Undersleeping in Uzbekistan

[kileskus]

Samarkand, part one

Sergey Yesenin, the brilliant Russian lyric poet, used his trip to Samarkand in 1921 as his main foray to the East to inspire his series of poems called the Persian Songs. It's an ideal vision of the Orient, too idealised to take seriously now, but that was what he escaped to from the turmoil of revolutionary Russia and his own personal life. One of my favourite poems from that cycle begins:

Never have I set eyes on the Bosphorus.
So please do not ask me what it's like.
I have seen the fair sea in your glances.
With a shimmering blue flame alight.

(Translation not mine this time - here is a wonderful lyrical translation by Peter Tempest.)

Yesenin never did set foot in Iran or Turkey. He had four marriages, with one to an American dancer 18 years older than him, before committing suicide at age 30.

One could ask if the blue flame was not just the imagined sea, but directly inspired by the blue of Samarkand.

I headed to the Shah-i-zinda necropolis after arriving, sleep-deprived:


The complex is made up of many structures spanning the 11th to 19th centuries, including several mausoleums both from Tamerlane's reign and the following Timurid period.





Then I had to do boring stuff.

Laundry - Samarkand, despite its population of 600,000 and endless tourists, does not have a self-service laundromat. I went to a dry cleaners who does 1 kg of clothes for $5 - and returned them to me folded as well.

SIM card - I had bought an e-sim but the signal was pretty weak even in parts of the city and overall it was just slow. Plus it was quite expensive - about $40 for 5 GB. As my 5 GB has run out I decided to get a local SIM card. The national mobile carrier here is called Uztelekom. There are a lot of stalls unofficially selling SIM cards, but I decided to go to a licensed outlet.

Plugged Uztelekom into Google Maps and got the Samarkand branch. I expected it to look like a Vodafone store, with lots of phones in glass cases and a section for SIM cards, but it looked like a Centrelink office. Take a number and sit down.

Legally, you need to have your passport registered when you activate a SIM card, which is why I didn't go to the unofficial stalls around the city. If you've been in the country longer than 3 days, you are also required to be registered by your accommodation provider with the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Make sure you ask your hotel for the registration slip. You can be asked for it when you leave the country, and in this case they needed it and my passport to give me a SIM card.

It was 15 GB for $8, and it's fast and reliable so I can now Google about the stuff I see when I'm out and about. I imagine it would've been easier if I'd gotten it in Tashkent, but got there in the end.

The last order of business was seeing a dentist. I am not sure if this topic is of interest to anyone, but since I've overshared about my personal life already, I'll go ahead.

My filling chipped off a few days ago and it's starting to cause problems. This is unfortunate timing because I don't want to get dental work done here but don't want to wait until I get back to NZ.

From my research, the biggest concerns with dental tourism is sterilisation of equipment, just like getting a tattoo overseas. Of course the cost of dental work here is orders of magnitude lower than in Aus/NZ but saving a few hundred/thousand dollars just to get hepatitis C is a Very Bad Idea.

The former USSR countries produce many times more dentists per capita than in Australia. This is a holdover from the Soviet medical education system where dentistry is the easiest stream of med school to enter, and there are essentially no caps on graduates the same way our medical student numbers are limited, for example. There are also low regulatory standards for starting a private dental clinic.

Hence you will see the ubiquitous stomatologiya signs on your travels in this region, but they might not be up to the standards we have back home.

I found a clinic that used gold standard sterilisation and the whole thing went well if not a little casual - booked the appointment via Telegram, went there with no reception to register at, just waited until the dentist came to get me, and then at the end I paid him in cash directly. But the actual work seemed very professional, and it was the head dentist himself not his junior staff who saw me. He didn't even charge me a tourist tax - it was $30 for the whole thing, which is actually on the lower end of Uzbek prices.

So, if you do find yourself in need of emergency dental care in the post-USSR countries, just make sure you get in touch with them via Telegram/Whatsapp first and ask about their sterilisation techniques. Have Google Translate ready when you get there, and then sit back, relax, and pretend you enjoy the flight.

I checked into my hotel after. The Western chain hotels are eye-wateringly expensive here, with the Accor ones being at least $400 a night. The local 4-star hotels are in the $100-150 range and I went with the Medina Hotel.


The room was quite spacious


As was the bathroom


There was a pool, too.

The gym, however, was extremely lacking, and the hotel restaurant wasn't open when I tried to get dinner, so I went to my local shawarma joint instead. Still not bad though given the rate I paid.

At sunset I went to the Bibi Khanym mosque, built by Tamerlane in 1400 for his favourite wife.



At 40 m tall this eclipses the buildings I saw in Bukkhara, and in general everything in historical Samarkand is taller. I find myself taking more photos from a distance to try to capture everything without warping. If anyone has tips on how to photograph tall buildings, especially wide ones, that would be appreciated. I find trees challenging too - stepping back 50 m would theoretically get the whole building in a shot, but then there's a tree in front of you.

Her mausoleum is directly opposite:

It must be nice being the favourite consort.

When I was still in high school and hadn't seen anything outside of Canada, Australia, and China (where I'd briefly lived as a kid), I remember seeing on my Facebook feed an article about a photographer who turned his back on famous landmarks. I've had this philosophy in my mind ever since, and I try to take photos of the areas surrounding the landmarks I visit. In Bukhara, it was a lot of parking lots or ambiguous empty spaces. For the Bibi Khanym mosque, it was this:


Went back to the hotel after the sun had set and found a mother and her two kids, one of them driving a buggy, going through the bins outside...

 

[kileskus]

Samarkand, part two

The next day I committed a tourist sin.

Having been woken up by the coughatiels in the hotel lounge screaming (my room being next to the lounge), I went up to the breakfast room to see quite a big selection.

