Tashkent - The City of Stone

Prologue

Again the times are out of joint.
The wheel of fortune is a marvelous thing.
What next proud head to the lowly dust will it bring?

The night is pregnant. What will the dawn bring to birth?
Two molten battles rage in the plains.
Bring blood red wine and fill the cup again.

– Hafez Shirazi (c. 1315 to 1390)
[Credits: William Dalrymple’s narration in the brilliant podcast, Empire]

It is the late 14th century. Temur has emerged from the rubbles of the now fragmented Genghis Khan’s infamous 12th century Mongol Empire that stretched from the China Sea to the Mediterranean. He has built a new dynasty in Central Asia, with Samarkand as his capital. His army, at least a 100,000 strong, has already taken most of Eastern and Western Persia (Khorasan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia), and he is now marching to take the south (modern day Iran).

Hafez is Persia’s greatest poet, living in Shiraz, and nearing the end of his life. He writes these lines about the twists and turns of history, hearing about the impending catastrophe that is about to befall his beloved city. It’s a lyrical ode to men, conquests, and violence, that unambiguously and sublimely define every patch of land on the planet.

I

In the heart of modern day Tashkent, Amir Temur Square is glistening in the oppressive, dry heat of Central Asia. Despite growing up in a country where my childhood was defined by summers (which got us trips to grandparents, and lots of mangoes), I am struggling with the itching of my limbs. It is not the prickly itch of Indian summer, it is the itch of skin that dries up the way it does in winters, with no sweat, and forms a strange concoction: winter skin in brutal summer heat. My guide and friend, a young Ms. Kadirova in her early 20s, satisfactorily eyes my melting ego, as I balance my backpack to take out the bottled water, while removing my sunglasses and my boonie hat as soon as I have found a tiny patch of shade.

The square is dominated by a large, bronze statue of Amir Temur amidst a carefully manicured garden. He sits astride a rearing horse, his right arm raised. The maroon granite pedestal on which his proud horse stands is blinding in the sun. The inscription, which was Temur’s historical motto, harmlessly reads: Kuch Adolatdadir (“Strength is in justice”). Temur’s expression is urgent: furrowed brows, fierce eyes, firm and slightly parted lips, tightened jaw, and a face turned slightly to the right where his hand is. It’s the representation of a confident, ruthless military commander leading his men to the next conquest. Allegedly, Temur was a man with a limp, and couldn’t easily get onto a horse: the nicknames Temur-i Lang (“Temur the Lame”), or Tamerlane, derive from this.

Amir Temur Square (Image courtesy: Embassy of Uzbekistan)

“So, Kumar, what do you know about this man?” Ms. Kadirova interrogates me, perhaps to assess which side of history I stand on. She is a petite, youthful woman who recently finished studying English language at the University, making her a delightful respite in a country where without some familiarity of Uzbek or Russian, most communication is essentially just sign language.

I evaluate my options to frame a response. In front of me is the man who acquired the choicest of epithets on both sides of the aisle: as diverging as “the Scourge of God,” and “Ṣāhib-i-Qirān” (Lord of the Auspicious Conjunction). The former title comes from his penchant to use terror and brutality as deliberate military policy. An extraordinary practitioner of cruelty and theatrical violence, Temur has the reputation of killing 15 to 20 million people, often with sadistic pre- and post- rituals such as burying alive, burning, trampling by horses, constructing towers from human skulls after massacres, or catapulting severed heads into fleeing ships. The number of departed souls attributed to Temur rivals those of Genghis Khan, despite Temur having controlled a much smaller territory, and his individual sadism is comparable to contemporaries like Vlad the Impaler. On the other hand, his auspicious title of ‘one who is destined to rule’ comes from his stature as the founder of the Timurid empire that gave rise to the most magnificent cultural renaissance that he initiated, and which flourished under his descendants shaping much of the arts and Persianate architecture that adorns today’s Central Asia, Iran, and India.

Instead of getting into the intricacies of rulers and their vanities, I settle upon the more sanitized versions to respond to Ms. Kadirova. She belongs to the large Gen Z population of Uzbekistan, a country with strikingly low average age (just 29.5 years). Being a post-Soviet-era child, she perhaps grew up in a nation that was reinventing its cultural identity in its Mongol roots. Temur, by all means, would have been a natural binding force to forge that identity of a nation, and he is splattered across almost everything tourists do or hear in the country today.

