Pattern upon Pattern upon Pattern

In October I had the wonderful opportunity to travel with my partner and ten textile friends to Uzbekistan through Behind the Scenes Adventures. I first became consciously aware of Uzbekistan through the International Folk Art Market in Santa Fe, where I volunteer every summer. After India and Mexico, Uzbekistan is the most highly represented country at the market, and their textiles and ceramics amaze me each year with their level of artistry and craftsmanship.

Just exactly where is Uzbekistan anyway? I had a fairly vague sense of that myself before I went on this trip, and I generally need to actually visit and travel in a country before my sense of geography solidifies. So I studied a map in preparation and found that Uzbekistan is in the middle of the grouping of ‘stan’ countries, east of Turkey, Azerbaijan and the Caspian Sea, west of Kyrgyzstan, the Himalayas and China, south of Kazakhstan and Russia, north of Afghanistan and India.

It is a region of the world that I had never traveled to before. Uzbekistan has a very erratically shaped border with a predominantly east-to-west orientation, and that is the direction in which we basically traveled until the last part of our trip.

We flew into Tashkent, which is the capital and largest city in Uzbekistan, with a population of more than 3 million. It is quite modern, friendly, safe and spotlessly clean. It’s not the most beautiful of cities, with its Soviet-era Brutalist architecture and concrete apartment blocks, but there were some wonderful highlights.

At the National Museum of Applied and Decorative Arts we saw intriguing examples of a mixture of Islamic and Oriental design in a dizzying array of patterns and colors, as well as a classic example of the daybeds you see in courtyards throughout the country covered in embroidered pillows and textiles.

A surprising treat was a morning riding the metro from one station to another. The stations were opened in the late 1970’s in the Soviet era, and each one is beautifully decorated with amazing tilework and architectural details in a unique style.

We paid a visit to the showroom and workshop of Madina Kasimbaeva, who is one of the premier Suzani embroiderers in the country and who is credited with reviving the artform. We saw demonstrations of the embroidery process and examples of stunningly beautiful textiles and coats.

We had our first taste of the amazing Islamic architecture and tilework throughout the country when we visited the Khazrati Imam mosque in Tashkent. But that turned out to be just the prelude to what was to come as we traveled west across the country beginning with Samarkand, the heart of the Silk Road.

Khazrati Imam mosque

I have been studying Islamic design for several decades and have traveled to the Alhambra, Morocco and Egypt, so I have gotten to experience a number of stellar examples from various time periods. I knew that Uzbekistan would have its share as well, but I was entirely unprepared for what I saw in Samarkand. As we went from one site to another I was rendered speechless by the scale, the elegance and the grandeur of the structures, and of the tilework in particular.

Registan Square, Samarkand

Centuries ago there were many hundreds of mosques and madrasas, or schools for the study of the Koran, with their thousands of minarets and domes in Uzbekistan. Very few are in active use now and most stand as a type of open air museum, many with shops inside spaces that were once cells for students to live in. We saw so many of these each day that I quickly lost track of where we had been, which buildings we had seen, which views I had taken pictures of.

Bibi Hanim mosque

All of these buildings and the tilework are centuries old at this point and you would expect them to be well-worn by time. Yet in most places they are in beautiful condition and the turquoise and cobalt blues in the tiles that you see everywhere are as vibrant as ever. We learned that, in contrast to the more contemporary Brutalist architect of the Soviet era, that was also a time that the Soviets undertook substantial restoration of all of these monuments.

One morning we drove about 40 minutes outside of town to a large outdoor market in Urgut. Our wonderful Uzbeki guide, Mirza, led us through the maze of people and stalls selling everything imaginable to a row in the back with stalls of vintage textiles and carpets. We spent some time at the stall of a woman who speciaized in weaving narrow bands using cards. I think we all went home with one or more rolls of bands to use as a hat band or trim on clothing.

Other outings took us to workshops where we could see weavers of silk carpets at work and looms set up with ikat warps.

A very special experience in Samarkand was the morning that we climbed a number of steps uphill to the Shah-i-Zinda mausoleum complex. It was like a small city unto itself, but the buildings were all mausoleums and tombs to important personages. Being at the top of a hill with views down to the city below added to the sense of sacredness of the space.

