Samarkand, Uzbekistan

My movement along the Silk Road has led me eastward and also forward in time. The ruins in ancient Merv, in Turkmenistan, dated from 600 BCE, and I keep lurching on through the centuries as I go.  In Uzbekistan, Khiva’s walls are 10^th C CE, and Bukhara was a center of power from the 10^th century onward.  Samarkand represents the flourishing of another empire, the one led by 14^th-century Amir Timur, or, as Christopher Marlowe called him, Tamburlane. 

I suppose it’s not a new thing for a ruler to flex his power through the metaphor of his construction projects.  Timur wanted his city’s physical statement to be unarguable. The structure he built to honor his favorite wife, the Bibi-Khanym Mosque, had minarets that stood 75 meters high before an earthquake toppled them; the beautifully tiled portal is 35 meters high (the scale is kinda hard to convey in photos): 

Timur’s body lies in another enormous mausoleum he designed for his favorite grandson.  Note that the dome is ribbed—this feature is an innovation of Timur’s architects, and accordingly its style is called the Samarkand Dome. 

 

At the heart of the city is Registon Square, where three enormous madrassas (15^th-17^th C) face one another.  This photo tries to give a sense of scale, but the square was being prepared for an international dance festival so my photos are cluttered with scaffolding and stagestuff. 

My favorite of the three madrassas is the western one--the left one--, about which more next time.

Bukhara, Uzbekistan

Bukhara is a much bigger city than Khiva, containing in turn a much larger walled city—this one about 750 acres, featuring an old wall (10^th C?) with 11 gates.  There’s a lot inside those gates:  more madrassahs and mosques and minarets than I can count, in addition to the amir’s palace.  Outside the old city walls is a decent-sized city, maybe the third-largest in Uzbekistan.  But you’d never need to go out, because the old city is stuffed full of shops, restaurants, lodging, etc.

Bukhara is vibrant, with locals taking strolls in the evening; it’s also much more touristy than Khiva.  Nearly every alcove or bend in the pavement or passageway holds at least one kiosk or shop selling something, from silks to tablecloths to knives to metal art to magnets.  A lot of hard-sell energy, if genteel.  Those people really want me to carry a carpet around in my backpack for the next several months.

Gatehouse to Chor Minor Madrassa, completed 1807

Kaylan Mosque, 15th C

 Ismail Samoni Mausoleum, 10th C, 

buried completely intact in sand until excavation in 1920s.

Central Asian languages

When I visited the Republic of Georgia a few years ago, I found that Georgians under 40 tend to speak English as a second language, and Georgians over 40 tend to speak Russian.  This should perhaps be no surprise given the timetable of Soviet dissolution and the country’s efforts to integrate, economically and politically, with the West.

Central Asia presents a more chaotic language landscape.  Yes, there are certainly a fair number of people who speak English, but it doesn’t seem to coordinate with age.  Russian, on the other hand, is everywhere. Almost everyone speaks the national language plus Russian.  Russian is still taught in schools. The further east you go, the more Cyrillic characters dominate the signage.

In addition to this language feature, the historical local languages are official in every country.  Turkmen is spoken in Turkmenistan, Uzbeki in Uzbekistan, Tajik in Tajikistan….except that the language maps don’t necessarily correspond with political maps.  In Uzbekistan, a good swath of the middle of the country has historical ties to the Tajik people, whose empire flourished in the 9^th-14^th centuries CE.  So the primary language in Bukhara and Samarkand, Uzbekistan, is actually….Tajik.  Which is a Persian language, akin to Farsi.  Khiva, in the west, primarily speaks Uzbeki, which is a Turkic language (like Turkish and Turkmen).  To make things even more confusing, Turkic and Persian alphabets are not the same, nor is there much vocabulary crossover.  So for instance, the local ruler in the Turkic lands was a sultan, while in the Tajik areas it was an amir (or emir, as in U.A.Emirates)

Arab tribes spreading Islam swept over the whole area in the 8^th-9^th C CE so there are also Arabic words across cultures.  And Genghis Khan brough his Mongol hordes here as well in the 13^th-14^th C CE (so those sultans and amirs were also called khan—or, in Turkey, han, as in the Osman Han Ottoman dynasty).  

Traveling between the Stans, I find it very difficult to attempt politeness in local languages, in part because they seem to change every 100 miles.  I’m sticking with salam aleikem as a hello, and rakhmat, or thank you, which two meager terms at least so far have produced warm smiles and reciprocated greeting.

Feeling stressed by proxy at the thought of trying to navigate these wildly divergent places that have all been historically lumped together, as if to suggest to the foreign explorer that it will be no small thing to move from one country to the next?  Well, then, please enjoy this baby peacock from the summer palace of the last amir of Bukhara.

