Download PDF | Chris Aslan - Unravelling the Silk Road_ Travels and Textiles in Central Asia-Icon Books (2023).
303 Pages
INTRODUCTION
Spinning a Yarn f I unpick my own road to Central Asia, it begins in the school library as I studied Soviet politics. In 1990, every world map was dominated by a huge red smear that crossed all the way from Europe to the Pacific. This was the Soviet Union. Lazily, I had assumed that it was just the communist name for Russia, and often people used the terms Soviet or Russian interchangeably. However, halfway through my course, the Soviet Union collapsed, and I decided to write my dissertation on the role of nationalism in its break-up. Reading more, I began to discover just how varied the peoples of the Soviet Union were, in terms of religion, language and ethnicity, and that a more accurate description of it was the Soviet Empire. The Kazakh Socialist Republic alone was roughly the size of Western Europe. These were significantly large areas of non-Russian Soviet presence. I discovered Abkhazians, Georgians, Turkmen, Chechens, Tartars and Kalmyks, and found illustrations of these people in their national dress. I was gripped. Although my parents are English, I was born in Turkey and spent my childhood there as my father was a professor at a university in Ankara. I knew that the Turks had originally come east from Central Asia, but hadn’t realised that there were so many other Turkic peoples out there, all sharing linguistic similarities. Ruling over the largest contiguous empire the world has ever known was a centralised government that made economic decisions which I couldn’t understand. I read how in the twilight years of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika allowed greater economic freedom, combined with subsidised public transport and a burgeoning unofficial market.
This meant that a Georgian villager could pick two buckets of apricots from the trees in her orchard, get on a bus to the airport, fly over three hours to Moscow, sell the apricots on the street and then fly back to Georgia again that evening. And still make a tidy profit. Now, though, these new countries, still vastly overshadowed by Russia, were having to make their own way in the world. My interest in the region continued. I was determined to travel along the Silk Road and see some of these exotic former Soviet countries for myself. I managed to get a travel bursary from Leicester University, on the proviso that it funded something related to my course. I was studying media and journalism, so I contacted some of the development organisations that had proliferated in these new republics and offered to write news articles for them in return for bed and board. A few took me up on the offer. With youthful certainty, rather than any actual financial accounting or a proper understanding of visa systems, I exchanged my earnings and bursary money into new US dollars – for some reason old notes were unacceptable – and stuffed them into my money belt, hoping it would be enough for the trip. I look back now in amazement at my readiness to head off with only the vaguest of plans for where I would end up, and with no contingency plan in case I was robbed. There were no ATMs where I was going, so the cash would simply need to last. I hoped to get as far as China but was relatively hazy about where I’d go after that, thinking I might try to get to Russia and return home on the Trans-Siberian train. Or not. I wasn’t entirely sure.
In the end, I was persuaded by a New Zealander in Tashkent to avoid Russia completely. He assured me that the Trans-Siberian was just a really long and fairly tedious journey through featureless landscape dotted with the occasional onion-domed church. Much better, he said, would be to head for China and then traverse the Karakoram Highway from Kashgar down to Gilgit in Pakistan and fly out of Islamabad. I took his advice but was to have a near-death experience as a result. My main concern before I left was that I might run out of books. So, I packed War and Peace in my hand-luggage – an epic novel for an epic journey – and a few other books I was happy to discard along the way. I’d borrowed an old rucksack from my dad, which he said had served him well as a student. It was a mistake. The rucksack was both heavy and uncomfortable and – as I discovered while in a bazaar in Turkmenistan – fairly easy to pickpocket. I also had a Russian phrase book, which might have been useful for ordering opera tickets, but other than that was fairly limited. It was my rusty childhood Turkish that was to prove more helpful. It was 1996 and a privilege to lift the Iron Curtain and peek behind it, visiting countries just five years old that were coming to terms with their own national autonomy. As these new identities were being forged, there was still a reeling from the sudden collapse of a centralised system which had in no way prepared these former Soviet countries for independence. Even oil-rich Baku was struggling economically, despite the influx of oil companies keen to get drilling. There were many highlights along the way, and moments I still remember clearly.
