A Carpet Ride to Khiva E-Book

Chris Aslan

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Seitenzahl: 466

Beschreibung

The Silk Road conjures images of the exotic and the unknown. Most travellers simply pass along it. Brit Chris Alexander chose to live there. Ostensibly writing a guidebook, Alexander found life at the heart of the glittering madrassahs, mosques and minarets of the walled city of Khiva - a remote desert oasis in Uzbekistan - immensely alluring, and stayed. Immersing himself in the language and rich cultural traditions Alexander discovers a world torn between Marx and Mohammed - a place where veils and vodka, pork and polygamy freely mingle - against a backdrop of forgotten carpet designs, crumbling but magnificent Islamic architecture and scenes drawn straight from "The Arabian Nights". Accompanied by a large green parrot, a ginger cat and his adoptive Uzbek family, Alexander recounts his efforts to rediscover the lost art of traditional weaving and dyeing, and the process establishing a self-sufficient carpet workshop, employing local women and disabled people to train as apprentices. A Carpet Ride to Khiva sees Alexander being stripped naked at a former Soviet youth camp, crawling through silkworm droppings in an attempt to record their life-cycle, holed up in the British Museum discovering carpet designs dormant for half a millennia, tackling a carpet-thieving mayor, distinguishing natural dyes from sacks of opium in Northern Afghanistan, bluffing his way through an impromptu version of "My Heart Will Go On" for national Uzbek TV and seeking sanctuary as an anti-Western riot consumed the Kabul carpet bazaar. It is an unforgettable true travel story of a journey to the heart of the unknown and the unexpected friendship one man found there.

Leseprobe

Previously published in the UK in 2010

by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.co.uk

This electronic edition published in the UK in 2011 by Icon Books Ltd

ISBN: 978-1-84831-271-5 (ePub format)

ISBN: 978-1-84831-272-2 (Adobe ebook format)

Printed edition (ISBN 978-184831-149-7)

sold in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asia

by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House,

74–77 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DA

or their agents

Printed edition distributed in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asia

by TBS Ltd, TBS Distribution Centre, Colchester Road,

Frating Green, Colchester CO7 7DW

Printed edition published in the USA in 2010 by Totem Books

Inquiries to: Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP, UK

Printed edition distributed to the trade in the USA

by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution

The Keg House, 34 Thirteenth Avenue NE, Suite 101

Minneapolis, Minnesota 55413-1007

Printed edition published in Australia in 2010 by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd,

PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander Street,

Crows Nest, NSW 2065

Printed edition published in Canada by Penguin Books Canada,

90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700,

Toronto, Ontario M4P 2YE

Text copyright © 2010 Christopher Aslan Alexander

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset by Marie Doherty

Contents

Title page

Copyright

About the Author

Dedication

Map of Uzbekistan

Author’s Note

Prologue: Tashkent transit lounge

Chapter 1: The walled city of Khiva

Chapter 2: A home by the harem

Chapter 3: The madrassah

Chapter 4: From calligraphy to carpet

Chapter 5: Worms that changed the world

Chapter 6: Madder from Mazar

Chapter 7: Bukharan cunning

Chapter 8: The dawn sweepers

Chapter 9: A carpet called Shirin

Chapter 10: Navruz and new beginnings

Chapter 11: Warp and weft

Chapter 12: Signed with a pomegranate

Chapter 13: Carpet of corpses

Chapter 14: My mother’s friend the warlord

Epilogue: September 2009

Glossary

Further Reading

Acknowledgements

About the author

Christopher Aslan Alexanderwas born in Turkey (hence his middle name) and grew up there and in war-torn Beirut (as a boy, his understanding of a shell collection was more the weapon variety). He spent his teenage years in England before escaping for two years at sea. Chris studied media at Leicester and became the first white boy in the university gospel choir.

After a year working for the students’ union, Chris moved to land-locked Central Asia, volunteering with Operation Mercy, a Swedish NGO. While writing a guidebook about Khiva, he fell in love with this desert oasis – which boasts the most homogeneous example of Islamic architecture in the world – and stayed.

www.acarpetridetokhiva.com

To my team-mates in Khiva, my Uzbek family, friends and colleagues. And especially to Madrim: Katta minnatdorchilik bildirib, do’stligimiz abadiy bo’lishini tilab qolaman

Author’s note

I have used the terms ‘carpet’ and ‘rug’ interchangeably. Pedants will argue that one is larger than the other, but this distinction is rarely acknowledged in modern-day usage.

Most Uzbek words appear in the glossary and are generally pronounced phonetically. The exception is the ‘kh’ sound which is always pronounced the way Scots pronounce the ‘ch’ in the word ‘loch’. I have written most Uzbek words phonetically, their pronunciation often different from the same word in Farsi or Turkish.

Technical terms from carpet-weaving and design can also be found in the glossary.

For the most part, I have used people’s real names except when to do so might endanger them. The views held in this book are my own and in no way reflect those of Operation Mercy, UNESCO or the British Council.

Prologue

Tashkent transit lounge

I’d always imagined that if I wrote a book about the carpet workshop and my time in Khiva, it would be written, or least begun, in the workshop itself. I’d sit in my office – a cell in the Jacob Bai Hoja madrassah – and write about the beginnings: the transformation of a disused and derelict madrassah into a centre for natural dye-making, silk carpet-weaving, and exploration into long-forgotten carpet designs. My laptop would be plugged into the rickety socket in my corner office cell next to the phone that rang incessantly, occasionally with carpet orders but usually with mothers passing on shopping lists to their daughters, or amorous young men unable to meet a young weaver in public but happy to court over the phone. I’d sit there typing as the light filtered through the arched plaster latticework, forming hexagonal pools of light on the stone floor. Perhaps Madrim would sit next to me, magnifying glass in hand, bent over a copy of a 15th-century manuscript, examining a carpet illustrated within its pages, partially obscured by a Shah or courtesan.

I’d look around our small office that once accommodated students of the Koran, now filled with a carved wooden table and chairs, beautifully constructed by my friend Zafar and his brothers; the wall niche that once held a Koran, now crammed with books and laminated carpet designs; the sleeping alcove, supported by thick ceiling beams, now storage for fans or electric heaters.