 

Khiva, Uzbekistan

Walled city that can only (if feebly) be described as charming.  Small in scale (about 2.5 kilometers to circumnavigate the walls), families living in houses inside the walls--it's an actual functioning village and not just a tourist pageant.  Those urn-shaped things are public tandoors, people!

Turkmenistan 2: In which I feel chastened

So, I really only started paying attention to Turkmenistan when I first saw John Oliver’s feature in 2019.  His comedy beats include: the sports fetish, the horse fetish, and all the big white marble buildings.  All these things seem to be true.  But as I’ve spent some time with Turkmen people—at community centers and mosques, in airports and yurts, I’ve heard something of their perspective.

Which perspective might be compared to the litter runt’s. They feel sneered at by the international community, physically precarious between Iran and Russia, and edged out of the global oil market by the predatory maneuverings of Russia, which kneecaps the economic potential of their one natural resource.  And when you get to know the country a little, some of those comedy beats gain some context.  All the white marble buildings and white cars?: well, it was 109F one day last week, and all that glossy white helps reflect some of the heat.  You don’t see the people walking around because it’s 109 degrees and they’re inside, in the A/C, or using cool tunnels rather than broiling sidewalks. The horses?: hey listen, they’re really beautiful horses and the whole country is horse-crazy, treating them like family, giving them full burials in a special cemetery, etc.  The Ahal-teke is the war horse of ancient Turkmen, and has become a symbol of courage and resilience and loyalty.  And those melons?: the country grows 200 varieties across its five regions, and they are splendid.  

 

Maiden's Castle at the ancient city of Merv (6^th C BCE) 

 

                                    Nissa, the first seat of the Parthians (2^nd-1^st C BCE)

 Listen, it’s still a tough place to be.  It’s a dictatorship with pretty much zero press freedom.  (See Doug Staker’s comment on the last post re: dictator aesthetics.)  There’s serious poverty, the roads outside of Ashgabat are ridiculously unmaintained (most folks just off-road it in parallel to the actual “paved” part), it’s a closed economy and money is hard to deal with, there’s an overwhelming police presence. There’s pretty much no infrastructure to support tourists/temporary travelers, and the internet is blocked in ways that make it very hard to function as a visitor--which means that people just don't visit (I was one of three tourists I saw during my time there).  Which means that their hot-rocking UNESCO site antiquities don't get any tourist love. 

And that deprives the Turkmen people of the chance to love visitors back. My guide told me that his religion teaches that the guest is a gift from God. On this point, the administrative state seems to be obstructing both sides of that gift exchange. 

Konya (Old) Urgench (10^th-13^th CE) 

Also, they have hedgehogs.  

Karakom Desert, Turkmenistan

 

Turkmenistan, Turkmenistan

 

I’m quoting, obviously, from the chorus of Dear Leader Gurbanguly Burdhimehamedav’s rap about the benefits of sports in the country.  If you haven’t watched John Oliver’s feature on the country and its strongman, I urge you to—it’s on YouTube.  I won’t try to link to it here.  It’s splendid, and our family watches it once a year, in observation of Turkmen Melon Day, a holiday in the second week of August.  It is also definitely not suitable for children, so be mindful of your tolerance for adult material. I arrived in Turkmenistan just after the holiday, and you better believe that the first thing I ate was melon.

The Ashgabat airport is a farce of performative bureaucracy.  I needed a covid test to enter the country.  When my flight landed at 2am, a bored and tired nurse stuck a swab barely up my nose, dipped it into a liquid-filled receptacle, poured water on a tray, looked at the tray, and threw it in the trash.  Whole transaction took maybe 3 seconds.  One has to pay a “migration fee” of $75 USD in clean crisp cash at the airport, plus admin fees, also in unmarked US bills.  A bit of a shakedown vibe. Passport scanners didn’t work. I think they took my fingerprints but I didn’t see the scanner actually scan.  They did not care at all what was in my backpacks through customs though the locals were getting searched thoroughly.  Lots of stages, lots of men in uniforms checking additional papers, 90 minutes from landing to airport exit. 

My guide--required to enter the country--was waiting and very, very friendly, and so eager to drive me through the absolutely pristine city to my hotel.  He kept slowing down to urge me to take photos. Striking city of white marble edifices.  Wide roads so clean it’s as if they were scoured with a floor waxer.  All the cars are white, too. Hotel a high rise of white marble, whose enormous rooms are decorated in an aesthetic I might describe as Middle Trump. 