The first was the thrill of reaching the border between Turkey and Georgia. Turkey felt very familiar, but just a few hundred metres away was a country that had recently emerged from behind the Iron Curtain. I joined the queue and passed through checkpoints fairly quickly on both sides, my passport scrutinised and stamped. There was a bench on the Georgian side where I waited for the bus, feeling nervous excitement at signs everywhere in bold Cyrillic or exotic Georgian script. But my excitement dampened as the hours went by. It was just before dawn when the bus finally arrived. Most of the other passengers were women, and were either traders or prostitutes. They all looked exhausted, and I wondered what money or other services had been extorted from them in order to let them pass. I soon learnt that the Soviet Union, and the new republics it had spawned, survived on the tenacity and determination of Soviet women, who did whatever was necessary to feed their families. I saw little of Georgia on that first trip; it was only on subsequent visits that I discovered the amazing food and wine, the love of complicated toasts, and the stunning mountain scenery of the country. From Georgia I took another bus, this time to Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. There, on the shores of the Caspian Sea, was the classiest of the capitals that I would pass through.
The city was divided into three sections. The outer section was Soviet-era and largely grey blocks of flats. The inner section was a walled city, which was as large as Baku would get until the mid-19th century when the city overflowed with foreigners flocking to the world’s first major oil boom. The middle section, or ‘Boom town’, was a cacophony of different European architectural styles built around the same period, as former peasants – now millionaires – returned from tours of Europe with postcards of their favourite buildings, which they handed over to architects to reproduce, along with wads of cash. Baku was about to experience another oil boom, but it hadn’t quite started. Taxi drivers were still university professors or opera singers, trying to make ends meet now that state salaries were virtually worthless. Those who could got jobs as cleaners or receptionists in the offices of the new international oil companies. I spent a week in Baku waiting for the ‘daily’ ferry to actually leave for Turkmenistan. Arriving in the dusty port town of Krasnovodsk, I bit into my first slice of Turkmen melon, which was incredibly crisp and sweet, thanks to the searing desert temperatures. Later I learnt that skilled melon growers could even grow their crops in the desert itself, digging down to the root base of a camel-thorn shrub and making an incision into the main stem and inserting a melon seed.
Not all would take, but those that did were able to draw on the camel-thorn’s extensive and deep-running root system, producing melons with a unique flavour. Ashgabat, the Turkmen capital, was a fascinating study in presidential megalomania. Saparmurat Niyazov, the first secretary of the Turkmen Communist Party, had reinvented himself after independence as Turkmenbashi, or ‘leader of the Turkmen’. Everywhere there were slogans stating, ‘People, Nation, Turkmenbashi!’ His portrait was ubiquitous, and his golden revolving statue dominated the skyline. Shops may have had a limited amount of consumer goods, but there was plenty of Turkmenbashi aftershave or vodka (later I regretted not buying a bottle as a souvenir). This presidential cult had barely got into its stride – Turkmenbashi went on to write a holy book entitled The Rukhnama, promoted as equal to the Bible and Quran. Great swathes of this drivel had to be memorised and regurgitated in lieu of job interviews or university exams, or to pass a driver’s test. After Niyazov died, the presidential cult continued with his successor, who managed to bankrupt the country through further mismanagement before handing over the reins to his son, a prince in all but name. Serdar Berdimuhamedow now rules a country with the world’s sixth largest gas reserves at a time when global gas prices are surging. Despite this, the people of Turkmenistan live in abject poverty.