Sounds would filter through the small wooden door: the thumping of weavers’ combs on the weft threads that mark the completion of each new row of silk knots; the rhythmic pounding of oak gall being crushed in the large brass mortar by Jahongir, our chief dyer; the loudthwackof dried silk skeins beaten hard against the wall, removing the entangled remains of powdered madder root or pomegranate rind. Over this, the sound of an argument between loom-mates from one cell, laughter from another, competing Uzbek, Russian and Turkish pop music, and the voice of Aksana giving a guided tour.

But this book will never be written in my office, or anywhere else in Khiva. Next to me, a bag full of gifts for the weavers and dyers who have become my family sits unopened. I am in the transit lounge in Tashkent. This is the furthest I can get, having been refused entry into Uzbekistan. I feel rumpled and tired, and have spent the last few nights sleeping on newspaper. More than that, I feel a crushing sense of loss, a dull ache around my heart that sometimes shifts to a constriction in my chest. I’m not sure how long I will be stuck here for, what I’ve done wrong, or whether I will ever return to the desert oasis I now call home.

Tashkent, November 2005

1

The walled city of Khiva

It was now near midnight and the silent, sleeping city lay bathed in a flood of glorious moonlight. The palace was transformed. The flat mud roofs had turned into marble; the tall slender minarets rose dim and indistinct, like sceptre sentinels watching over the city … It was no longer a real city, but a leaf torn from the enchanted pages of the Arabian Nights.

—J.A. MacGahan,Campaigning on the Oxus, and the Fall of Khiva, 1874

‘The amazing thing about working in Khiva, or anywhere else in Uzbekistan, is what you might end up doing,’ Lukas explained during a recruitment phone call. ‘You’ll find yourself doing things you’re not qualified to do and would never have the opportunity to do elsewhere. You just do them because no one else is.’

Over the next seven years I often thought back on these words, whether holed up in the British Library poring over medieval Persian manuscripts, debating Timurid carpet designs with an Oxford professor, stripped naked and radiated at a former Soviet youth camp, crawling through worm droppings in an attempt to record the silkworm’s life-cycle, accused of drug-smuggling while attempting to bring sacks of natural dyes out of Afghanistan, or running for cover as an anti-Western riot engulfed the Kabul carpet bazaar.

I had no background in textiles or carpet-weaving and no inkling that this would become my main focus in Khiva. In fact, my only background in carpet-weaving had been a rug-making kit I was given as a child. The rug still languishes, unfinished in an attic somewhere, after I managed to impale the weaving hook into my nose, mid-thrust. It was now 1998 and I had recently graduated from a degree in mass communications, which didn’t seem very relevant for life in a Silk Road oasis. Lukas thought otherwise, and was excited to have someone work alongside him. We would be writing the content of an online guidebook about Khiva, requested by the Mayor of Khiva to boost tourism. Lukas was working for Operation Mercy, a Christian humanitarian organisation, and they seemed happy with my qualifications.

There were many reasons to ignore Khiva and look for volunteer possibilities in more hospitable climates. It was a remote desert oasis with freezing winters and simmering summers; I knew that conditions would be basic, and everything that I’d heard about Central Asian cuisine had been overwhelmingly negative. I would have to learn a new language and culture, and had never been particularly good at foreign languages. Operation Mercy didn’t pay volunteers – who were expected to raise their own expenses – and an initial commitment of two years felt far too long. My supportive parents reminded me of a note posted in the staff room at my old school for teachers on swimming duty: ‘Beware C. Alexander. Jumps in deep end but cannot swim!’

I considered other options, but kept coming back to Khiva. I had been specifically invited there with a project waiting for me that fitted my skills. I appreciated the humanitarian and Christian ethos of Operation Mercy and was impressed with their current work in Khiva among the blind. There was also something very alluring about Khiva and the Silk Road.

I was born in Turkey at one end of the Silk Road, and my parents held a fascination with China at the other end. I was intrigued by the peoples of the Silk Road, particularly those of the former Soviet Union. At school I had studied Soviet Politics, though the course was renamed halfway through due to the Soviet Union’s collapse. Before this, I had naively assumed that the term ‘Soviet Union’ was simply a Communist term for Russia, and had no idea of Tatars, Tajiks, Azeris, Kazakhs or any of the other peoples who called the USSR their home. Now I might be living among them.

It was also at Bedford School that I first heard about Captain Frederick Burnaby. He had attended the school and there was a house named after him. Burnaby, reputedly the strongest man in the British army, was a Victorian hero. Bold, brash and assured of England’s God-given superiority over everyone else, he decided to travel to Khiva in 1876, largely because the Russian authorities had forbidden foreigners access to Central Asia, which they now considered theirs. Burnaby travelled overland on horseback in the middle of winter and narrowly avoided freezing to death en route. He was granted an audience with the Khan, who was shocked to discover that the great Britannia was ruled by a woman. Burnaby had plans to travel through the Turkmen city of Merv and into Afghanistan but was apprehended by the Russian authorities and ordered home. However, his travels gave him enough material for a bombastic bestseller:A Ride to Khiva.

I didn’t want to travel to Khiva but to live there. I wasn’t sure what to expect and whether any of Burnaby’s encounters with ‘the natives’ would be similar to my own. In one respect, though, we were to prove similar: we were both single Englishmen in a culture of arranged marriages, which baffled Khivans as much today as it had back then.

‘Which do you like best, your horse or your wife?’ inquired the man.

‘That depends upon the woman,’ I replied; and the guide, here joining the conversation, said that in England they do not buy and sell their wives, and that I was not a married man.

‘What! You have not got a wife?’

‘No, how would I travel if I had one?’

‘Why, you might leave her behind and lock her up, as our merchants do with their wives when they go on a journey.’

‘In my country the women are never locked up.’

‘What a marvel!’ said the man. ‘And how can you trust them to so much temptation? They are poor weak creatures and easily led. But if one of them is unfaithful to her husband what does he do?’

‘He goes to our mullah, who we call a judge, and obtains a divorce, and marries someone else.’

‘What! You mean to say he does not cut the woman’s throat?’

‘No; he would be hanged himself if he did.’

‘What a country!’ said the host; ‘we manage things better in Khiva.’