I try a neutral answer to Ms. Kadirova’s question: “Well, I know that this guy ruled as an Amir, and not a Khan, because he wasn’t a Mongol. But he married right, and got himself a posh Mongolian wife that gave him some legitimacy.” Born in Shahrisabz, about 90 km south of Samarkand, Temur was ethnically a Turk, and despite being neither a Mongol nor a Persian, rose from a common brigand to a ruler of an empire that stretched from Delhi to Istanbul.

My answer didn’t seem to impress her much, and she was probably sharp enough to sense that I am dithering. Admiration for Temur’s greatness seemed too clean for me, and condemnation seemed too easy: leaders throughout human history are too complex for a binary judgment.

Today’s Tashkent is a layered city. Temur has been dead for six centuries. Where he and his horse are installed today, there used to be a monument of Karl Marx, and the square was called the Revolution Square until being dismantled in 1993 to be replaced by Temur. The brutalist Soviet-era Hotel Uzbekistan still overlooks the square: a reminder of a different, more recent layer of the city.

Ms. Kadirova was already walking ahead, toward the next thing, in the manner of someone who had made her peace with her question long before I arrived.

II

The short 90 minutes flight from Almaty to Tashkent is a feast for my eyes in this cloudless month of June. As the aircraft gets airborne on its westward journey, the majestic snow-capped peaks of the western Tian Shan (“Heavenly Mountains” in Chinese) appear, surreally rising above the heated earth. The foothills in southeastern Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan first roll into dunes of rich green velvet, and then flatten out to meet the vast Eurasian Steppe that has shaped the rich history of nomads: people who first domesticated horses, made humans exceptionally mobile, conquered vast territories, and supported trade routes as transformational as the Silk Road. There are also vast stretches of yellow ochre desert punctuating the scenery; I promptly look at the map to understand the topography – the desert is the norm, and the greens are the banks of Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, mighty rivers that drain from the Pamir and Tian Shan, fanning out across the steppe, and making civilizations possible. Every major city in these regions cling to the narrow bands of green – Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva, and the fertile Fergana valley in the east. Beyond them lies an immense country of deserts and scrubland – large parts of Uzbekistan are just empty.

Tashkent Airport is a compact, old-fashioned soviet building, where time probably froze a few decades ago. It makes for an underwhelming first impression. At the passport control line, I decide to practice radical acceptance and mindfulness, occasionally interspersed by uninformed studies of humans, their possessions, expressions, and habits. Amidst this indulgent and intimate enterprise, time stays still, and I try to bring my mind to match its pace with considerable difficulty. As an official directs me to go past the gates, an irrational fear pricks the balloon of my sangfroid – “How will I get out of this country?” I promptly dismiss that border control issue, and move to address more pressing matters of bladder control. Behind one of the only two conveyor belts in the arrival hall, there are some cargo pellets with plastic wrapped goods. Besides them is a group of men, some sitting on the conveyor itself, some on the pellets, and some standing. Behind those men is a narrow opening, which I use to explore the whereabouts of a functional toilet. I see a door, slightly ajar, and make my way into a smoke-filled enclosure. An officer in dark blue police uniform is puffing away near the only wash basin, under the “No Smoking” sign, occasionally tapping away the ashes into an awkward plastic dustbin. His expressions mute my American urge to smile and say hello. I silently complete my business, edge my way to the basin, wash my hands, and make my way out.

I take a good look around the arrival hall. It’s the size of a bus station, somewhat crowded, and offers an enriching glimpse of anxious locals, women, children, and their precious possessions wrapped in crude suitcases, cartons, and simple cloth bundles. There is a mild commotion; perhaps time has frozen on this side of the gates as well. One of the two operating conveyor belts has a lot of weight to carry, and people dispossessed of their belongings for extended periods of time might be getting jittery. After retrieving my bags, my next stop is the mêlée near the x-ray machines for customs clearance. I haul my bags carefully into the tiny mouths of the ancient machines, wait at the other end, and mentally prepare myself to look for an ATM, my usual routine at foreign airports.

“Where are you coming from?” I hear a voice emanating from another dark blue police uniform behind a rickety metal table. I respond truthfully, mustering as much of a smile as I can.

“Put your bag here.” There is a deep, hollow, acoustic in the voice, and without prior exposure to this country, the accent sounds like a version of Russian.