Being a group of weavers and other textile afficionados we all noticed the patterns in in the tilework and particularly how many twill and twill derivatives we saw that could be woven. Lots of material for inspiration!

Heading westward, we next took a train to Bukhara, a smaller, yet equally magical city. It was perhaps my favorite of the cities we visited, with its markets held underneath a series of 16th century domes.

Once inside the semi-open air spaces you could find every imaginable type of textile and other crafts, and almost imagine how it must have felt back in the heyday of the Silk Road.

Walking through the domed market we saw everything from miniature paintings to puppets to saddlebags to padlocks in fanciful animal shapes.

Bukhara also has its share of the classic Islamic architecture and beautiful tilework that we saw in Samarkand. But I was also particularly taken with the 10th century Ismael Samani mausoleum. In the shape of a perfect cube and constructed with plain bricks, the patterning in the brickwork both inside and out was a statement in understated elegance.

After a lovely few days in and around Bukhara we had a long day’s bus ride to the west across the barren steppes to Khiva. Before leaving on this trip I read a book called Carpet Ride to Khiva by Christopeher Aslan Alexander. In this book Aslan relates the stories of how he spent seven years living in Khiva while developing a carpet weaving workshop. I was excited to see the place where this all took place and to perhaps even visit the carpet workshop.

Khiva consists of a relatively small old city that is surrounded by fortress walls, separating it from the larger and more modern city. Since our hotel was directly across from the entrance to the old city our entire time there was spent within the old city walls.

The old city is over 2500 years old, and while fairly small in area, it has more than 50 historic monuments, and we did our best to see as many of them as possible in the three days that we spent there.

We did, in fact, get to visit the carpet weaving workshop that I had been reading about, and we were also treated to a spectacular exhibition of tightrope walking by the Jabborov family, who have been performing for five generations. The small person on top of this group is the newest member at the age of five.

After our two weeks of traveling from east to west, from Tashkent to Khiva by bus and train, we hopped on an airplane at the Khiva airport and were back in Tashkent a couple hours later. The next day we got on another train and spent several hours traveling southeast to the Fergana Valley and the town of Margilan, which is the center of ikat weaving in Uzbekistan.

During our three days in Margilan we visited multiple craft centers and workshops and saw every aspect of ikat production from silk reeling to tying and dyeing warps, setting up the looms and preparation for weaving. We saw women at looms weaving ikat velvet by hand and industrial looms operating at breakneck speed. We saw young women finishing the last rows of knotted carpets they had been working on for several years that had up to a million knots per square meter. We saw a demonstration of block printing and had the good fortune to be at the right place at the right time to see the process of calendaring fabric.

We had a long drive back to Tashkent through the Fergana Valley on our last day of our journey, but drove through lush scenery and snow-covered mountain passes. Along the way we had several wonderful stops to break up the trip, including seeing a 19th century palace in Kokand and fascinating demonstrations of painting on ceramics in Rishtan.

If you’re wondering about the food in Uzbekistan, every meal had a rich assortment of fresh fruits and vegetables. The tables are spread with a beautiful array of small dishes before the main dish is even ordered. The national dish is called plov. It is cooked in giant cauldrons and served family style on large platters composed of rice, garbanzos, onions, yellow carrots, beef and spices, though every restaurant and region has its own variations.

Fresh bread is served at every meal. And the patterning that you see throughout the country makes its way onto the bread as well. In all of the markets you can find bread stamps for sale that have metal pins embedded in various geometric designs. These are used to stamp directly onto the unleavened dough before it is baked.

The displays of bread that you see in the markets and along the roadsides are a feast for the eyes as well as the appetite.

It’s hard to believe that we did all this and much more in just two and a half weeks. I feel that we covered a wide expanse of the country and had an in-depth overview of the art, architecture, and crafts of Uzbekistan, but at the same time like one could spend months or years there and still find more to see. I’m filled with visions of my magic carpet ride through Uzbekistan that will probably be in my dreams for a long time to come.