Captain Frederick Burnaby,A Ride to Khiva(1876)

With Burnaby’s book to guide me, I knew what Khiva had once been like but had no idea what over a century – most of it under Soviet rule – had done to change the cultural landscape. My initial commitment of two years would extend to seven, before being cut short by deportation. A place I knew only through the eyes of a long-dead British soldier would become home. The bizarre would become familiar, and the exotic would become normal. Soon I would daily roll up my mattress on a balcony that overlooked the minarets and madrassahs of Khiva’s old city, glowing in the dawn sun, growing used to these scenes from the pages ofThe Arabian Nightsthrough which I’d slipped.

Khiva would leave a huge imprint on my life: toughening me up, humbling me with regular examples of sacrificial hospitality and kindness, broadening me with new friendships and very different perspectives on life. I would find myself not only living on the Silk Road but immersed in a world of silk, discovering indigo blue, madder red, pomegranate gold and the subtle shades of life in a desert oasis. Random strangers would become my second family and an eclectic assortment of characters would be woven together to form a thriving workshop of weavers, dyers and embroiderers. People I might simply have photographed if passing through would become the tapestry of my life. Khiva was a place I would come to love; and then, unexpectedly, Khiva was also a place that would eventually break my heart.

* * *

First, though, there was a compulsory two-month language course in Tashkent, the capital. I had savoured the exotic sound of this name, only to discover a drab, charmless city with no centre, no heart and little visible history. Tashkent had been levelled during an earthquake in the 1960s and rebuilt by the Soviets in swathes of concrete. There was still a sizeable Russian community in the city, making it a contrasting place of mosques and mini-skirts, Russian rap and Uzbek folk music. Tea-houses full of bearded men wearing skull-caps and shrouded in smoke from skewers of sizzlingshashlikevoked a timeless image of the Silk Road. Next door, a new Korean pizza restaurant attracted upwardly mobile young Russians and Uzbeks with the Backstreet Boys blaring from the entrance over the clink of vodka glasses.

I found it hard to define Tashkent Uzbeks, who seemed able to flit between traditional and more Soviet ways of thinking and living. While I was scrabbling for a towel at the presence of a female cleaner in the men’s swimming pool changing rooms, young Uzbeks around me would think nothing of sauntering past naked to collect their locker key from another female attendant. The world of sport, I learnt, was a Soviet one with no place for bashfulness. Yet these same youths got dressed, caught trolley buses or trams, and arrived home to a different world where parents planned arranged marriages for them, where food was cooked by the subservient wives of older brothers and the day began with ritual washing and dawn prayers. It was a society looking for identity, marooned somewhere between Mohammed and Marx.

The government had moved dramatically away from the Kremlin after independence. The Russian-speaking first secretary of the Communist Party reinvented himself as President Karimov of Uzbekistan. He learnt Uzbek and, despite his initial pleas to maintain the Soviet Union, marked the first of September as Independence Day. He encouraged the building of mosques (although in the fumbling early days of independence one mosque inauguration had scandalised its Saudi patrons with vodka served by skimpily-dressed waitresses) and the revival of Uzbek history, language and culture.

But by the time of my arrival in September 1998, the government seemed to be questioning its embrace of all things Muslim as radical Islam gained popularity, particularly in the densely inhabited Fergana valley to the east of Tashkent which made up a quarter of the population. Having served as an efficient wedge between Tashkent and Moscow, Islamism was now the largest competitor to the government and its power monopoly.

My days were spent in language study. I had only two classmates, Catriona from Scotland – a teacher also joining Operation Mercy in Khiva – and an enthusiastic American whom we dubbed ‘omni-competent Sarah’. She had arrived in Tashkent two months previously and as far as we were concerned, was already fluent.

We learnt phrases such as, ‘This is a pen’, and ‘Is this a pen?’, attempting to apply them practically in the teeming bazaar just outside our classroom. Hawkers of stationery nodded solemnly in agreement, ‘Indeed, it is a pen.’

Our teachers – two women – spoke little English, which was good for forced language practice but didn’t help us with the many questions we had about Uzbek culture and traditions.

We learnt how to get around the city. Tashkent boasted a tastefully designed metro, each station themed after an appropriate Soviet hero or after cotton, which seemed to be the main value of Uzbekistan as far as the Soviet authorities were concerned. We learnt to understand Cyrillic, despite new edicts attempting to move the country towards a Latin script. Laboriously pondering the first couple of letters on hoardings, we’d suddenly recognise words likegamburgerorgot-dog.Borrowed English words beginning with ‘h’ were translated into Russian with a ‘g’ instead, giving rise to places such as Gonduras or Gong Kong and a pantheon of new personalities including Gitler, Gercules, Gamlet, Frodo the Gobbit, Attila the Gun and Garry Potter.

I was placed with an Uzbek family who lived on the outskirts of the city. Their house was backed by a courtyard full of chilli plants, aubergines and tomatoes; the pit toilet at the bottom of the garden guarded by a bad-tempered sheep. There were three sons in the family and the middle one attended the University of World Languages, speaking some English. While the small, rotund father of the house wore a traditional black skull-cap embroidered with chillies to ward off the evil eye, his sons wore jeans and tracksuits and were all keen to emigrate to America. I learnt to enjoy greasy bowls of noodle broth calledlaghman,and to cup my hands in prayer at the end of each meal. My host parents were kind and hospitable but also very concerned for my safety, wringing their hands each evening if I appeared fifteen minutes later than my promised return time.

After two weeks in Tashkent, smothered by my host family, struggling to make any sense of the language and missing home, I slipped into self-pity. It would take over an hour to get home from language class in crammed buses, which seemed the perfect place for melancholy. Standing wedged between two stout Uzbek women, pungent armpits in my face, I wondered if I’d made a terrible mistake in leaving England. A chicken, one of three forlorn birds trussed in a shopping bag near my feet, pecked my ankle sharply. Khiva took on the allure of a promised land: the concrete claustrophobia of Tashkent replaced with a skyline of glittering minarets; a place with no overcrowded buses; a place where chickens could roam free.

* * *

I had imagined arriving in Khiva, after a long, arduous journey, to see its exotic skyline beckoning like a mirage across the desert. In reality, my first glimpses of the city, at three o’clock one blustery November night, were the few metres illuminated by headlights after an eighteen-hour drive. There was no sense of exuberance, merely the opportunity to collapse on the piled cotton-filled mattresses that Lukas and Jeanette, my hosts, had prepared for me.

