Tashkent Solecisms
A travel log introducing: my Uzbek friend, Bob.
Russian translations listed in the footnotes. Sorry… I thought it would interrupt the flow of the text.
There is a little bit of an ego, that I’d love to live up to- this cool image of the internationale- some world-backpacking Yevgenii Onyegin who speaks several languages and is the life of the foreign night clubs his friends from all corners of the world invite him to. It would be the epitome of being a wolf (as I’ve described) in such a globalized world. But the truth being, travel is much more humbling and I’m not that capable. Everyone is a performer at home and my Russian and common sense isn’t as good as I tout it. I get easily lost in conversation trying to buy honey at the bazaar and I have to admit to the woman behind the counter: “Я дурак1.“ (To the grand amusement of my Uzbek friend, Bob) As I walk by a stand of strawberries, I take my friend’s advice to just try one. I ask the woman, “можно попробовать2”. She waves her hand over the fruit to say, “yes”. I take one- eat it in a single bite -“вкусно, спасибо3.”- and I walk away with a smile (To the grand embarrassment of my Uzbek friend, Bob)
(If like me, you’ve never been to a real bazaar and don’t understand the etiquette, it is not a massive sampling event. To try something means that you have interest in buying it, and by me walking away with no other comment, it just means I was an asshole who was hungry and cheap.) And so the list of those in Uzbekistan, who I owe a letter of apology due to my solecisms, grows…
Why have I started my travels in Uzbekistan? Simply, I have this friend from high school, his name being Bekhruz {redacted}-bov, or simply Bob as my family calls him. He is a very cheery fella, a genius with an unkillable attitude, and the fact he puts up with me is simply incredible. Without him, I’m not sure I’d get very far in any manner on this side of the world, and I am gracious. He has offered me a view that very few will ever get. Uzbekistan if you cannot tell, is simply not a tourist destination for those in the West. Most who come here are from immediately surrounding regions, primarily Russians. And from long Soviet occupation, Russian culture and language have been well-seeded here.
I am staying at a place called the Residence Park. It is an old Soviet compound I’m told that has since been revamped into a government hotel. The place consists of a handful of buildings locked away behind guarded walls. At the beginning of my stay, before the guards got to know my face, there were a few encounters getting in and out of the place that my Russian under pressure was barely sufficient to convince them that I was where I needed to be. Bob, after a customary assalomu alaykum, was always able to get them to open the gate by shouting some magic Uzbek phrase over the wall. I’ve since learned that all he has been saying was “I’m here to see THE American.”
Even if Tashkent is at least over ten percent white Russians I stick out like a sore thumb. The only pair of shoes I brought are these black Merrill hiking boots where the soles are peeling off and it appears that no one outside of America wears hiking boots so casually as I do. And while the locals are freezing and wearing coats and hoodies at anywhere from 5° to 12°C, I am just in a single layer button up shirt with the sleeves rolled up most times, as anything more would make me overheat (for I come from a place where the temperature now is -23°C). Saying that, I am at least glad I picked up new clothes from the thrift store before I left, for anything is better than the flannel and Carhartts I left home.
Mosque
My very first day here, despite being +14 hours jet-lagged I wanted to be thrown right into the culture of the people, into the odd and exotic from what I knew; and so I accompanied Bob and his family to the midday prayer at the local mosque. If you are not familiar with the proceedings of it, it has an utterly abstract similarity to the conduct of a Christian mass. To begin with, everyone is expected to shower before the service. Cleanliness is vitally important in Islam and considering that hundreds of people will share the air of a building for an hour, it has a very practical purpose. In addition, women do not attend; they pray at home. The mosque service is only the affair of men.
At noon, the city seems to stop abruptly. People would park and leave their cars in the middle of the road if the traffic police weren’t at the ready to tell them to park somewhere else. They then begin to flood the streets up to the beautiful entrance. At the door step you take off your shoes, and step onto the carpet, the entire floor of any decent mosque being carpeted. One is supposed to wear this white cap called in Uzbek as a Doppi, similar to the Yamaca in Judaism, but the good majority don’t follow this; I adorned one as the party I went with falls into the more conservative lot.
