Uzbek arts, crafts, music and literature

Suzani (from Persian suzan, needle) is a large hand-embroidered textile — traditionally the centrepiece of a bride's dowry, and a decorative wall hanging in every Uzbek home. Motifs are floral: pomegranates, tulips, sun-medallions, and looping vines, in bright silk on a cotton ground. Each region has a distinct style: Nurata suzani feature very fine dense stitching; Bukhara suzani are darker and geometrically stricter; Samarkand suzani favour bold reds.

Suzani are still made largely by hand, and buying one is a serious way to bring Uzbekistan home. Prices range from about USD 60 for a modest cushion cover to several thousand for a large antique piece. The main Samarkand and Bukhara bazaars have specialist suzani stalls; boutique workshops (Yodgorlik in Bukhara, Human House in Samarkand) sell higher-quality contemporary pieces with clear provenance.

The Fergana Valley — the fertile bowl of land east of Tashkent — is Uzbekistan's silk-weaving heartland. In the town of Margilan, the Yodgorlik silk factory still weaves atlas (adras when cotton is mixed in) on wooden looms using ikat resist-dyeing, a technique in which threads are tied and dyed before weaving so that patterns emerge on the loom itself. The bright zigzag of Uzbek atlas silk is unmistakable — you'll see it in dresses, cushions, and scarves everywhere.

A visit to Yodgorlik is one of the finest craft experiences in Central Asia. You can watch the whole silk chain — from silk cocoons boiled and unwound in copper pans to woven bolts of finished cloth — inside a single working factory that has been running in essentially the same form since 1972.

Rishton, a small town in the Fergana Valley, has produced turquoise-glazed pottery for around a thousand years. The signature blue-green ishkor glaze is made from local ash and copper salts, and the clay is a distinctive high-fire body from a nearby seam. Traditional forms include the lyagan (large flat serving plate), pialas (small tea bowls), and hemispherical bowls. Contemporary studios — Alisher Nazirov's family workshop in particular — are among the finest working potteries in the Islamic world.

Uzbek miniature painting descends from the Timurid Herat school of Kamal ud-Din Behzad (c. 1450–1535). Trained miniaturists still work in Bukhara and Samarkand, producing detailed small-format paintings on prepared paper or thin card — courtly scenes, Silk Road caravan trains, and the great poems of Nizami and Navoi. The tradition survived the Soviet century in part because it was protected in the state's Applied Arts institutes.

Calligraphy remains a living craft too. Traditional Persian nasta'liq and Arabic thuluth are taught and practised; workshops in the Bukhara old town sell single-page calligraphies and combined miniature-and-text works.

Shashmaqom ('six maqams') is a classical vocal-instrumental musical tradition developed in Bukhara and Samarkand from the 16th century onwards. It is a modal system of great sophistication, historically performed by Sufi musicians and by Bukharan Jewish court musicians. UNESCO recognised shashmaqom as intangible cultural heritage in 2003 (jointly with Tajikistan).

Folk music is alive across the country. Instruments include the dutar (two-string long-necked lute), the tanbur (a longer relative), the rubab (a short fretted lute), the doira (a large frame drum), and the karnay (a two-metre-long ceremonial trumpet blown at weddings). Boysun district in southern Uzbekistan has an especially rich living folk tradition — UNESCO listed the 'Cultural Space of Boysun District' in 2008.

Modern Uzbek pop is huge in the country and largely inaccessible outside it. Contemporary singers like Sherali Jo'rayev and Yulduz Usmanova are household names in the region.

The Uzbek literary tradition is one of the two great Turkic literary traditions, alongside Ottoman Turkish. Its founding figure is Alisher Navoi (1441–1501), who wrote in Chagatai Turkic — the medieval literary Turkic language directly ancestral to modern Uzbek and Uyghur — at a time when Persian was the prestige language of the entire Islamic east. His khamsa (a set of five long narrative poems modelled on Nizami's), his lyric divans, and his prose essay Muhakamat al-Lughatayn (a comparison of Turkic and Persian) essentially founded literary Turkic.

Later poets include Zahiruddin Babur (1483–1530), the first Mughal emperor and author of the Baburnama — one of the finest autobiographies of the medieval world, written in Chagatai Turkic. Modern Uzbek literature has been shaped by Abdulla Qodiriy (1894–1938), whose novels O'tkan Kunlar ('Days Gone By', 1922) and Mehrobdan Chayon ('The Scorpion from the Altar', 1929) are foundational.

Tashkent's Applied Arts Museum and Amir Timur Museum are excellent introductions to suzani, ceramics, and miniature painting. In Samarkand, the Konigil paper-making village (a working restoration of the Silk Road paper industry) is a fine afternoon; the Registan's central Tilya-Kori madrasa doubles as a small textile museum. In Bukhara, the Bahovaddin Naqshbandi complex, the Trading Domes, and workshops around Lyabi-Hauz are where craft still happens. In the Fergana Valley, our Craft Trail tour visits Yodgorlik (silk), Rishton (ceramics) and Chust (knives) in five days.