Water and power cuts in the searing summer temperatures are the norm, and most have to queue for hours outside state shops in the hope of buying cooking oil, flour or water. Meat is a mere memory. Unsurprisingly, these repressive and isolationist policies, along with a presidential cult, have led people to draw many parallels with North Korea. I took a further train through Bukhara and Samarkand to Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. I was learning how to navigate police corruption. ‘Problema,’ said a policeman as I got off the train in Tashkent, just before dawn. He ominously tapped my passport before walking off with it, beckoning me to join him in his office. A few weeks before, I might have panicked. Instead I simply told him, ‘Problema niet,’ got out my tatty copy of War and Peace and read for an hour or so in the police office, as it was still too early to call my hosts. Eventually, the irritated policemen chucked my passport at me with what I presumed was a muttered curse and shooed me on my way. Jon, my host in Tashkent, arranged for me to work on a commemorative newspaper celebrating Uzbekistan’s fifth anniversary of independence. I had to turn the nominally translated English into something that was actually comprehensible, and enjoyed wading through the pages of nationalist propaganda. An article comparing the historical figure of Amir Timur with present-day President Karimov contained sentences such as ‘Historians note that the “General of Genius” did a good works amongst the European peoples.’ I wasn’t always sure what it was actually trying to say. While the Soviet architecture of Tashkent was more concrete brutalism than anything oriental, the Silk Road came alive when Jon took me to Chorsu bazaar. Under retro-futuristic domes was a riot of colour and smells.
I tried to keep my wits about me, mindful of pickpockets or garrotting myself on the strings that held awnings over the stalls, designed for people shorter than myself. I was intoxicated. The smoke and sizzle of shashlik wafted over us as a portly man skilfully rotated the skewers of six cubes of mutton. There are always six pieces, sometimes alternating between meat and mutton butt-fat; the word for six in Persian is shash, giving shashlik its name. We wandered through curtains of fabric, much of it silk, but with an increasing amount of glittery or sequinned polyester from China, while women bought metres to take to their local tailors for dresses. It was late August and the fruit and veg section of the bazaar held an embarrassment of riches. Colourful mounds of bright red and green peppers, carrots strung together by their bushy green tops, and a whole section devoted to piles of enormous melons in all shapes and colours. There was a bed beside each stall as the heavy fruit could not be easily moved and would have to be guarded at night. A woman squirted bundles of fresh herbs with a plastic water bottle to keep them from wilting in the heat. Tomatoes were so large that three was already a kilo. We filled the string bags Jon had bought for the purpose. Plastic bags cost extra, and I was amused to find Morrisons bags for sale, wondering how these Northern British supermarket bags had ended up there. ‘Why’s it so busy?’ I asked Jon. ‘It isn’t,’ he explained. ‘You should see it on Sunday, which is called Bazaar-day.
Then it’s really heaving.’ ‘But why are there so many people? You said that there are plenty of other bazaars in Tashkent.’ Jon shrugged. ‘It’s where people go for something to do, or to meet a friend. Plus, most people like to buy their produce fresh, so they’ll come several times a week.’ Annette Meakin, a British travel author who stayed in Tashkent for a while at the turn of the 20th century, put it thus: ‘When a Sart*wants amusement he turns his steps instinctively towards the bazaar; when he wants news of what is going on in the world, he is off to the bazaar, and when in fact there is no urgent reason why he should be there, you will find him in the bazaar.’* I got up early one morning and caught a bus to Samarkand for a day trip. After all, this was the heart of the Silk Road. I marvelled at the stunning Timurid architecture – a relief after the brutalist concrete architecture of Tashkent. At the Registan – a square with three sides dominated by the most incredible tiled madrassahs – renovation was taking place. Beneath a scaffold I noticed a broken piece of glazed green brick tile in the dust. Furtively, I pocketed it, breathless with transgression and the knowledge that I now possessed a 15th-century treasure in my bag. I didn’t. I discovered later that the Soviets regularly renovated these monuments, particularly as some of the Registan was destroyed in a large earthquake in 1886. The tile was probably younger than I was. In the afternoon heat I passed by wheeled stalls offering carbonated water mixed with violently coloured cordial from medicinal-looking glass bottles, served from a communal cup. I stopped for refreshment in one of the teahouses and tried not to stare too obviously at those around me. There was still evidence of the great melting pot of varied people, brought together under Amir Timur’s ruthless reign. Women wore gypsy-style headscarves, some looking Mediterranean, others Mongol.