Lukas and Jeanette, a Scandinavian couple, had lived in Khiva for two years and in Tashkent before that. They both spoke good Uzbek and had adapted well to life in Khiva. Jeanette wore a headscarf as all married women should, and baggy pants under long, brightly-patterned dresses. Her distinctive gold hooped earrings studded with nuggets of turquoise were typical of those worn by local women but had been a birthday present from Lukas rather than the usual marriage gift. She tried to sweep outside her house every morning and keep up with the cultural expectations of her neighbours. On some days she managed excellently, but on others the challenges of home-schooling her eldest daughter and raising three children in such a different environment from her own would overwhelm her.

They lived in a modern part of Khiva in a concrete two-storey house that doubled as our office. Their faith and commitment to the blind children they worked with had kept them in Khiva despite the challenges and isolation. They both taught children how to use white canes, increasing their independence and freedom. They were also attempting to change the attitudes of teachers at the blind-school who had been trained in the Soviet science ofDefectologia– an approach to disability that was caring but isolating, ensuring that those with disabilities existed in a cosseted parallel world of institutions, away from their able-bodied family and friends. Lukas was struggling with the corrupt school director, who was building a palatial new house for himself with money meant for the blind children under his care.

Both Catriona and I were keen to visit the blind-school, but first we wanted a general tour of the town – and especially the Ichan Kala or walled city, dubbed by UNESCO ‘the most homogeneous example of Islamic architecture in the world’.

Our tour took us down one of two main roads that ran the length of the modern town, past the blind-school, the park and a rusting ferris wheel which I assumed, wrongly, was disused. At first sight, Khiva had a shabby, provincial and slightly disappointing feel to it. It was only as we turned the corner at the bottom of the road that the Ichan Kala loomed in front of us. The bulging mud-brick walls wound around a crowded centre of madrassahs, mosques, minarets and mausoleums like a large bronze snake basking in the autumn sun. Nearing the walls, we could see their crenellations and the impressive watchtower, giving the appearance of an elaborate sandcastle.

Four enormous, turreted gates led into the inner city from the four points of the compass. We approached the Grandfather Gate and Jeanette introduced us to a plump woman who sold entry tickets. We would pay admission this time but, seeing as we were living in Khiva, wouldn’t pay again. This was, after all, one of the main thoroughfares for getting to the bazaar.

Wherever we went, we were greeted with a chorus of ‘Toureeest! Toureeest!’ As time went by, I learnt to expect this accompaniment, along with ‘Good morning’ at any time of day or night, and the occasional ‘Fuckyoo’ from gaggles of daring boys. We were also greeted with cries of ‘Aiwa’, which I assumed to be a local variant of ‘hello’. Its origins were actually in the first capitalist television adverts shown in Uzbekistan after the Soviet Union’s collapse. Aiwa electronics featured an ad with two passers-by, both carrying Aiwa products, waving a cheery ‘Aiwa’ to each other with the tagline, ‘The whole world speaks Aiwa.’ The greeting was practised on the first tourists who visited Khiva, and they – assuming as I had that it was a local greeting – responded with enthusiastic Aiwas, establishing its authenticity. These first tourists had also arrived armed with pens, which were now considered an expected gift from all foreigners accosted on the street. Often children would shout ‘A pen, a pen!’ at me, sounding much like I probably had during my language course in Tashkent.

We walked past a series of small stalls selling souvenirs – a huge mud-brick wall to our right and an impressive madrassah to our left. Next to this was a large, squat tower layered with beautifully glazed bricks in shifting shades of green, turquoise and brown. This complex, built by Mohammed Amin Khan after a particularly lucrative pillaging of Bukhara, was on such an opulent scale that parts of the city walls were removed for its accommodation. Rivalry between the Khiva Khanate and the neighbouring Emirate of Bukhara was a reccurring theme in both Khiva’s history and its modern-day attitudes. Mohammed Amin Khan planned a minaret taller than any other, dwarfing the one in Bukhara, but never completed it. Some claimed that this was because the Khan realised that those calling the faithful to prayer would gain a tempting bird’s-eye view of his harem. Others believed that the Khan had plans to assassinate the architect on completion of the minaret – ensuring that the Bukharan Emir could not commission him to build an even larger one. The luckless architect, fearing for his life, jumped from the minaret, turned into a bird and flew away.

‘Well, seeing as we’ve paid for our tickets, we might as well be tourists for the day,’ decided Catriona, heading towards a stall selling papier-mâché puppets. I was drawn to one selling carved wooden Koran-stands and boxes in different shapes and sizes. Having greeted the stall owner in Uzbek, I discovered that he spoke excellent English and that his name was Zafar. He praised my Uzbek, amazed at my simple phrases. I was used to flattery in response to my limited efforts, particularly in Tashkent where few foreigners strayed from Russian.

‘You’ve only been here six weeks and already you speak more Uzbek than all these Russians who were born here!’ a Tashkent taxi driver had declared once, glaring at a passing mini-skirted Russian. ‘What are you giving me money for?’ he demanded as I got out of the car. ‘You are learning our language, you are our guest. Please do not offend me with money.’

Far more impressive was Zafar’s English, which was self-taught and fairly fluent. He was about my age, with a ready smile and a quick wit. We got chatting as Catriona and Jeanette haggled at the neighbouring stall, and as we left he invited me to visit his home. Zafar would become a good friend and would play a significant role in my carpet journey.

Jeanette took us next to the Kunya Ark, or old fortress. We entered through another huge, carved wooden gate, past a magnificentiwan. These roofed, three-walled structures acted as primitive air-conditioners, capturing cooler northern breezes and circulating them. Most were simple but this one was part of the Khan’s palace, held up by immense fluted pillars decorated with intricate carving. The three wallswere completely tiled, with stalks, leaves, blossoming lotuses and peonies winding around each other, covering each wall in mesmerising complexity. This was a place I would return to later, to discover potential carpet designs.

