On Uzbek Food and Architecture

A travel log from Samarkand.

At a dinner among Bob’s family members, I learned finally what is like to be a guest- to be estranged across the table from familial interactions and to simultaneously be the object of curious amusement, all in a language I half-conceive of. My comprehension of Russian is much better than my speaking. As someone who rather likes to talk a lot, I humbled myself to being a mute, nodding, smiling, attempting to be pleasant. I was onslaught by their questions about собак-санки, охоты, болшие дерева¹, (and all else that apparently exists in the foreign consciousness about the frozen-wasteland of Alaska) and often, I just didn’t have the vocabulary to explain myself. The idea that I didn’t go to college when presented with the opportunity was an odd one to them.

All of this happened while small tidbits of food kept coming out of the kitchen such as somsa, Uzbek’s favorite meat pastry similar to a pirozhka. On the table were many snack foods: a plate of fruit with pomegranates, mandarins, pear & apple slices, grapes; bowls of pistachios, almonds, and cashews; and a platter of qazi, this traditional horse sausage where minced meat and fat are put into the intestine casing, fermented for several months and then boiled. The fat melts in your mouth with a chalky texture. There is another dish made with qazi known as Beshbormok. I am told the Kazakhs make it better, but all it consists of is slices of this qazi boiled in a soup with dumpling noodles and various vegetables, I’ve fallen in love with it, and unable to acquire horse meat in the States, I have no clue how I’ll replicate it.

Food

Shashlik (Шашлык) and Plov (Плов) are more truly the national dishes of Uzbekistan. Shashlik is a classic skewered kebab, most typically with spiced sheep meat sandwiching pure pieces of sheep tail fat, and then grilled on an open fire. These can be acquired rather affordably anywhere, and there is no difference between a 10.000 so’m stick of kebab and a 50.000 so’m stick of kebab ($0.81-$4.05). To really get your money’s worth though, I recommend ordering the Шашлык Кавказ (Caucasian Shashlik, or “done in the manner of the Georgians” basically) when available. It is served on a meter-long iron rod and makes up at least four normal kebabs.

Plov is a pilaf made with pieces of meat, chopped carrots, and chickpeas and is saturated in some dark vegetable oil- all of which is prepared usually on mass in big skillets by a “Plov master”² to be served as the exclusive meal at a good restaurant. We visited “The Central Asian Center of Plov”, a giant two-floored restaurant, seemingly famous across the region, where there existed two options: spicy and regular plov. It usually is garnished with everything that could be worked up from the pantry: quail eggs, pickled tomatoes and cucumbers, cilantro & dill, сметана³, onions, and more. Plov serves as the central meal for an event called Morning Osh-Plov⁴. Instead of hosting evening banquets, (because seemingly going out to any event after dark is suspect-behavior for an Uzbek man), the Uzbeks host them in the morning inviting everyone they can and cooking a surplus of food as an excuse for the community to get together, share news, and for the host to show off his wealth and especially his charitability⁵- anybody can walk into an Osh Plov and receive a free meal regardless of connection.

Samarkand

We took a train to Samarkand, and early in the morning, we barrelled through dewey green fields lying just outside the boundaries of Tashkent. The mountains soon began to peer out and I had a reassurance of where I was. At some point, the lush green died to wasteland, and I soon saw a landscape that resembled Western Texas. I’ve been reading Empire of the Summer Moon recently, and looking at the vast deserts of dried bushes only made me make small connections between the Comanche and all the nomad bands who once rode across and made home this piece of rather worthless land.

Arriving at Samarkand, I realized that I left my passport back at the hotel in Tashkent. It never became a major problem though, we merely picked up and went to a different hotel, claimed I was a guest staying somewhere else, and I emerged from the hotel only at unsuspecting times.

In Samarkand, the very best way to get around is by taxi, and renting out the taxi-driver as a tour guide, because from his profession in a small city, he knows everything and everywhere. Our guide was Rudolph (or however approximated in Russian), rather short, squat, sun-tanned, and grey-haired- and he was a cocky bastard. We caught him pouring two pots of tea at the same time and snagging kettle corn from a seller with a laugh; in general, he acted like he owned the place but this was very his best trait.⁶

We went to the Registan and somehow came across just the right teenager who for 70.000 so’m, would undo the padlocks on all the doors leading up to the top of the minaret. Whether he was affiliated with the museum or we were trespassing was besides the point, because it is the very best view you can get of the city and especially of the Registan- this huge complex of three madreseh, centers of Islamic learning that ran for five hundred years before eventually the Soviets closed and abandoned them. The minarets used to be about ten meters taller before they were used as gun nests and amputated in conflict between the Red and White armies. It is a truly beautiful view from that aspect, seeing how the sun glitters on the mosaic titles.

Amir Timur/Timurlane/Timur the “Lame” (or just Tim) is a central hero in the history of Uzbekistan. His mausoleum exists in Samarkand as another vaulted ceiling room, caked in five kilograms of gold and lined further in Onyx stone that all shimmers with the light of tourist camera flash. His stone is a simple black rectangle and merely serves as the marker above where his actual remains lie in a basement room sealed off from the public. Normal people, I’m told, are buried two meters- important people, leaders, godheads- six meters. A descendant of Genghis Khan, he established an empire that turned the backwater Uzbek deserts into a center of trade, culture, art, science, power, and prosperity with Samarkand as his capital.

This empire though, was squandered by his grandson, Mirzo Ulug’bek, who Bob and I have decided to call “The Greatest Loser in Uzbek History”. He inherited the empire for his father was too old by the time Timur passed the crown, and Ulug’bek was just the right age to rule. Yet, he proved disinterested in statesmanship and more so inclined toward the sciences.

Sometime in the early 1900’s, a Russian colonel was snooping through the archives of Samarkand and came upon a benign receipt from a sheep herder that read something along the lines of (I’m painting with broad strokes here, I forgot to write down the actual passage) “I sell to Alisher forty heads of sheep by the big hill north of the river where Ulug’bek’s observatory once stood…”

It’s location fell into obscurity after Ulug’bek’s death, for of all this “squandering an empire” thing, he had many enemies who wanted to destroy his legacy and the observatory was thus leveled. What remains today is only the 10-meter-deep basement which still preserves the curve of one of the largest pre-modern sextants to have ever been built. With this tool, he was able to accurately measure the distances to stars and calculate the true length of a year down to seconds.⁷ The data he collected from that (now) pile of ruins was later disseminated throughout Islamic and European astronomical circles and served as the base of our understanding of the stars until the digitization of telescopes and other data-collection equipment.

There is one last truly notable site in the city. It’s a mosque but rather quaint in comparison to the mausoleums and madreseh I’ve been visiting. Inside is another even quainter white room that if you didn’t read the plaques in Uzbek and Russian, you wouldn’t believe had any significance or excessive age. Except that this is Hazrat Khizr Mosque and once existed most likely as a small Zoroastrian temple by the time of Arab conquests in 712. For the last millennia plus some spare change, it has served as a holy stop for silk-road travelers from all corners of the world, who coming from all different faiths, stopped in that little room to pray for safe travel across the desert.

That is an exceptionally special feeling then. There doesn’t glitter gold or art on the walls. Some so’m are thrown in the corner as alms. And there is only this little arrow slit overlooking the city- a view which has undoubtedly changed over 1300 years and probably would be unrecognizable to whoever soul stopped by here all those years ago. I can say with joy, that I gave a little prayer in that room, for the safety and happiness of friends and family on the other side of the world… I left and was able to look up, to smile at the sunset lowering herself down the mountains.

Restoration

I have this thought to end with. Many buildings have risen in recent years to replace the old Soviet styles, either built in the character of Western skyscrapers, or more interestingly, as a revitalization of Islamic architecture. Government buildings, museums, metro stations, all have been built with this old style in mind including vaulted ceilings, beautiful geometric lacings, archways; there is a living culture here of it. Not to mention, after the fall of the Soviet Union, all of the old mosques, mausoleums, and madraseh that had fallen into disrepair, were suddenly reconstructed, repainted, to look as closely as they did when they were brand new during the reign of Amir Timur and Mirzo Ulug’bek. The old ruins in a sense haven’t been preserved, not like in Athens or Rome where the Greek and Roman ruins have been left purposefully in disrepair, or in Istanbul where the Hagia Sophia is left with a flaking five-hundred year old paint job. The photos are stark from before and after restoration, to the point that today, more of the stones and art are new than original- to the point that they have to leave some parts of the buildings unrestored or else UNESCO won’t consider it a heritage site.

But one might wonder- why?

Why not just go the route of most nations and leave the ruins as ruins- focus on the fact it is ancient history and just build around it a museum. Because it is a valid concern: at what point does something become something else when so many of its pieces have been replaced. Take a knife, and after a few years of use you replace the handle, after a few more years of use you replace the blade- is it the same knife as when you started? The Hagia Sophia is not the Hagia Sophia if you touch up all the paintings of seraphim on the ceiling, it loses the original touch of the Byzantine artists and replaces it with a horrible approximation. Yet, the Byzantine artists are long dead and new regimes have passed and settled in Constantinople; first the Seljuks, then the Ottomans, and now the Republic of Turkey. The paintings are left intact because it is in remembrance of those who came before. There is a line put in the sand between the previous peoples and modern administration. It is a national treasure as it relates to our history, but it is not of us all the same. It shall rot on its own accord, the original painters are not there to keep it, but out of respect we shall not destroy it.

This is not the attitude of Uzbekistan, for the nation sees these mosques and madraseh as a direct lineage. Yes, we are the descendants of Amir Timur’s empire, its culture and art. And we are not dead, we are very much alive in fact. Why would we present ourselves to the world through dusty old ruins? And so, in every ruin and structure, the government had the funding for, the domes, the stones, the gold leaf, the paint, and everything else have been reset and reapplied. It is a living culture like I said and that is how the nation wants to appear. In Tashkent, there is a museum being built with the money of a wealthy investor, wanting a place to put his collection of Islamic artifacts. This place is being constructed in the very same league as the old mosques and madraseh it has been placed next to, the same tradition of Koranic writing on panels, of domes and arches and everything, with the slightest modern twists and scaled to a palace-level size. I love the name, however, so pompously dubbed, The Center of Islamic Civilization.

Danke,

-ABSURDISMUS

1. In order, “dog-sleds, hunts, big trees".”

2. I am told he is trained from a young age, as an apprentice, to learn the treasured secret of master plov creation and mass standardization.

3. It’s just sour cream but I love that word, (or it may not be either?) It is really hard to translate Uzbek milk products and I’ve been served a few things called Kefir existing on a scale between cream cheese and salty water.

4. Osh is the Uzbek word; Плов or “Pilof” is the Russian.

5. This pillar of Islam, “Zakat”, seems to be very stressed in the conservative sectors of this society.

6. Highly recommend him, he only speaks Russian though, and will try to funnel you to his friends’ souvenir shops.

7. He was only off by 2.