our room and indulged in (semi) hot showers. Bliss. This was followed with a sample of the local beer before we collapsed very satisfactorily into bed.
Setting out to head into town the next morning brought a whole host of first impressions. Wide arterial streets (built for tanks) occupied by turquoise Daewoo cars bustling about to a backdrop of gaudy advertising billboards for products such as mobile phones and the local water park. Overgrown flowerbeds line the roads highlighting the Islamic Uzbek love of flowers and beauty, flavoured with a distinctly Russian soupcon of negligence. The pavements are full of people manning little homemade stalls – usually selling fruit from their gardens, cigarettes, lighters and roasted nuts. Unusually, in cash strapped Uzbekistan you never have to buy whole packets of anything – hence the opportunity to purchase a single cigarette or nappy should the need arise.
Lottery ticket sales are big business here (a dash of the capitalist dream perhaps) often hawked by buxom babushkas or aging military veterans. Local bakeries waft tantalising aromas across greasy countertops and hand out buttery pastry filled with sharp cheese, fresh spinach or spiced meat. The melon season was clearly upon us as evidenced by the heaps of melons blocking side streets with bored teenagers manning their goods, which were all handily wrapped in raffia type stuff to provide a handle with which to carry them. The shops and houses are generously interspersed by tired, dusty parks featuring carbuncled paths and large iron statues of bossy Russians mid speech. Although some of the parks seem to be places of leisure and relaxation, many of their occupants look as though they live there or at least have no where better to spend their days. There are also strange concrete protrusions littered around the place. Now these might be just where the gardeners keep their tools – but they do have a conspicuously ‘nuclear bunker’ look about them.
People watching was perhaps the best fun and we certainly provided entertainment for the locals (perhaps it was the concept of sandals without socks that was proving so amusing). The women were pretty when young in a dark and exotic sort of way with long eyelashes and a coquettish smile, tending towards the Italian Mama look in middle age. The poorer girls dress more traditionally with triangular scarves partly covering their hair, loose kaftan type tops teamed with baggy trousers and a startling collection of plastic slippers and home knitted socks. Trendier teens look misguidedly towards 1980s Russia for fashion inspiration and totter over the potholed streets in high heeled mules and skin tight jeans. In contrast to their demure sisters they are brazen in grabbing attention, plastered in make up with hair inexpertly coiffured to perfection. In essence they are the embodiment of the advertising hoarding models praying on Tashkent’s materialism. Who says advertising doesn’t work?
In contrast, few of the men seem to be going for the Russian look. The odd one or two brush the clinging dust off their baggy suits and polish their pointy toed shoes on the backs of their trousers, but the majority clearly take after their fathers and their grandfathers before them. Straggly moustaches are de rigueur, complemented by close fitting Uzbek caps and jumpers and shirts of indeterminate pattern and origin. This is where Christmas jumpers go to die. Whereas the women catch your eye and giggle or try to sell you something, the men oscillate between leering and ignoring you. The same as men anywhere really.
Our initial wanderings brought us into a smarter park dominated by a stern statue of Timur. Since independence Uzbekistan is doing its best to assert its culture and is choosing to do that by massing behind their favourite warlord – Timur. Just in the way that the Mongols look to Ghengis Khan as their spiritual warrior and the Kyrgyz honour Manas, Uzbeks place their admiration in Timur. This phenomenon is heightened in post Communist Central Asia, for many, filling the gap of organised religion. Although a Muslim nation, outpourings of faith are discouraged for fear the extremism found in the Fergana Valley and due to deep suspicions engendered by generations ground down by communism. So although Islamic virtues are widely practiced, the call to prayer is banned and many mosques are being turned into tourist attractions. It feels secretive, as though faith is tolerated but not talked about, something that ‘other people do’ and a subject you certainly don’t bring up at a dinner party! If, on the other hand, you want to discuss the murderous advances of Timur through the 14th centaury – then go ahead….
Enjoying the cool of this park and listening to the soft playing of the water irrigating the boarders we were especially impressed by the very un-Islamic local beer carts on the corners that come with a helpful bar man and a tap to top up your tankard (you bring your own) for that after work drink…sorely tempting – I’m just waiting for an Uzbek entrepreneur to bring that concept to London.
We also found the central market and get thoroughly lost in the Chorsu Bazaar and looking at the heaps of lovely vegetables. It is situated in a huge covered building that looks a bit like a sports stadium from the distance. A cornucopia of food, clothes and pretty much anything an Uzbek family would want. Despite looking chaotic, the organisation is obvious when you get amongst the stalls. Like a department store there are clear areas for different types of goods – some more familiar to a western visitor: clothes, shoes, meat etc and some less expected – sour cheese balls anyone? The sales people are vociferous but friendly and all too happy to see visitors in their midst.
It doesn’t take much imagination to strip the experience of the plastic bags and other modern accoutrements and go back in time – the market women still wear local costume of brightly coloured, striped shalwar kameez type garments; the men are swarthy with moustaches that declaim their importance and through which they drag on roll ups and the children, dressed as miniature adults, shyly peer around their mothers’ skirts at the weird tourists.
On leaving the bazaar we suddenly noticed we were in even more of a minority than usual – being the only women. We were outside one of the main mosques – the Juma or Friday mosque – a male domain. We were surrounded by bearded supplicants dressed in white robes all queuing for their post prayer meal. Whilst no hostility was evident we were obviously out of place and decided to make our way home.
As the city began to empty at the end of the day we were standing at a cross roads watching the Uzbek commute. We were also wondering what the strange sounds we could hear were, until we noticed that the chap standing next to us with carrier bags full of ingredients for supper also had a bag containing a live chicken - that was understandably a bit unimpressed with being transported that way!
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