We wanted to view the whole of the walled cityfrom the watchtower. Entering through a darkened doorway and fumbling our way up a steep staircase built into the mud-brick walls, we emerged blinking in the sunlight to a spectacular view. Ahead of us the large green dome of the Pakhlavan Mahmud mausoleum glinted, and behind it was the shapely, tapered minaret of the Islom Hoja madrassah. This was the second-largest minaret in Central Asia and, with its bands of dazzling tiles, it made a fine desert beacon for weary travellers to fix their eyes upon. Sunlight flashed off the distinctive blue, white and turquoise tiles adorning the portals of each madrassah. Beyond a central group of larger buildings were flat-roofed mud-brick houses clustered like a Christmas-card Bethlehem, and in the distance I could just make out the first dunes of the desert. The only thing missing was a flying carpet or two.

* * *

I stayed with Lukas and Jeanette in their tiny spare room upstairs, next to the larger room we used as our office. Over the next few weeks our guidebook team established a routine. Lukas still had his other responsibilities at the blind-school but would meet us in the morning for planning and researching the guidebook. I valiantly waded through a few Soviet guidebooks that had been translated – nominally – into English. In the afternoon Catriona and I would visit each site of interest to learn as much as we could about it from local guides and museum attendants.

Lukas encouraged us to view all opportunities to speak Uzbek as ‘work’ and good language practice and to seek them out as much as possible. Most of the museums were housed in madrassahs and presided over by women bundled in layers of acrylic cardigans with angora headscarves, knitting colourful socks and slippers to sell to tourists. These museum ‘wifies’, as Catriona referred to them, became our first friends. They assumed that we were married to each other, but – after our vehement protests – concluded that we were merely conducting an affair. We quickly learnt that there was much more segregation between men and women in Khiva than in Tashkent.

Khiva’s madrassahs varied in size. Most were now museums but some had been converted into hotels, woodwork shops, even a bar. Originally they were residential colleges for learning the Koran, each following the same basic design: an elaborate front portal leading into a courtyard, with a tree for shade and a well for water. Radiating from the courtyard were cells in which students studied and slept. Some had a mosque and minaret attached and some didn’t.

Sitting inside the madrassah cells, making conversation with the museum wifies, we realised just how different the dialect in Khiva was. They smiled at our stilted, textbook Uzbek, explaining how they would say the same thing completely differently in Khorezmcha, their own dialect.

We weren’t the only ones struggling with pronunciation. The wifies warmed to Catriona’s name, adapting it to the Russian ‘Ekaterina’, but ‘Chris’ proved more tricky – particularly with the English ‘r’. After attempts at ‘Cliss’, ‘Cwiss’, and even the occasional ‘Christ’, I presented my middle name, Aslan, as an alternative.

‘But that’s not your real name,’ declared one of the ladies. ‘Aslan is an Uzbek name.’

I was born in Turkey, I explained, and my parents had given me a Turkish middle name, much to the delight of their Turkish friends.

‘And this is also in your passport?’

I nodded and from that point on everyone in Khiva referred to me as Aslan.

* * *

I felt claustrophobic living and working in the same place. The house felt too small for Lukas and Jeanette and their three small children without their having to give up a bedroom for me, so I started looking for a place of my own to live. I was glad to have tasted life with an Uzbek family in Tashkent, but had no wish to repeat the experience. There were no newspapers to advertise accommodation for rent, so I placed posters around town. I watched expectantly as an old Uzbek man in a long, quilted robe tore off a phone number from the poster, certain that a deluge of housing options would soon come my way. Unfortunately, my poster-placing spree coincided with Lukas and Jeanette’s phone line breaking for ten days.

I made my first trip back to Tashkent, helping Lukas collect equipment donated to the blind-school. During the month I’d stayed in Khiva, Tashkent seemed to have magically transformed itself. Now it was a paradise overflowing with English-speaking foreigners, hot water on tap, nice restaurants and shops brimming with variety. I wondered why I’d never appreciated these things before.

There was also Tezikovka – the weekend flea-market. Anything from toilets and potted plants to dismembered fridges, second-hand books and pets were laid out on the streets for sale, and if you were lucky you could sometimes buy back your own, previously stolen, property. The bazaar began after independence as the large Jewish population of Tashkent started selling off their possessions before departing for the promised lands of Tel Aviv or Queens, New York. I bought myself a large red flag of Lenin covered in Communist slogans and then – in a moment of weakness – found myself the owner of a lime-green parrot who I named Captain Frederick Burnaby.

Returning across a desert whipped by bitterly cold winds with nothing but the occasional squawk from Burnaby to relieve the boredom, my enthusiasm for Khiva waned. We arrived to a grey and overcast city approaching winter. I placed Burnaby and cage in the corner of my little bedroom, where he perched glowering. All attempts to teach him how to mimic the traditional greeting ‘Assalam-u-Aleykum’ were met with hostile silence and the occasional lunge.

This time, my arrival in Khiva had none of the mystery or excitement of before. I tried to remain positive. I knew about culture shock and that the honeymoon phase in a new culture would lead to the despondent phase as the novelty wore off and the differences niggled. Knowing didn’t really make much difference to how I felt, though. I looked for the positive and for events to look forward to. We had all been invited to a circumcision party in Urgench (a town about twenty miles from Khiva, and the capital of our province of Khorezm), which would be my first cultural celebration and might even lead to making some local friends.

While in Tashkent, I’d been mortified to discover that weddings, circumcisions and christenings were held at five o’clock in the morning. Dragged out of bed by my Tashkent host-brother, we’d attended thebeshik toyof a neighbour celebrating a new birth. Mother and child were absent from the proceedings, as both were still vulnerable to the evil eye – a curse caused by jealousy or the unwitting complimenting of a child. We sat at plastic tables covered in food and I nodded off during a lengthy monologue from the mullah, shaken awake and confronted by a large bowl of greasyplov. This national dish of rice, carrot-shavings and raisins was topped with lumps of mutton and fat. Central Asian sheep have large, overhanging bottoms where fat is stored for winter. This prized fat, known asdumba(with a powerful taste I never acquired), divides each piece of meat on a stick of shashlik, and is generously pushed from guest to guest when eating from a shared mound of plov.