I haul the suitcase on the rickety table, with considerable difficulty. I remind myself on the virtues of light packing, which is also my usual routine at foreign airports, and then prepare myself for the interrogation.

“Open this. Do you have any antiques?”

I am a bit flummoxed, though the question isn’t vituperative. There is a mental voice of rationality that is eager to proffer a logical explanation to the uniform – under Uzbek law, it is illegal to export cultural artifacts or antiques, and I am just entering the country for the first time in my life. I subdue that voice of rationality, which is my area of expertise gained from where I work.

The subsequent 10 minutes are spent in a public display of, amongst other things, dirty laundry from my previous destination, shoes and dirty socks in a bag, smelling workout clothes in another bag, a book, another bag with an electric toothbrush and an electric shaver and a curious-looking tongue-cleaner from India, yet another bag with wires and chargers, a ziplock with protein powder, a small shaker bottle, and another ziplock full of pills. Another uniform has decided to join the show, while both managing to keep relatively solemn faces as they unzip every tiny corner of the objects, including a zip that removes the lining of my suitcase that I never knew existed as a feature. A third one is called for. There is a relaxed tension permeating the air. The third uniform arrives, and carefully lifts my ziplock of pills with an expressions of a hazmat unit operator. After preliminary visual inspection, he opens the packet with extreme care, and takes out a red pill. The mental voice of rationality in my head is eager to proffer a question – why not the blue pill – but the solemnity of the occasion does not warrant it. The uniform proceeds to carefully split the capsule into its two constituent halves, and empties the contents of one of the halves on his rather well-padded left palm. Looking at a sparkling white powder under bright tubelights makes me feel somewhat high, though I resist the temptation to smile with widened eyes. The uniform sniffs at the powder, without a single flinch in his expression, as if this sequence of events is the most quotidian occurrence, and unsurprisingly lifts his gaze. His eyes scan me from top to bottom, shift towards the other uniform, and I hear another deep, hollow, acoustic voice. The first one now faces me, breaks into a smile, and says: “So? India, haan? Chal Chhaiyyan Chhaiyaan.” I take a few seconds to recognize the abrupt shift from a Bollywood crime thriller to a Bollywood romcom, and while still absorbing the events of the immediate past, proffer the insincere American smile.

It is an unusual welcome, one that hints at a country still negotiating the space between its sepulchral Soviet past and an increasingly open present. The blueprint of Soviet governance – the Apparat – is firmly entrenched, fueling an administrative machinery that still runs on paper, stamps, and formal permissions. The Soviet propiska system, which was designed to tightly track and control the movement of all people within the USSR also lingers. The system originally required any Soviet citizen traveling to a new city to register their presence with the local authorities within a narrow timeframe of 72 hours. Today, foreign tourists must still register within 3 business days of arrival, and ensure that their physical location is continuously tracked with zero chronological gaps if they move to a new city or change accommodations during the trip. While departing from the same airport several days later, I would be asked to submit registration slips from all cities I visited at the passport control. I wouldn’t be able to produce any.

III

Walking towards the Independence Square under the unrelenting sun, Ms. Kadirova continues with her well rehearsed history lessons. Tash means stone, Kent means city; so this is the City of Stone. Before Islam, before Russian rule, and long before the Soviet Union, this region belonged to an older Central Asian world. It practiced Zoroastrianism, the worship of fire. Later came Arab conquest and Islamization, Turkic migrations, Mongol conquest, Timur and the great Persianate courts, Russian expansion and Soviet rule.

Despite wearing sunglasses, I find myself squinting in the empty ‘square’ visually radiating heat from the stones that are shimmering brazenly. It’s a vast, tree-lined expanse, overlooking soviet-style government buildings including the Ministry of Finance and the Senate Building, and appears to be a place designed entirely for politics. The history of the square is a condensed history of the city itself. It was Cathedral Square under the Russian Empire, Red Square after the Revolution, Lenin Square during the Soviet era, and finally Independence Square (Mustaqillik Maydoni) after 1991. The Lenin statue that once dominated it has been replaced by a golden globe bearing the outline of Uzbekistan, with a mother and child at its base, a deliberate attempt to move away from soviet past and symbolize a country being reborn.

Old ‘layers’ of the city could have been more prominent, if not for the earthquake of 1966 that destroyed much of old Tashkent and gave the Soviet planners something close to a blank canvas. They built broad avenues and wide boulevards, large public spaces and imposing buildings, perhaps much of it planned for the ideological ‘community’ aesthetic, making ‘individuals’ feel small. The Soviet imprint is most spectacular underground. Tashkent’s metro, opened in 1977, was the first in Central Asia, and each station seems to have been given a different architectural vocabulary. Marble, chandeliers, mosaics, geometric patterns and elaborate Soviet symbolism turn what should be a mundane commute into something resembling an underground museum. Soviets also expanded Tashkent’s ancient canal network, an oasis that has survived almost two millennia, and in the process, boosted industry and agriculture. The ‘expansion’ also diverted enough water that triggered the famous Aral Sea ecological disaster.

Post-independence rulers have kept themselves busy editing the city; renaming streets, districts, and metro stations, replacing Soviet names with Uzbek ones; changing statues; and almost reconstructing its Islamic past by presenting new buildings as old. The Hazrati Imam Complex is beautiful in its modernity, and simultaneously absurd in characterizing itself as a collection of historic madrasas and mosques. Maybe it’s a prudent choice towards building a national identity, for, a country as layered as Uzbekistan needs an anchor to unite and grow. Ms. Kadirova describes the economy, the gold and copper and natural gas and cotton, lots of cotton, that are dug from the old, tired and thirsty earth, chugging the country towards a liberal, international-friendly, diversifying state. As we walk along the “Broadway” Alley (renamed to Sayilgoh Street) watching young men playing on the numerous public ping pong tables, she juxtaposes the scenery with an elaborate description of challenges that men face in finding brides, the ‘bride price’ of anywhere between $200 and $3000 to secure one, and for the men who can’t afford, the practice of stealing someone else’s bride.

Some of the best remnants of the layered past of the country are perhaps found in the goods at Chorsu Bazaar (Persian, meaning “crossroads” or “four streams”). Historically, it was an open-air market along the ancient Silk Road, and served as a meeting point where merchants from Asia, Europe, and the Middle East bartered for spices, silks, and ceramics. After the 1966 earthquake, the Soviets rebuilt the structure with a monumental, 80-meter-wide concrete dome tiled with deep turquoise.

This is where I first see the preparation of plov, Uzbekistan’s legendary national dish. In the open-air food rows of the Bazaar, massive cast-iron cauldrons (called kazans) sit on heavy brick and clay structures, similar to a tandoor, that burn wood and channel intense smoky heat to the pots. The theatrical cooking performance, apparently, has three parts, much like magic. There is the sizzle, that aggressively fries chunks of mutton or beef in a lake of oil, then there is the layering, which adds mountains of julienned yellow and red carrots, onions, whole heads of garlic, and chickpeas and spices and sweet raisins. This makes for the rich, aromatic broth (zirvak) that permeates the air with its delectable smell. And finally, there is the steam, where long-grain rice is piled on top, and massive metal lids cover the pot to steam everything into perfection. The complexity of tools and the ingredients used are a result of evolving civilization over centuries that resulted in the plov – a genealogy running through the Persianate world, Central Asian traditions and later Russian and Soviet influences.

Chorsu Bazaar (Image courtesy: Uzbekistan ACDF)

Just past the main dome, I go inside the bustling, flour-dusted bakery section of the Bazaar, a magnet for curious tourists drawn by the scent of roasting yeast. There are fiery clay tandoors that open towards the front, and inside them are glowing rows of raw nons slapped onto the scorching walls, puffing up over the open flames. The sight fascinates me, and sensing my excitement, or maybe as a usual stunt for tourists, a sweat-soaked baker hands me his long, hooked metal rod and guides me in spearing a blistering, golden-brown loaf off the clay wall and bringing it out. I decide to buy a few of the piping-hot nons and walk around the rest of the Bazaar blowing and chomping on it. There are piled high produce, colorful spices, dried fruits and nuts, a variety of cheese, lots of meat, bread, and gift packs, all competing for space, with smells of cooking drifting through the aisles. Multi-level concentric balconies are packed with vendors calling you out to buy their wares, while the outdoor alleys host clothing shops, and the open kitchens.

Despite the modern dome, the Bazaar feels old, and largely ‘non-curated.’ It has absorbed centuries of humans that have passed these lands buying, selling, bargaining, carrying, eating, while history moved with its glacial pace. And it seamlessly met the modern daily life humming beneath this dome, while continuing to draw life from the same rivers and oases from its earliest civilizations.