In the light of day, the city is even more impressively clean and white.  Like, there is no trash anywhere. You could eat off the floor of the tunnel that runs under the auto roundabout next to my hotel. Nor are there people walking out amongst all these beautiful white buildings.  Nor is there any sign of commerce taking place: no shops, no bustling from one door to the next.  It’s almost like a giant child built a model city and plopped it here in the basin beside a small mountain, and then left to go do something else.

My guide joked that locals call the city Ash-Vegas

V cool airport, actually, in the shape of a falcon.

 

Ephesus

We finished up our Turkey adventure together in Selcuk, which is the modern town right next door to Ephesus.  Continuously inhabited for the past 9000 years, Ephesus offers up strata of artifacts whose throughline is the guardianship of the goddess Artemis.  You may recall that one of the O.G. Wonders of the World was the Artemision--the temple of Artemis at Ephesus.  That massive structure was undone by earthquakes and fires in the 3rd century C.E. but one pillar remains still.  B, who wrote an elementary school book about the ancient Wonders, was thrilled to cross one off his list. 

For my part, I was thrilled just to hang out at the library.

And also at this splendid church, marking the site of St. John's bones.  Built the same time as the Ayasofya, but it hasn't quite resisted time as steadfastly.

We have been to 3 different areas of Turkey, each one wildly different from the others. And there is so much more of Turkey to explore.  The only negative, really, is that it has been, as Jay would say, hot as crotch, and I keep repeating to myself the soothing mantra, in a few weeks I'll be in the mountains.

Volcanos etc.

 Cappadocia is a region surrounded by volcanos, and though they haven't erupted for the past 8000 years or so, the earth is this super-enriched soil.  Which makes for abundant and robust produce.  Like, some of the best produce I've put in my mouth. And it grows everywhere--it's a bit like Milton's Eden, in that the labor seems to be to control the growth rather than to coax it.  We were hiking in the most difficult-to-reach canyons and kept walking into vineyards and spontaneous orchards of quince, cherry, apricot, pear, apple, mulberry.  

And we also took a traditional cooking class, in which we first harvested everything we ate and then cooked it over an open flame in a clay pot.

Kapadokya, Turkey

B and I flew several days ago from Istanbul to Cappadocia.  It's a fantastically sculpted landscape, bristling with what they here call fairy chimneys and what we would call hoodoos, though the hoodoos are mostly pyramidal.  The town of Goreme is situated in the middle of an array of canyons (which they here call valleys), each sporting a different flavor of chimney.  There's Sword Valley (gray and bladey), Red Valley (not Canyonlands red, but rather paler), Rose Valley (which features pinks and golds), Rocket Valley, Pigeon Valley... etc.

We've pretty much hiked them all in the last few days, which is no mean feat considering that it's about four billion degrees here.  We have to take what we get, weather-wise, and don't want to hide in the hotel room until dark falls and we can't see the canyons.  So we pack a ton of water and sunscreen and head out into the sun.  

Some things of note: Pigeon Valley is named for all the pigeon cotes that were carved into the rock during the Stone Age (about 5000 years ago).  Actually, these cotes are everywhere, but in Pigeon Valley they contrast nicely with the bright white stone.  At the top of Pigeon Valley, the heatstroked hiker is rewarded with The Castle, an ancient fortification rising above Uchisar and everything else around.

Rocket Valley: 

Red Valley contains some Byzantine-era churches, containing frescoes from the 10th century.  Column Church (Kolonlu Kilise) is a massive cave church that just keeps going and going into the rock. B says it's his fave church he's ever seen, and I have dragged that kid to A LOT of churches.

One more thing about Cappadocia: the balloons. Every morning. It's apparently why people come here. It's a big thing. Folks seem puzzled when we say we're here for the hiking.

(Though we also rode a balloon.)

Istanbul

B and I have spent the last several days in Istanbul.  We have put in full days--walking over a dozen miles each day and covering all three parts of the city (the 2 European sections, old and new, and the Asian side).  As we've moved through a couple thousand years of history and across the conquests of 3 different empires, we've talked much about how mistaken is the old proverb about all roads leading to Rome; it is this place, at the crossroads of cultures and continents, that has endured as a kind of epochal omphalos.  

Basilica Cistern

B next to the aqueduct whose construction

Constantine initiated

It's also very easy to be a vegetarian here.  B and I would be happy eating only Turkish food for the rest of our lives.  Here's our dessert from last night's dinner, at the venerable Ciya Sofrasi (sorry, can't figure out Turkish characters on my keyboard): Cheese with pistachio, candied baby eggplant, candied bitter orange, candied and spiced unripe walnut, candied pumpkin, goat cheese baklava.

Illuminated

Qu'ran, from the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts

Deesis Mosaic, Ayasofya

Not Constantinople...

The Blue Mosque / Sultan Ahmet

Istanbul