I found some descriptive quotes of Bukhara in Thubron’s book The Lost Heart of Asia that I wanted to share. It makes me feel as though I can see this famous city with my own eyes. Which is, after all, why I read all of these historical travelogues. I want to see the world. And not just Paris or Rome, although I’d love to go there, too. The places I really want to see are the so-called backwaters of Central Asia and the Middle East. Samarqand, Bukhara, Shiraz (in Iran), the Fergana Valley (in Kyrgyzstan), Herat (in Afghanstan)… all of Alexander the Great’s old hangouts.
Thubron strolls through Bukhara:
…I entered a dust-filled wasteland fringed by a pale host of mosques and medresehs. The din and pall of restoration shook the air. The earth dazzled. The buildings glared in a blank, shadowless uniformity. Dressed in cement-colored brick, they had not the rich plenitude of the tiled mosques of Iran, but were patterned only sparsely with a glaze of indigo or green. For the rest, they were the color of the earth beneath them: a dead platinum. It was as if the dust had hardened into walls and turrets and latticed windows. Everything– even the clay-colored sky — shone with the same bleached stare.
But above, in radiant atonement, hovered a tumult of turquoise domes. Beyond the high gateways and iwans — the great vaulted porches– they swam up from their drums like unearthly fruit, and flooded the sky with the heaven-sent blue of Persia. From a distance they seemed to shine in unified aquamarine, but in fact the tiles which coated them were subtly different from one another, so that they spread a vibrant, changing patina over every cupola: eggshell, kingfisher, deep sapphire.
These mosques and medresehs were mostly raised by the successors of Tamerlane or by the 16th century Sheibanids, the first and most glorious Uzbek dynasty that succeeded them. Little that is older survives…
The blanched aridity all around oppressed me inexplicably, as though the city were dying instead of being restored. Even the dust seemed to have been leached by some ghostly peroxide. But in fact Bukhara was being resurrected indiscriminately: walls rebuilt shoddily en masse, tilework reproduced wholesale. Work had started in the Soviet period, but events had overtaken it, and the mosques which had been reconstituted cold in the service of art or tourism were stirring again with a half-life of their own.
The following descriptive passage is also very interesting because it captures what appears to be the inherent contradictions not only in Bukhara but in all of Uzbekistan. They don’t really fit in with the rest of Central Asia, they are not homogenous, they practice Islam but with elements of shamanism and Sufism, they don’t subscribe to fundamentalism. They try to resist being sucked into the issues plaguing Afghanistan, the civil war next door in Tajikstan, the tyrannical dictatorship in Turkmenistan next door. They are a milder people. But this struggle is difficult. Very difficult. Because, of course, there are many radical elements in the populations. There are millions of Uzbeks who do not live in Uzbekistan proper, who live in Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, China, Tajikstan … and these people bring home radicalism, fanaticism.
Thubron discusses the glorious Renaissance that Bukhara experienced in the10th century, a great era of art and literature, and although it was back in the Middle Ages, the tensions he describes in the society still exist, and still simmer beneath the surface.
He visits “The Tomb of the Samanids”, a 10th century mausoleum that stands on the outskirts of the city.
The tomb is all that survives of the precocious Samanid dynasty, the last Persians to rule in Central Asia, whose empire pushed south of the Caspian and deep into Afghanistan. The tomb escaped the Mongol sack because it lay buried under windblownsands, its builders half forgotten, and it perhaps finds its architectural origins in the palaces and fire-temples of pre-Islamic times. But its sophistication — the lavish, almost playful deployment of its brick — betrays an age more daring, more intellectual, than any which succeeded it.
For over a hundred years, until the end of the 10th century, a creative frenzy gripped the capital. Alongside the moral austerity of Islam, there bloomed an aesthetic Persian spirit which looked back to the magnificence and philosophic liberalism of the Sassanian age, extinguished by the Arabs more than two centuries before. As the Silk Road spilt into and out of Bukhara — furs, amber and honey travelling east; silks, jewellry and jade going west — the Samanids sent horses and glass to China, and received spices and ceramics in exchange.
An era of peace brought men of letters and science crowding to the court, and the Persian language flowered again in a galaxy of native poets. It was an ebullient age. Iranian music, painting and wine flourished heretically alongside Koranic learning, and the great library of Bukhara, stacked with 45,000 manuscripts,became the haunt of doctors, mathematicians, astronomers, and geographers.