Then it was off to the Afrasiab archaeological site. Named after the legendary king who was a thorn in the side of the Persians, Afrasiab represents what first started as a Sogdian town in the 5th C BC. Sogdiana was a state covering modern Samarkand and Bukhara and parts of Tajikistan. They were quite influential in trade along the Silk Road, not as merchants but from being in the middle of the trade route, to the point that the Sogdian language became a lingua franca.

It was destroyed by Genghis Khan in the 1200s. Excavations started in the 1900s. There's a museum next to the site that I went to first. It describes the Sogdian state and exhibits artefacts covering a wide span of time. It also has preserved some of the murals from the royal palace in Afrasiab. The murals depict all kinds of different cultures, attesting to the extent of trade that was done.



The site itself is mainly just mounds and some exposed clay. The actual remains of the city are underground for the most part. There was a section of the site containing a supposed citadel but I was told by a security guard who was standing there not to go further. Not sure if there's been some changes recently because based on Google pictures other visitors have seen this citadel.



As for the sin: I found a piece of grey material, 2x3x1 cm, with five and a half grooves marked into it like treadmarks. It was lightweight with a Mohs hardness of about 3. I pocketed the fragment, because I do have a collection of interesting looking rocks back home.

Having had a closer look at it now, the grooves are slightly irregular but look deliberate, like they were made manually with a sharp blade. And it's layered at the broken edge.



Afrasiab was built with mudbricks and compacted clay, and supposedly the building material was marked by whichever construction crew was handling it. I don't think this little piece I've picked up appears nearly old enough to be anything significant, and the important stuff is below the ground anyway, but I do feel like I've broken the rule of never take away material from an archaeological site. I've emailed them asking if it's just treadmarks from their diggers or if they want me to return it for examination. In the meantime it's gone into the airplane chuck bag I'm keeping my fossils in.

Onwards, then, to Ulugbek's observatory. After Tamerlane died of pneumonia at age 69 on the campaign trail to China, his empire was ruled by one of his grandsons, Khalil, who was notoriously bad at management, and ceded control to his uncle, one of Tamerlane's sons, who then assigned the region including Samarkand to his son, Ulugbek.

As I said before, Ulugbek had some military successes but his heart was not in territorial expansion. He built an observatory in Samarkand, catalogued over 1,000 stars, and measured the length of time in a solar year to an accuracy of 58 seconds.


The above-ground observatory has been lost to time. Now the site of where his observatory was is a compound split into two buildings. On the left is a museum and on the right is a tunnel containing the preserved remains of the famed quadrant that Ulugbek used. The tunnel is oriented in a north-south direction, the 'meridian' used in measuring star movements.



His quadrant had a length of 63 m and a radius of 40 m, and it was this he used to measure the movement of the stars each night and thereby calculate the length of the solar year.

Nearby is the mosque and mausoleum of Uzbekistan's first post-independence president, Islam Karimov. He was from Samarkand.



He ruled from 1991 until his death in 2016 and appears to be perceived positively in Uzbekistan due to the relative political stability the country experienced after, which cannot be said about most other post-USSR states. He also sought to strengthen the conception of an Uzbek identity and use historical narratives to facilitate that.

He was also an authoritarian ruler, though, when it came to civil liberties. In 2005 in Andijan a mass protest erupted in response to some of his economic and social policies; an estimate of over 400 protestors were killed, but the government does not talk about it and does not permit discourse on it. I noticed when I was in Andijan that there were no memorials of the event.



There was a prayer on at the time I was there. If you zoom in you can see the people holding their hands cupped in front of them - this is to catch the blessings/positive thoughts from the prayer, and then they'll move their hands to their face as though washing their face with those blessings.

I took a bus from there to Registan Square. Bus routes are best found on Yandex Maps. You can pay by contactless card (like in every city in the world except Melbourne).



It's made up of three madrasas. The one in the middle is Ulugbek's madrasa, built in the 15th C and where he taught as he lived in Samarkand. The other two are from the 17th C, built a few decades apart from each other.

The one on the right is the Sher-Dor Madrasa, its name Persian for 'abode of lions'. If you zoom in you'll see some lion/tiger figures as well as more anthropomorphic suns. Again, not what you should do strictly speaking but if the governor of Samarkand wants lions and human faces on a madrasa, the Muslim clergy are hardly able to say no.

The one on the left is the Tilla-Kori madrasa, commissioned by that same governor. It's remarkable for its use of gold leaf.



Looking at the façades it is apparent that there are inconsistencies in the shades of the colours of the tiles. Restoration efforts, which began in earnest in the 1950s, weren't able to find the exact shade of blue as the recipe has been long for a long time.


The courtyard of the Sher-Dor, featuring its ribbed domes that look like meringue drops. The domes have two layers. The outer one is ribbed, apparently to help with structural integrity in light of the building's size and the region's earthquake prone-ness.


Inside one of the rooms of the Tilla-Kori madrasa. This stalactite recess is called a muqarna. Apparent from its aesthetic function, it also helped amplify a speaker's voice; the priest would turn his back to the congregation and speak into this recess and that would make his voice louder and clearer.

You can see the plentiful gilding in the design. The original builders used gold leaf and the restoration effort in the mid-20th C also used real gold leaf.


Looks quite thin and flaky to me


Several tourists rented traditional dresses from the souvenir shops and would take photos of themselves in them or get one of the photographers lingering in the square to do it. To be fair the dresses did look well made and complemented the buildings, and it was nice to see tourists so enthusiastic, but the photographers had an irritating habit of demanding that other tourists clear the space for them to take their photos and videos unobstructed.

Had to catch up on some work in the afternoon, and then at night went out for dinner and hookah which, though associated with a romanticised version of the Orient, I still felt compelled to try at least once while here.