It was a relief to learn that celebrations here in Khorezm took place, more sensibly, in the evenings. Our hosts in Urgench were Rustam and Mukkadas. This couple – good friends of Lukas and Jeanette – were the pastor and his wife of the only Uzbek Christian church in the region. Despite official harassment and regular visits from the secret police (formerly the KGB), they had been told by the authorities to register their church but were then denied registration by the same authorities on the grounds that there was no such thing as an Uzbek Christian; that they were both Uzbek and Christians was apparently inconsequential. Considered a threat by the local government, they were also ostracised by their family and community on account of their faith, and accused of turning Russian. Both of them were determined to maintain their cultural traditions, and keen that their community recognise that they were still Uzbek and proud to be so. Circumcising their sons was a natural part of this, so a trip to hospital and the deed was done.

We arrived outside Mukkadas and Rustam’s simple mud-brick house at sunset, greeted by the two young boys who hobbled awkwardly, wearing specially-made loose pyjamas. Boys were always circumcised aged three, five or seven, and often brothers or cousins were done together to save on costs. Each guest would congratulate them and stuff bank-notes into their clothing. The weather was freezing, but the abundance of plastic trestle-tables and chairs made it clear that the celebrations would take place outside. I was looking forward to meeting Rustam and Mukkadas, but they were both busy organising food and Lukas went to help them. Catriona and Jeanette were led to a women’s table, while I was seated beside a group of young men from the neighbourhood. They nodded in my direction but were more concerned with pouring shots from a bottle in a paper bag, disgusted that their hosts had not provided vodka – their main motivation for being there.

I picked up a slice of melon and discovered it had frozen. A live band blending keyboards and pre-programmed percussion with traditional stringed instruments and a large hand-held drum performed a deafening repertoire, accompanied by a professional dancer in a glittery outfit covered in jangling metal tassels. Plates of plov arrived and I gratefully ate with my right hand, the rice and carrots warming my fingers. Groups of women – their faces animated by gossip – sat bundled in cardigans and scarves. A table of men nearby were busy toasting each other. My valiant attempts at small talk with other men on my table had petered out into awkward silences. I felt alone; an unnecessary appendage to the established community around me.

This feeling persisted over the coming weeks. Other than brief forays to museums, I was stuck in the office, succumbing to a blend of boredom, listlessness and loneliness. Remembering my encounter with Zafar the wood-carver and his invitation to visit, I returned to his stall, but it was shut up for winter. The mud-brick madrassahs and city wall that had glowed bronze in the autumnal sun were now grey and lifeless. Even the bazaar had lost its sparkle. Mounds of bright red peppers, yellow melons and stacks of fresh herbs were succeeded by lacklustre piles of drooping root vegetables. The gaudy sequin-and-glitter dresses worn by local women were now subsumed in layers of grey woollen shawls, the men all wearing uniform black leather jackets.

* * *

I found colour only in Khiva’s history. Bundled in blankets, over which the occasional mouse scuttled, I curled up in bed reading tales of treachery, intrigue and political manoeuvring between imperial Russia and Britain. Khiva was to play a crucial role in pushing the Russian empire south towards India – their ultimate goal – and experienced three Russian invasions.

The first invasion in 1717 had ended in almost complete annihilation of the Russian troops. Battling against the Khan’s army and running short of water, they welcomed the Khan’s offer of a truce and discussion of terms. The wary Russians were welcomed into the city, the Khan apologising for the paucity of lodgings and explaining that the troops would be separated into smaller groups for more comfortable accommodation. The Russian generals were suspicious but were overridden by their commander – an Azeri convert to Christianity – who understood the sanctity of hospitality and did not want to cause offence. Once divided, the Russians were promptly slaughtered – a remnant surviving and put to work with Persian slaves building the Mohammed Ghazi Khan madrassah.

The perfect pretext for a second invasion was provided by the returning diplomat-cum-spy Captain Muraviev. He visited Khiva in 1820 and discovered the city’s bustling slave trade, bolstered by captured Russians. Most of the slaves were Persian Shi’ites – considered worse than infidels by the Sunni Turkmen and Khivans. Turkmen raiders captured them, forcing any Christians or Jews among them, who were considered ‘People of the Book’, to convert to the Shi’ite faith first, making them infidels and thus worthy of slavery. Those who survived the long desert march were sold in the Khiva slave bazaar. Persian slave girls were the most popular additions to harems, while a young Russian male was considered the hardest-working and worth four camels.

Captain Muraviev narrowly avoided slavery and imprisonment himself. He held audience with the Khan and was kept for a number of months under house arrest. During his first day in Khiva, he had seen the pitiful faces of Russian slaves in the crowds as they stared imploringly at him. The slaves made contact with him secretly through a message hidden in the barrel of a gun he’d sent for repairs:

‘We venture to inform your Honour that there are over 3,000 Russian slaves in this place, who have suffered unheard of misery from labour, cold, hunger etc. Have pity on our unhappy situation and reveal it to the Emperor. In gratitude we shall pray to God for your Honour’s welfare.’

Later, Muraviev met one of the unfortunate slaves personally.

The old man’s name was Joseph Melnikov; he had been 30 years in slavery, was the son of a soldier, and had only been married a week when he was seized by the Kirgiz near the fortress of Pretshistinsk and sold as a slave at Khiva. After 30 years of bitter bondage, when by daily and nightly work he had at length scraped together sufficient money to purchase his freedom, his master cheated him by accepting his savings, and, instead of setting him at liberty, selling him to someone else. (Captain Frederick Burnaby,A Ride to Khiva, 1876)

The Russians had found their pretext, but waited until 1840 before acting. Summoning a vast army, they planned to attack Khiva in winter, fearing the scorching desert summers. Unfortunately they chose the coldest winter for decades and soon their army was decimated by scurvy, snow-blindness, hypothermia and wolves. Eventually they turned back, suffering massive casualties without even a glimpse of the walled city.

It was clear that the Russians would not admit defeat, and the English stationed in Persia dispatched Captain Abbot to Khiva, hoping he could persuade Allah Kuli Khan to release the Russian slaves (now a mere 300 or so) and destroy any pretext for another invasion. Captain Abbot – a rather dour and mournful character – failed to impress the Khan and narrowly avoided being buried up to the neck in the desert, a suggestion made by the Khan’s spiritual advisor. With no news from Abbot, a dashing young officer by the name of Richmond Shakespeare was sent to Khiva. He used his charm and eloquence to convince the Khan of an imminent Russian threat – despite their recent defeat – and the need to free all Russian slaves.