They seemed a lot busier than the men, or perhaps just harder-working. Other than a group of stout older women, marked as pilgrims by their long white headscarves, seated in the teahouse that looked out at the Timurid-era Friday Mosque, most of the idlers were male. Older men sat cross-legged on raised seating platforms, resplendent with long white beards, striped robes and turbans wrapped around grubby skullcaps, playing backgammon or simply nursing a bowl of green tea, gossiping and watching life go by. At another seating platform were middle-aged men in greasy, well-worn suits, wearing black skullcaps adorned with four white embroidered chillies. The young men in the teahouse wore polyester tracksuits made in China with misspelt brand names and were undoubtedly uncomfortable in the heat. I then travelled from Tashkent through the fertile Fergana valley, across an open border with no passport checks and into the city of Osh in Southern Kyrgyzstan. The famous market was filled with Uzbek men in their familiar black skullcaps and Kyrgyz men with more Mongol features, sporting tall bonnets made of white felt with black velvet trim. I experienced my first trip by UAZ. These high-clearance, khaki four-wheel-drive Soviet vans were both incredibly sturdy and extremely uncomfortable. Ours had a habit of breaking down, but when it did, there was usually someone selling melons nearby, or possibly kumiz. The passengers seemed happy to sit around and chat by the side of the road while the driver tinkered with the engine. I was offered a swig of kumiz and the other passengers laughed as I tried not to wrinkle my nose at the sharp, fizzy taste. It’s fermented mare’s milk and mildly alcoholic. After several bottles had been consumed and the engine fixed, the rest of the van sang Kyrgyz songs lustily and revelled in my applause, insisting that I sing a song from ‘Angliya’.
We climbed steadily in altitude heading for a mountain pass, and I could feel the heat radiating from the labouring motor under my front seat. At some point during the night, the driver stopped to get a few hours of sleep. I woke, sore and cold – my one warm top packed in the rucksack strapped to the van’s roof-rack – and stepped out of the van for a pee, greeted by steaming breath and a spectacular sunrise. Before a backdrop of soaring mountains, the hills were dotted with yurts and splashes of colour from clothes on washing lines. Smoke curled up from their chimneys and doors opened as girls went to milking and boys took their herds to graze. We eventually arrived in Bishkek later that day, but I saw very little as I didn’t know anyone there and needed to get to Almaty, still the capital of Kazakhstan at that point, before nightfall. In Almaty, my favourite experience was a trip to the Arasan Baths. These were no run-of-the-mill Russian banyas but an opulent and yet distinctively Soviet complex of saunas and bathing pools. I had to wait a few days for my remaining visas, before taking a 36-hour train journey on the Genghis Khan Express from Almaty in Kazakhstan to Urumchi in China. There were growing numbers of ethnic Han Chinese arriving in the city from Eastern and Central provinces of China every day; the park was filled with pagodas and red lanterns glowed outside Han Chinese restaurants, and yet Urumchi still felt surprisingly Central Asian. Uzbek phrases that I’d picked up along my travels seemed to work just as well with Uighurs, the largest indigenous people-group. Chinese influence, like the legacy of Russia in Central Asia, was more noticeable in municipal spheres such as hospitals, schools and universities rather than in the bazaars, teahouses or domestic settings.
Certain parts of the city were where the Han lived, and other parts still retained their Turkic identity. Even with my limited understanding as a tourist, I was aware of the ethnic tension, and it turned out that even the time you set your watch to was political. I walked naked out of my hotel bathroom as a Han cleaner opened my bedroom door without knocking, looking unapologetic given that she considered it ten in the morning and that I should already be out and about. My watch, as with most local people, was set two hours behind, which made far more circadian sense but was considered ‘separatist’ for being on local, not Beijing time. There was a constant cultural tug-of-war between Mohammed and Mao. As more Han arrived daily, Urumchi, the regional capital, was filling up fast. Cranes bristled on the skyline, and Uighurs and other Turkic peoples were now a minority in the city. I still found streets where the smoke from sizzling sticks of mutton shashlik wafted in the air along with steam from fresh rounds of bread cooling from the oven, and the slap of laghman noodles being expertly hand-stretched and then whacked against a metal tabletop. The one place where Han and Uighur seemed to mingle, or at least tolerate one another, was the People’s Park. I’d expected perhaps some older Han moving sedately together in communal tai chi around the beautiful ponds and pagodas. Instead, I was passed immediately on my arrival by a diminutive Han woman walking backwards and clapping loudly.
