Margilan sits on the historic Silk Road roughly 400 km east of Samarkand, in the fertile Fergana Valley. Chinese historians describe it as a silk-producing town by the 2nd century BCE — before silk technology officially reached the Roman world.
The signature product is atlas and adras — vibrant multi-coloured ikat fabrics. Ikat is a resist-dye technique: the warp threads are bound and dyed one colour at a time before weaving, so the pattern is fully created before the weft even touches the loom. It's mathematically brutal — a single 30-cm-repeat design can require 50+ hours of pre-dye binding.
Working workshops open to visitors:
- Yodgorlik Factory — the largest, employs ~250 workers. Free tour showing the full process: cocoon boiling, thread reeling, warp binding, dye baths, hand-loom weaving. Retail shop at the end.
- Said Ahmad Hoja workshop — smaller and more personal, run by a UNESCO-recognised master. Ask specifically to see the ikat-binding room.
Prices for hand-woven pure silk atlas start around US $30–50 per metre; blended silk-cotton adras is cheaper. Machine-loomed silk exists but has a slightly duller sheen once you've seen the hand-woven version.
Every autumn the town hosts the International Atlas & Adras Festival, gathering weavers from Central Asia, Turkey and Japan.
Fergana Valley in photos
A short visual companion to this entry — photographs of Fergana Valley from our travel archive.
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