Reluctantly the Khan complied, even releasing favourite slaves from his harem. The liberated Russians followed Shakespeare in a joyful exodus across the desert to Russian territory. The Tsar – privately livid – offered public gratitude to the British for this liberation, buying the Khanate of Khiva 30 more years before the Russians finally invaded successfully under General Kaufmann in 1873.

Trading Persian and Kurdish slaves continued into the 20th century, ending only under the Bolsheviks. Slaves were not the only source of Khiva’s ethnic diversity. Alexander the Great had conquered Khorezm, his armies taking local wives and leaving a blond-haired, blue-eyed legacy. Invaders from the East had done likewise, and Mongolian features were also present. Some Khivans could pass for southern European, while others would look at home in China or Indonesia.

* * *

Of the variety of mosques in Khiva, only one was allowed to function. This had been the way during the Soviet era, and the Uzbek authorities were wary of Islam and keen to maintain Soviet standards of control. The working mosque stood beside the Strongman’s Gate next to the fish-selling area of the bazaar. A row of painted clocks announced the times for prayingnamaz– performed by pious Muslims five times a day, facing Mecca. Beside themwas a government ‘wanted’ poster ofwahabisor Islamic fundamentalists. I arrived there with Catriona, unsure whether or not infidels were welcome to explore. We were soon put at ease by the gold-toothed mullah who was delighted that foreigners wanted to know more about the origins of his mosque.

A walnut trader from Khiva, the mullah explained, had once discovered a large bag of gold coins at the bottom of one of his sacks. Assuming the money was cursed, he took the coins to the Khan. The Khan’s advisors – also fearful of a curse – advised the Khan to order a new mosque built with the money in order to alleviate any bad luck. The walnut trader had the money returned and was granted a plot of land. The mosque took shape but the walls were only half-completed by the time the coins ran out. The resolute trader announced to the city that he would exchange a walnut for each brick provided for the mosque. And this, concluded the mullah, was how the mosque was completed.

I wanted to ask the mullah about religious freedom, but my language was limited and he grew uncomfortable at the subject. We did find out that during the Soviet era, a complex system of informants had kept tabs on attendees. This system still flourished and anyone younger than anaksakalor white-beard was suspected of potential radical tendencies and risked interrogation or worse.

Khiva’s Friday mosque – with similar status to a European cathedral – was built to accommodate the entire adult male population of Khiva. Its low wooden ceiling was supported by hundreds of carved wooden pillars, with a lamp-post in the middle of this pillar forest bathed in sunlight from the overhead window. The mosque was no longer a place of prayer and was frequented largely by tourists and illicit young couples who had discovered that the steep, dark minaret staircase made an ideal location for passionate embraces. Unless one wheezed loudly while climbing to the top, it was quite common to catch couples hastily separating and brushing down rumpled clothing.

Gone were the days when the minaret had served for dispatching women suspected of improper behaviour. Adulterous women were trussed in sacks and thrown from the top. A captured Turkmen rebel had also been hurled to his death, but a combination of crosswinds and his billowing baggy trousers ensured that he survived the fall. This was obviously the hand of Allah and the people assumed he would be spared. Instead, the merciless Khan had the luckless rebel taken back up to finish the job.

There were other draconian punishments illustrated in Khiva’s historic jail, now a macabre museum. Two forlorn-looking mannequins were incarcerated, surrounded by paintings depicting ways in which they might be sent to the next world. The Hungarian traveller Arminius Vambery witnessed Turkmen rebels having their eyes gouged out, the sword wiped clean on their beards as they groped around in blind agony. Adulterous women not hurled from a minaret were placed in a sack of wild cats which was then beaten until the women were scratched to death, or were stoned, as witnessed by Vambery:

The man is hung and the woman is buried up to the breast in earth near the gallows, and there stoned to death. As in Khiva there are no stones, they use Kesek (hard balls of earth). At the third discharge, the poor victim is completely covered with dust, and the body, dripping with blood, is horribly disfigured, and the death which ensues alone puts an end to her torture. (Arminius Vambery,Travels in Central Asia, 1864)

Captain Muraviev, who had been so touched by the plight of his enslaved compatriots, wrote about the form of execution in vogue at the time of his visit.

Impalement is carried out in Khiva with still greater cruelty than attends it in Turkey. The stake is of wood and has a rather blunt point, and, in order that the victim may not die too soon, his hands and feet are firmly bound. As soon, however, as the stake has entered pretty deep into his body, they are released again, when the tortured wretch increases his sufferings by his violent struggles. (Nicolai Muraviev,Journey to Khiva through the Turkmen Country, 1822)

* * *

Khiva’s history, though grisly, seemed for the moment more interesting than its present. In search of excitement, I determined to explore the bazaar further. I learnt where the illicit money-changers loitered – their pockets bulging suspiciously – and where to buy gaudy wooden chests painted in bright magenta and turquoise with ‘May your wedding be blessed’ written on them. Not everything for sale was as it appeared. A stall sold rough wooden pipes that had nothing to do with smoking. They were inserted between a baby’s legs before it was swaddled and strapped into a cradle, funnelling pee into a clay jar below.

Another stall sold packets of dark green mulch that looked like desiccated spinach. I assumed it was a spice of some kind but was told it wasnuzz.Sprinkled onto the palm of the hand and tipped back into the cavity between teeth and bottom lip, this blend of tobacco and something stronger caused a mild high, slurring of the speech and suppression of appetite. Used by all taxi-drivers, it rendered them incomprehensible to my untrained ear. After fifteen minutes or so, nuzzlost its potency and was spat out. This proved dangerous when sitting in the back of a taxi, and on one occasion a large expectorated globule blew back, spattering my face.

I made friends with Kamil, a carpet-seller who trawled the closer villages in neighbouring Turkmenistan for carpets, providing generous bribes to the border guards and selling the carpets to tourists for enormous profit. I was useful – able to translate English books on carpets into a pidgin Uzbek of sorts – and Kamil taught me more about Turkmen carpet designs. Although not part of the local mafia/government, he’d done well for himself, buying influential friends and a smattering of wives whom he’d installed in different houses around town. Polygamy was officially illegal but many richer men took mistresses and referred to them as second wives.