Another woman strode by, waving her hands in the air, shouting. These were both time-honoured methods of improving circulation. Then there were eager groups of Han retirees learning Uighur dancing, the men happily mimicking the coquettish flourishes of the women’s parts. There were also traditional Chinese dance classes, some involving swords, as well as line dancing, communal body-slapping and tai chi. I passed a ballroom dancing group where partners were optional. An old man swirled by holding an empty waist of air. Young Uighurs and Han skateboarded together or did tricks using two sticks connected with string and something akin to a disembodied yoyo. In a shaded section of the park, older Han used giant broom-handled paintbrushes with water bottles attached above the brush to write out poetry in large watery Chinese characters onto the pavements. By the time they were finishing their last characters, the first ones were drying and disappearing. Later I endured a 30-hour bus ride through the Taklamakan Desert to Khotan. The Jade City – as Khotan was known – was famous for its Sunday Bazaar, which had not been commercialised and commodified by the local authorities, as had happened in Kashgar. I joined herds of fat-tailed sheep trotting at pace with their large backsides wobbling as shepherds slapped them with sticks. There were carts drawn by horses resplendent with bright tassels, pompoms and sleighbells, blending with the clank of the cowbells as cattle and camels ambled slowly to market.
The other bazaars I’d visited in Central Asia still had a distinctively Soviet feel to them, but here I felt swept up in the real Silk Road. Clanging resounded from the copper section of the bazaar as craftsmen hammered at their water ewers, basins, cauldrons and plates. Many were covered in beautifully intricate patterns. The carpenter section was full of lathes and more hammering, decorative gourds, painted wooden cradles, carved spoons, wooden stamps bristling with nails and used for decorating bread, and much more. The livestock bazaar was just as noisy. Sheep were carefully lined up with odd numbers pointing in one direction and even numbers in the other, as if they’d just been expertly shuffled. There were spice spellers, and makers of fur hats and square embroidered skullcaps plying their trade. There were also reams and reams of gaudy atlas silk, made with a distinctive warp-resist method. It was wonderful. Perhaps the most memorable part of the whole trip was the bus journey from Kashgar, the historic Uighur capital, to Pakistan. Most of the passengers were pot-bellied, bearded Pakistani traders in shalwar kameez, who spent the journey gossiping, belching and spitting. The rest were backpackers from an assortment of countries. At first, the bus was stiflingly hot as we passed cotton fields being harvested by Uighurs. Gradually, we left the plains behind and climbed into the foothills of the mountains. We passed a caravan of shaggy Bactrian camels, heavily loaded with bales of merchandise, and I took blurry photos through the bus window. This was the Silk Road of my imagination. We climbed further and the road opened onto high summer pasture studded with yurts, yaks, camels and sheep. My neck got sore from craning out of the window at this beautiful, raw landscape. By the time we’d reached Tashkurgan that night, we were already at 3,000 metres.
The air had a nip to it and our rooms were equipped with bright pink thermos flasks and thick blankets. We continued to climb the next day until we reached the Khunjerab Pass, the highest paved international crossing in the world, at almost 4,700 metres. We all disembarked and the Pakistani traders wrapped woven woollen pattus around themselves and stamped their sandalled feet to keep warm, while the tourists took photos. I wasn’t wearing enough. The descent was quick and steep, with the road zigzagging sharply down hairpin bends. Then there was a sudden clatter behind me. One of the large panes of glass had fallen out of the bus and now cascaded in eversmaller pieces down the side of the mountain. But the driver seemed unperturbed, and we continued, mountain air sweeping through the bus, down to the first habitation, a small village called Sost. This was where the bus terminated and where our passports were officially stamped. The village consisted of flat-roofed mudbrick houses and lush green terraces full of orchards and poplars that already blushed yellow, as autumn started early up here. Flanking us were jagged, snow-capped peaks. I headed for a cluster of minivans, finding one going further down the valley to a village with a recommended guesthouse. A Japanese backpacker sat at the back and several local people had also taken their seats. I picked a spot and hoisted my hand luggage onto my lap, pulling out my tattered copy of War and Peace, and wondering if I’d finish it before the trip ended. A few minutes later, my chest was stabbed with pain.
