U Z B E K I S TA N
TA S H K E N T
BUKHARA SAMARKAND
I T W A S W H E N T H E B L U E B O W L fell and broke that a desire to revisit
Uzbekistan swept over me in a sudden tremor of remembered colors and patterns. The bowl, made from fragile, salty clay by the masters of Khorezm, a historic pottery center in western Uzbekistan, sported an intricate, pale azure design I could gaze at forever. It was my trophy from a trip I made in 1990 to Uzbekistan, the history-saturated crossroads of the Silk Road. That trip was an act of homage. My beloved paternal grandmother, Alla, was born in 1917 in the fertile Fergana Valley east of Tashkent, Uzbekistan’s capital. She was raised there by her grandmother, Anna, a prominent Bolshevik women’s rights activist. In the 1930s, Anna was transferred to a political job in Moscow, and later, like many Bolshevik activists, she ended up in a gulag. Alla never talked about Anna—except on those special occasions when she got very drunk and
Previous spread: The Uzbek city of Samarkand has been a trading center on the Silk Road for more than a thousand years. The city’s Shah-i-Zinda necropolis, pictured, was built between the 11th and 19th centuries. Above: A madrassa (school) in Registan Square in Samarkand. Left: Visitors to the Naqshband Muslim shrine in Bukhara. NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019
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