Inside the mosque, you encounter gorgeous architecture, one that evolved for millennia in a world alternate of yours, developing its own richness and unique beauty like that of Gothic or Baroque, but in a wholly different vein. Every blank space on the ceiling has been filled with gilded geometric shapes and the delicate lace of Qoranic calligraphy (it is beautiful how much they utilize the words as true art) And the domes in the ceiling rise up with more circling patterns like angels ascending to heaven. There are no pews; people generally align themselves in rows facing the altar (which then faces Mecca), but for the first 2/3 of the service this alignment doesn’t matter. It almost seems like a casual gathering. Everyone sits on the ground rather disarranged, for no prayer is happening. They are merely attentively listening as the Imam is providing a lesson, a religious education, or advice as Bob called it, just as in Christian mass. I couldn’t understand it though, as I don’t speak Uzbek but Bob was happy to translate. I’m pretty sure he condensed and skipped a lot, but the message was a general reminder of charity- of “great good deeds and little good deeds are of equal weight” and “take no pride in charity; expect that those you give to will not pay you back”.
Then the last 1/3 was a call to prayer consisting of kneeling, touching one’s head to the ground in a bow, standing back up, and repeating in some pattern I wish I knew. Sometimes it was in rhythm with personal prayers each member of the congregation spoke to themselves and sometimes it was in unison with the call of the Imam, I just followed along with what Bob did naturally. Then in a blink it was over, everyone rose and we began to wish “peace be with you” upon everyone: “Assalomu alaykum”
Another Bloc
In the days following, Bob took it upon himself to show me absolutely everything of note in his city. I feel put to shame by the amount of effort he has put into showing me his home. He has kept lists, consulted family members, gone out of his way to buy train tickets, arrange hotels, and more, all of which makes the time I invited him to Florida seem like a lousy excursion.
Tashkent is an incredibly clean and modern city in comparison to what most foreigners would think before going there. It is well-developed and fairly open at the same time, with rows endlessly stretching of old trees that shade the road and the central city is dotted with green parks full of national monuments. All of the trees are covered in white paint along the first meter of the trunk. Bob claims that this paint is some kind of insecticide, but he likes to say that this may not be true anymore and that the trees in Tashkent and other cities have been painted white for so long that the true purpose has been obscured by time. In any case, it adds a nice touch- pleasant to the eye to see all these trees lined up in the same dress. They are mostly oaks.
A bus tour of the city can show you everything there is to see in about two hours, taking you around everywhere from the Minor Mosque, to Amir Timur Square, and into the shadow of the Tashkent TV Tower- gilded with the exceedingly outdated/incorrect claim of 9th tallest tower in the world4 on all of the plaques. You can ascend it by elevator to reach an observation deck at around 97 meters in the air to get a real view of the city, and it was at this point that I was looking out onto the whole city after traveling it for half a week that I realized it was an incredibly typical city. Tashkent supposedly lies in the mountains, it has a moister and more temperate climate in comparison to Southern desert cities like Samarkand or Bukhara, yet I couldn’t verify this because where there should’ve been a mountainscape, there crept instead only a veil of smog over the whole city. I saw within this shroud the incredibly modern bits of center with foreign hotels and business conglomerates as well as the crumbling soviet block apartments in which the average citizen resides.
Tashkent is not overall a historically important city to the Uzbeks, but it does have history. It was first settled in the fifth century B.C. by probably some proto-Iranian people, who eventually formed an ancient confederacy or kingdom that the Chinese referred to as the Kangju (康居) or “Kingdom of the Kang”. One hypothesis follows that “kang” 康 in Kangju (ju 居 in Chinese meaning “kingdom”) stems from the Tocharian stem *kaŋk, meaning “stone”. And so as the years progressed, many different peoples and rulers took on the mantle of administering the region, from Khans, to Caliphs, to Amirs (a very famous one, named Timur, included), until the name evolved to Chach and eventually to Tash and the settlement proper to Tashkent, finally meaning “Stone City” or “City of Stones”. This would mean that the settlement for 2500 years has maintained the same fundamental name as when the first recorded nomads inhabited the region.
Yet still it is a city built in style by the Soviets, for after a devasting earthquake in 1966, much of the old adobe city was leveled and left room for remodeling. Institutes, apartments, factories, and facilities were built to create another Soviet model city, and even after modernization, it is an overwhelming aesthetic. Thus, you really must leave Tashkent, to the Silk Road stops and emirate capitals of Samarkand and Bukhara to see the sites of the nation. Before that though, I want to end with one last note on the bazaar.
Bazaar
My friend tells me there are eight notable bazaars in Tashkent, often each specializing in their own things and we were only able to visit two together, one of which is where the strawberry incident in the introduction happened. Yet, seeing these bazaars has struck a note in me about how real the country is. To preface the explanation though, you must know about the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, Turkiye- the ancient bazaar of bazaars, a continued tradition of the people of the city. It once brought exotic traders from all across the known world to a single marketplace, one which made travelers who passed through it marvel at its array and size!
If you walk through it today, you will realize it has evolved into a tourist trap. Sold in over a hundred little shops, are nothing but overpriced souvenirs and high-end European brands (which are most likely fakes). Every shop which sells rugs, sells the same rugs… teacups, the same teacups… handbags, the same handbags- and so on in a labyrinth of aggressive hustlers. They pray off of the prestige and ideal of the bazaar, just as much as the shops who lay in wait for you to walk out of the Hagia Sophia, in order to sell junk to the dumb foreigner. No originality takes place- capitalist competition to these sellers lay in who can harass the most customers in the best English, and it all reeks of a culture that has sold its soul to the global marketplace. Where once grew flowers, it was deemed more efficient and profitable to merely grow weeds, and in that precious bit of soil between the concrete has grown the darkest and thickest mat of them possible, seeking attention.
Uzbekistan for better or worse, lies outside of the eye of Sauron. The Chorsu bazaar- the largest and most popular bazaar in Tashkent- sells meats and vegetables. There are a number of shops which have taken root outside of the main facilities, and they indeed sell everything: clothes, jewelry, ceramics, kitchen accessories… live roosters- and yes the very kind of souvenirs I’ve summoned up before but it is a bazaar that the real local of Tashkent goes to and has his/her stand he/she goes to to buy dried fruits and nuts.
Even after visiting Samarkand (which I will go into better detail in next installment), the Siyob Bazaar- the intersection of the Silk Roads which thousands passed through to get from one side of the continent to the other- is a pretty chill place with people who seemingly don’t have a desire to extort the foreigner. I bought two rolling pins and these bread stamps from a seller. I merely picked them out and planned on giving over my 170.000 So’m (about $15)- but the seller stopped me in Russian and insisted I picked out a better one without cracks or rusty tines. Bob explained to me that in Islam there are two kinds of money, Halal money which is earned through honest means and Haram money earned through usury and trickery, and that the shopkeeper was not wishing to earn Haram money by any means.
This is all to say as if I was some travel blog influencer, “dude, Uzbekistan is so not touristy, now is the time to go.” Which, sure- I agree with, but that kind of sentiment, bringing something into the public eye, is what causes a spike in tourism and ruins the purity. This place is an underrated gem. (Look at what happened to Iceland after the eruption Eyjafjallajökull.5)
At the same time, it is not my place to speak. To the Icelander who otherwise already had a decent economy and now has cairns and human shit growing all around his favorite childhood waterfall/troll hostel, global tourism is bad. Yet, I see evidence that the nation of Uzbekistan is desperately trying to grow tourism through a myriad of techniques (again better explained by explaining Samarkand), and to people who on average make $1,200 a year, such money flowing into the country is vital. More money is to be made selling foreigners overpriced trinkets of national caricatures and peep shows into your nation’s most sacred rooms than selling bread to locals for mere cents.
But very maybe, it is better to live so humble and to keep a certain dignity and culture- but what if that dignity doesn’t pay the bills and feed the family? This pride like a Snegirov6 keeps one’s family forever without opportunity and in poverty. Yet has some evil colonial conspiracy forced the peoples of the world to sell out their culture- or have times just changed? This is almost an eternal question and I merely leave it as a thought to the reader. I take no position because I am too young to have one.
I just still feel really bad about insulting that woman’s strawberries- they were in fact very tasty, and I’ll take half a kilo the next I’m allowed back.
Danke,
-ABSURDISMUS
“I am an Idiot" - Russian has a few words for “Idiot”, “Идиот” being pretty common but it seems based on their comical reactions, that “Дурак" is a bit stronger and exceptionally funny to hear out of a foreigner.
“May I try?”
“It is tasty, thanks.”
It only comes out to 375 meters.
2011, this bad boy volcano (translating literally to Island-Mountain-Glacier), erupted so hard that it blocked trans-Atlantic air routes for several weeks and unintentionally brought Iceland into the public consciousness and is largely responsible for the boom of the nation’s tourism industry in the early 2010s.
Snegirov is a character in The Brother’s Karamazov, a disrepudiated army captain who takes the money Alyosha gives him- money that could be used to pay for his daughter’s medical bills or simply as an investment into the family’s future- and stomps it into the ground with joy.
Thanks for writing that ! I loved it!