It didn’t feel deep enough for a heart attack, but the pain was worse than any bee- or waspsting I’d experienced before. I shook the neck of the baggy T-shirt I was wearing in the hope that the hornet, or whatever it was, could fly out. There were two more stabs in quick succession. Peering down I saw, matted in my chest hair, a pale-cream scorpion, pincers moving and tail poised to strike for a fourth time. I shrieked loudly and ripped off the T-shirt, flinging it and the scorpion out of the open sliding door. Staggering outside, I peered at three marks on my chest where blood had begun to trickle. ‘There’s a scorpion in my Tshirt,’ I announced to no one in particular, feeling a little faint. ‘I think I’m going to die.’ A crowd formed, alerted by my scream and curious about my state of undress. I tried to ignore the pain and think quickly, given this was a life-ordeath moment. ‘Look,’ I told the crowd, pointing at my chest. ‘I’ve been stung three times by a scorpion. On my heart! I need a doctor. I’m going to die. Please, take me to a doctor.’
This elicited a wave of sympathetic head wobbling, and someone picked up my T-shirt, shook out the scorpion and squished underfoot it before handing the T-shirt back to me. ‘Very sorry sir,’ said one of the younger men who spoke a little English. ‘Clinic closed.’ ‘Clinic?’ I asked, seizing on this vital information. ‘Yes! I need to go to the clinic. Now! I don’t have much time. Please, I need a doctor.’ ‘Very sorry sir, clinic closed,’ said the man again with an emphatic wobble of the head. One of his friends offered me a pill of some sort, which I swallowed unquestioningly. Another offered me tiger balm which I dutifully rubbed onto my chest. I felt my left arm grow numb and become difficult to move. It’s starting, I thought to myself, forlornly. All I knew about scorpion stings was that in a film I’d seen as a child, a woman stepped on a scorpion and then just minutes later went into a fevered shock before dying. I had just minutes. Why was no one helping? ‘Please, take me to the doctor,’ I pleaded again, trying to keep my bottom lip from trembling. The young spokesman for the crowd declared, ‘Not possible sir. You are okay. Many pain, no problem.’ Then, with an apologetic smile, he and everyone else began to disperse. I was left with the Japanese backpacker who spoke no English, but was furiously flicking through his guidebook in a bid to find information. I did likewise. Both our searches proved fruitless. I gingerly flopped my limp arm through the armhole of my T-shirt and pulled it back on.
The lack of concern was a good thing, I reasoned. No one wanted a dead tourist in their van, and they knew scorpions better than I did and didn’t seem to think I was in particular danger. There was nothing for it but to sit back down again. As the shock wore off, the pain kicked in, and it felt as if my chest had been stabbed with a white-hot poker. We set off, passing spectacular scenery, and I glanced out of the window, half-heartedly, my chest throbbing. I really wanted my mum. An hour or so later, the van deposited me, still alive, outside the guesthouse. I was wobbly on my feet and couldn’t use my left arm properly, but I was alive. There were Americans, and now I had someone who would listen to my story and give me sympathy and, more usefully, a tube of antihistamine. My chest felt tender that night, but the following day I was fine and went trekking, crossing the river over a bridge made of steel wire and sticks. Later, when I actually lived in Central Asia, I learnt that a sting from these small scorpions might kill a baby, but for an adult, it was merely a case of severe discomfort. In many ways, I was lucky to be stung on my chest and not somewhere more sensitive. These scorpions were particularly common in mountainous regions. When I helped my local friends in Khorog to build a house, we often found scorpions resting beneath the boulders we were using instead of bricks. ‘Look, it’s a scorpion!’ I said, the first time I spotted one. My friends looked at me quizzically, wondering if I would also comment on the ants, or occasional centipede, given how commonplace scorpions were.