The short era produced men of striking genius: the polymathic al-Biruni, who computed the earth’s radius; the lyric poet Rudaki; and the great Ibn Sina, Avicenna, who wrote 242 scientific books of stupefying variety, and whose ‘Canons of Medicine’ became a vital textbook in the hospitals even of Christian Europe for 500 years.
Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, is a similar story.
In the 1st century A.D. it was an oasis settlement. Throughout the following millennium, Tashkent was conquered and released and re-conquered over and over again. Persians, Mongol hordes, Turkic khans swept through, owned it, and passed it back and forth between them over the years.
And then, on June 15, 1865, the Russians arrived. And basically they never left. They are still there. In 1990, the population of Tashkent was 40% Russian. After the Soviet collapse, the Russians were a lost and sad community, abandoned by the motherland, adrift in a society wracked with upheaval, a Muslim revival … they were the old oppressors, trying to live with the conquered people, who were now trying to take back their country. So Tashkent has a Russian overlay … unlike Bukhara, which is a Muslim center. A very religious town, filled with fundamentalists. Tashkent is a Russian outpost.
Tashkent, in the years after 1865, became Russia’s base of operations for further conquests in Turkestan. The Russians built a colonial city here which swallowed up the medieval Turkic city. Thubron says, “The Russians had captured Tashkent in 1865, not on orders from St. Petersburg but by the adventurism of local generals. Wiithin a few years it became the capital of Russian Turkestan, and there grew up beside the native town a pleasant, nondescript cantonment, where water channels trickled and great trees bloomed. Its first governor-general, the vain and chilly Kaufmann, ruled like a petty emperor. His army and administrations were filled with exiled bankrupts and adventurers. Far from home, local society became inward-looking and licentious, while beside it the Uzbek community continued almost unstudied, as if it would one day fade away.”
Finally, with the advent of the Bolsheviks and their terrible architectural sense, the old Tashkent disappeared forever. Stalinist architecture (massive homely buildings, dauntingly wide concrete boulevards) stamped out the medieval nature of the desert town … there isn’t much left to be seen of the old Tashkent.
And then in 1966 there was a tremendous earthquake which gutted half of the city. Soviet builders rushed in to fill the vacuum and rebuild the city according to their own disgusting sensibilities. Tashkent, from the pictures, is one of the ugliest places on earth. Everything is grandiose, inflated, with massive gaunt spaces meant to make the citizens feel tiny and insignificant. The avenues are 6 lanes wide, the squares are massive vistas watched over by mammoth statues … It looks oppressive. Like someone is always watching, or like the city is always waiting for something terrible to happen.
Stalin’s legacy persists here, not just in the architecture, but in the population of Tashkent. Tashkent is filled, to this day, with Russians and Armenians. Taskent has very strong ties with Moscow … much stronger than other areas in Uzbekistan. This adds to the regional divides in the country; very difficult for the nation to join together, unify, and agree on who they are as a people, as a place. Nobody agrees. Everybody battles for power.
The Russians, while they were the leaders of Tashkent, erected a state playhouse, a ballet, a circus. So Tchaikovsky is introduced to Uzbekistan, to a disgruntled Muslim populace (who, quite frankly, have no curiosity about other cultures … in general … they could not GIVE a shit about what Western culture might have to offer … Meanwhile, we translate all of their top novels and poets into English or French or German or Italian, we watch their films, we give them Oscars … but the exchange is almost completely one-sided).
And Tashkent today? Over a million people live in the city. There is much crime; it is not safe for anybody. It is verey polluted. There is no work. And the youth population has exploded, so the city is filled with drunken young men, filled with vague grievances, who have nothing to do. The suburbs continue to spread. Everything looks the same. There is no traditional Uzbek community here. Everyone yearns to be part of the West, and yet they live in a poverty-struck and dangerous society, where they basically have to leave in order to live productive lives. The mafia is ever-present, their influence in everything.
It’s a bad situation, a powder keg. Islamic fundamentalism on the rise, reacting against the youthful population who want nothing more than to have access to Western music and Western movies.
These people have had their histories, their indigenous culture, amputated. There is no memory, no sense of who they are. The Russians who still live here live in fear, hiding out in their houses, dreaming about the good old days of Stalin.
Kind of a sick scenario, no?