My experience with Kamil helped me learn more about Turkmen carpets and begin to appreciate indicators that affected a carpet’s value, such as the knot count per square centimetre. I also realised that within a few years, there would be no more old carpets to sell off. I wondered what it would take to set up a workshop producing new carpets of a decent quality to sell to tourists. It wasn’t something I gave much thought to. After all, what did I know about carpets? A few years later, when asked by tourists visiting the workshop where I’d studied carpets and textiles, I’d look back and remember my very basic tutelage.

My accommodation prospects brightened. I discovered a beautiful old courtyard house within the walled city just next to the Khan’s fortress and watchtower. It was empty but owned by the Ministry of Culture who used it sporadically as a guesthouse. I could rent the main living room for the princely sum of around $10 a month, sharing the bathroom and kitchen with an occasional guest from Tashkent. I was keen to move in as soon as possible, but the landlady insisted I gain approval first from the Ministry of Culture in Tashkent. I persuaded Lukas to visit them next time he was there, sure he would charm them with his fluent Uzbek.

‘Maybe it will be possible,’ had been the response. ‘But first you must get these other permissions.’ This sounded straightforward, but I failed to understand that I had been given an Uzbek ‘no’. Preferring not to say no directly, the hope was that I would be put off by the demand for permissions and look elsewhere. It was only later that I understood this, learning to spot the expression of vagueness immediately assumed by any official when asked questions to which the answer was negative, or the dreadedhozerin response to a ‘when’ question. We were taught in language class thathozermeant ‘now’, but swiftly learnt that its practical application could mean anything from five minutes to eternity.

* * *

Catriona and I continued to collate stories for the guidebook, and Isak – a German-speaking guide – proved particularly helpful. Standing before two life-size photographs of the last Khans of Khiva, he told us stories of their lives. The elder of the two was Mohammed Rakhim Khan, a poet known by his pen-name ‘Feruz Khan’, and ruler at the time the Russians successfully conquered Khiva in 1873. He had retained his position but was stripped of his armed forces, expected to pay a huge war indemnity to the Tsar. He was Khan when Burnaby made his ride to Khiva, hosting the Captain and astonished that such a great nation asInglizstanmight be ruled by some woman called Victoria.

Feruz Khan had been a benevolent ruler and popular with his subjects. His trusted Vizier, Islom Hoja, was a progressive thinker committed to improving the lot of the common man. The Tsar invited his new vassal to St Petersburg and the Khan left his medieval Khanate, returning with tales of wonder at the modern world. His new, purely decorative telephone was given pride of place, and a pianoforte was installed in the palace with a courtier instructed to learn how to play it. The Vizier Islom Hoja was similarly inspired and returned with grand schemes to modernise Khiva. He set about building the city’s first hospital, its first secular school (which even admitted girls) and a post office – dreaming that one day Khiva might be connected to the world by telegraph.

Islom Hoja was a respected Vizier and honoured by the Khan, who arranged a marriage between their children. However, his fortunes changed with the death of the Khan. The Khan’s first-born was a hopeless opium addict and passed over in favour of Isfandir, who wasn’t much better. The new Khan – preoccupied with his harem and dancing boys – left the running of the Khanate to the Vizier. This arrangement worked nicely until Tsar Nicolai invited the Khan and his entourage to St Petersburg.

At the first official reception the Khan, unaccustomed to meeting virtuous ladies uncovered, was introduced to the Tsarina. His frank sexual proposition was judiciously translated as: ‘The Khan, enamoured by your beauty, humbly requests a portrait of your likeness to show his harem the superior beauty of the European woman.’

The Tsarina, delighted, provided the Khan with a portrait, and the smouldering Khan was promptly packed off to the nearest brothel. The Tsar, hearing of such lewd conduct, was furious and refused to appear in the official photographs marking the occasion. Meanwhile, Isfandir contracted syphilis, a disease then unknown in Khiva, and returned to the Khanate where his physicians assured him that cleansing would occur if he slept with 40 virgins. The Vizier – fearful that his own daughter might get infected – intervened, quarantining the Khan from any further sexual exploits until he was well again, making a powerful enemy in the process.

Isfandir was determined to do away with his interfering father-in-law; but he needed allies, who were hard to come by due to the Vizier’s popularity. He consulted the mullahs, who were also keen to see an end to the Vizier and his modernising ways, which threatened their own power base. A plot was hatched and a messenger dispatched ordering the Vizier to come to the Khan’s palace immediately. The mullahs arranged for bandits to lie in wait for the Vizier, robbing and murdering him. The Khan immediately rounded up the bandits, executing them before they could protest that they were merely following orders, and conveniently tying up the loose ends.

Still, there were people in the Khan’s palace who knew the truth – and one of these was Isak’s grandfather. Corroborating his story, Isak pointed out a yellowing official photograph taken in St Petersburg with the Tsar notably absent. Next to this was the portrait of the Tsarina given to Isfandir. Catriona wanted to know what happened to the last Khan.

‘You must not worry about Isfandir,’ Isak reassured her. ‘A few years later, he too was assassinated.’

The Bolsheviks were fearful of former royalty staking claims to Khiva, and exiled the next in line to the throne. He returned from Ukraine after independence with his children and grandchildren. His offspring, speaking only Russian and Ukrainian, wandered around Khiva in jeans, marvelling at this exotic and foreign place that they might have ruled had history turned out a little differently.

* * *

By the beginning of March, I had lived with Lukas and Jeanette throughout the long, cold winter and we were all desperate for me to move out. Lukas was bogged down with endless bureaucracy required by the government for Operation Mercy work and, despite my nagging, had not followed up the permissions I needed to move into my dream house. I decided to take matters into my own hands and contact the Ministry of Culture myself. Enlisting the help of an English-speaking guide, we visited the post office and made our call. A terse conversation ensued, during which the guide simply nodded. Afterwards he turned to me and said: ‘They just say “no”. You simply cannot live in that house.’

This was both emphatic and unequivocal. I had no alternative plans, but had to move out of Lukas’s house as his parents were visiting soon. I was anxious and irritated; although I’d made it through the winter, it had been about surviving, not thriving, and I was still unsure whether coming to Khiva had been a mistake.

However, my housing crisis would result in an unexpected encounter in the Khan’s derelict palace that was to change my fortunes in Khiva considerably for the better.