There was an older American couple who lived in Khorog, and on a visit to their traditional Pamiri house, our hostess, Melinda, suddenly yelped and ran out of the room, unbuttoning her blouse as she did so. This was unexpected, but then something caught our eye and we saw, twitching on the carpet in its death-throes, a small pale scorpion. It had fallen from the roof-beams into her cleavage, where it had stung her and then been crushed by her bosoms. I now know, should I ever get stung again, that whacking the offending scorpion until it’s turned to mash and then smearing this on the sting will help reduce the effects, as scorpions carry antibodies to their own poison in their bodies, in case they accidentally sting themselves. I stayed for a week in the Hunza Valley, trekking and enjoying fresh chapattis and dahl drizzled with apricot-kernel oil. I would have stayed longer, but term was starting and I still didn’t know if I had enough money for a flight home. I think the Hunza Valley might just be the most beautiful place I’ve ever been.
The mountainsides were covered in boulders that spelt out greetings to the Aga Khan, as most of the inhabitants were Ismaili and revered him. After a terrifying overnight bus journey from Gilgit to Islamabad, the driver careening at speed around blind corners as we wove our way down from the mountains, I arrived in Islamabad. I was dishevelled and dirty but managed to purchase a last-minute flight that evening back to the UK, with just enough money left to get all my rolls of film developed. I had ‘done’ the Silk Road. Although, of course, all I’d done was skate across the surface. I blush at photos of my youthful self in inappropriately short shorts blithely standing beside the holy tombs in the sublime necropolis of the Shah-i-Zinda in Samarkand with no sense of my own cultural insensitivity. I have a photo of a man taken in Osh; on the back, I’ve written that he is Kyrgyz, when I can now see from both his features and dress that he is clearly Uzbek and that a border does not signify an ethnicity.
The cotton fields had been obvious as I travelled through during harvest time, but I’d missed the significance of the many pollarded white mulberry trees I’d passed, not realising that they were grown for a thriving silk farming industry, also known as sericulture. In Soviet museums I enjoyed cutaway yurts showing their fabulous textile trappings, but never questioned why there were so few nomads left now. As for the cotton-pickers, they simply added drama to my photos. I hadn’t stopped to think about their working conditions or whether they were actually getting paid, or why the children amongst them weren’t in school. Instead, having ticked ‘The Silk Road’ off my bucket list, I got on with writing up news stories for the various development organisations who had hosted me, and a report for the university travel bursary board. I was in Leicester for two more years and had largely forgotten about Central Asia, until one of the development organisations I’d written for contacted me. It was a small Christian Swedish organisation called Operation Mercy and they had just opened a new branch office in the desert oasis of Khiva, which also happened to contain a walled old city considered by UNESCO to be the most homogenous example of Islamic architecture in the world.
The Mayor of Khiva had heard about this thing on computers called the interweb or something, and that it might be a good way of promoting his city to the outside world to garner more tourists. He approached Lukas, a Swedish graphic designer, asking him to create something. Lukas assured the mayor that he could make it look nice, but that he wasn’t a writer and would see if he could find one who would volunteer on the project. Lukas asked me if I was interested. And I was. So, this was what brought me out to live in Central Asia in the first place. It really was a journey into the unknown, and I had absolutely no plan to stay longer than my initial two-year commitment – and definitely not for fifteen years. If I’d known during my student trip along the Silk Road that I would return to live in these countries and get gored by a yak, swim illegally to Afghanistan and back, unsuccessfully smuggle gems, share a cage with a snow leopard, weep with survivors of ethnic cleansing, and get expelled from two countries, I’d have been as surprised at that as the fact that I’d develop a passion for 19th-century Central Asian embroidery.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق