Three days after arriving in Samarkand, I headed to Bukhara. Zulya had organized for me to fulfill Zufar Qoryogdiev, a Bukhara State College professor of ethnography and anthropology with a specialty in Sufism, on the memorial complicated of Bahauddin Naqsband, the area’s most revered saint. Zufar did some analysis earlier than our assembly and was satisfied that my ancestors would have been part of this order—and that some might even have been buried right here, within the tidy rows of elm-shaded graves. I murmured a prayer at Bahauddin’s tomb in a courtyard below a large mulberry tree. “You are strolling the place, a whole bunch of years in the past, your ancestors should have,” stated Zulya.
Her phrases have been nonetheless with me on a transparent morning when Zulya and I arrived at a landmark that felt acquainted. My ancestors ultimately made their solution to Hyderabad, in India’s Deccan plateau, settling there till my mother and father’ technology migrated west. On the historic coronary heart of Hyderabad stands the Charminar, an ornate archway erected in 1591 whose 4 sepia-tinted minarets are emblematic of town. I used to be flummoxed the primary time I examine Uzbekistan’s personal Chor Minor. Given Bukhara’s 2,500-year historical past and the prevalence of Central Asian influences in India’s tradition, delicacies, structure, and vocabulary, I might assumed the Hyderabadi model was a duplicate. In Bukhara, I found the 2 usually are not clones of one another—right here, the 4 tawny turrets are topped in vivid turquoise ceramic tiles, naturally. Nonetheless, I am positive buying and selling journeys to India impressed the Turkmen service provider who conceived of the one in Samarkand.
The Mughals carried their tandors, their samsas, their dasturkhan tablecloths, their domed mausoleums, their zardozi threadwork with them to India, which in flip absorbed this wealthy cultural legacy. Centuries later, after Silk Highway cosmo-politanism was subsumed by Communism, lots of Uzbekistan’s landmarks suffered from Soviet neglect. When Uzbekistan gained its independence, its newly shaped Uzbek authorities was fast to revive its treasures, typically enlisting native craftsmen to work carefully with their friends in India to find out how.
On my final night in Bukhara, Zulya invited me to hitch her household to have a good time the sallabandan of her niece Nargisa. I filed into the restaurant in a procession that jogged my memory of an Indian wedding ceremony, holding trays of presents and following a band of musicians. The ceremony is a vital milestone in Bukharan households, marking a lady’s transition to motherhood: “It is each mom’s accountability to do sallabandan for his or her daughter,” Zulya defined as Nargisa’s mom, grandmother, and mother-in-law wrapped a white muslin material round her head and draped her in a scarlet veil with gold embroidery. There was magic within the familiarity of the second, of generations imparting traditions from one to the following. Which hardly shocked me in any respect.
“You might be one in all us!” stated Zulya Rajabova, the founding father of Silk Highway Treasure Excursions and a Bukhara native, the primary time we Zoomed. Over the months that adopted, her crew took care of visas and thoughtfully drew an itinerary from my lengthy want listing, matching me to consultants from Zulya’s huge Rolodex of contacts to convey the Silk Highway’s historical past to life. And I wasn’t sure by the itinerary. After I arrived in Tashkent, Abdulaziz Isomov, my information, took me to a residential neighbourhood in pursuit of superbly tailor-made silk ikat pants from the stylish idea store Bibi Hanum. And on my remaining day in Bukhara, a last-minute request acquired me contained in the studio of seventh-generation potter Shokhrukh Rakhimov for ceramics that now stay on my cabinets in New York Metropolis.
This text appeared within the December 2022 challenge of Condé Nast Traveler and was first printed digitally on CNT US.