Samarkand

Tapchane d'exposition dans la cour de la médersa Cher-Dor, Registan, Samarcande.

Motif de céramique du Registan à Samarcande.

City of Samarkand. Of course I decided to start my journey by Samarkand. Not that it is the best (I prefer Bukhara), but it was my first aesthetic and poetic shock when I visited for the first time Uzbekistan. What nevertheless was my surprise when I arrived in Samarkand, this Wednesday, July 21 1999, with my Olizane pocket guide. Impatient to discover the "very noble and grand" city described by Marco Polo in the Book of Wonders, I saw here and there industrial rubble, black scrap, broken windows, half-collapsed walls, precarious sun-drenched houses. So was my beautiful scented oasis! Only streets with dated, noisy and polluting cars. I ruminated darkly at night in my hotel, along the syndrome known by the Japanese arriving in Paris, disappointed not to find the idealized city described by travel magazines. Did my guide cheated on me ? My enchantment came the next day, while I was standing in front of the Registan.

Three buildings almost symmetrical, high facades with monumental pointed-arch gates, majestic domes, minarets. The walls are covered with mosaics of blue and yellow tiles endlessly repeating geometric friezes. The Registan is considered the show window of a civilization that erected the tangible beauty supreme value. Sitting on a patch of grass, I imagined crossing the caravans. I saw the caravanserais and the turbaned dignitaries, half lying under colorful canopies. Supreme audacity, I entered illegally in their harem where I heard the slighting laugh of the girls. When I opened my eyes, I stood surrounded by Nafisa, Nargiza and Sharnoza. They were students and made up the numbers for the great festival of Asian art which was to take place a month later. They were young and pretty and we began to converse pleasantly. I was charmed. Myths and reality came together.
- What is it especially good, Nafisa told me, is that with the festival, we will not go to cotton.

Friday, August 10, 2012. After my installation in the Legend Hotel, I have lunch with Nargiza in the chaikhana (tea house in persian, the word is passed into the russian language) Lyabigor, who had previously, as an emblem, a live eagle tied by the leg to its perch. The eagle is always present but stuffed. The place is nice, with an airy, cool and equipped with tapshans terrace. It is frequented both by local and tourists. Nargiza, whom is familiar to me because I saw her almost every year thanks to its professional visits in Paris since our first meeting at the Registan, organized my stay in her country. She works for an Uzbek tourist agency where she is responsible for the French department and plans to come to school in France for training in the responsible tourism.

Up the next morning before seven o'clock, I start to walk the streets in the old town located in the Imam Said district sides of the Umarov street. We find tapshans everywhere. Inside the Registan, they are there as a testimony to the skills of the craftsmen and to accommodate spectators folkloric ballets. We settle down there in chaïkhani for tea or meals. In the house of mahalla (district), the aksakals (literally white beard in Turkish, but also wise in charge of the tradition) take place there to discuss the public life. And in the gardens of private homes, they are reserved for family and guests. Some tapshans seem abandoned on a street corner, in a park or in a closed chaikhana. The men meet there to play chess and, sometimes, discreetly sharing a bottle of vodka. In the Siab market chaikhana, we eat for cheap samsas (pastry triangles stuffed with vegetables and meat) served with a slightly spicy sauce, manties (steamed ravioli with pumpkin or meat) and a chorba nearest the pot-au-feu than soup noodles. Tea is the rule even if they serve a stale beer. Clientele are mainly people who came to shop in the multitude of stalls lined up in the covered market where you can find spices, fruits and vegetables. An couple of old persons. She, her face quite lined, wearing a beautiful silk dress "ikatée" called khan atlas. He, wearing the inevitable uzbek embroidered skullcap. Further, a "white beard", his head covered with a white cotton turban. The waitresses are dressed in flowered dresses over colorful pants. A light scarf is required. At the end of the meal, I get up and turn to the waitress.
- Rahmat, I told her just to show that I know the country.
- Ok, she replies.

Samarcande depuis le site archéologique d’Afrasiab, cité qui précéda Samarcande de 500 av. J.-C. jusqu'au XIIIe siècle. Photo prise en 1999.

Tapchane d'exposition dans la cour de la médersa Cher-Dor, Registan, Samarcande.

Tapchane dans la cour de la mosquée Saïd Imam.

Tapchane dans une maison privée, rue de Tachkent.

Tapchane dans une maison privée, rue Marta.

Femme cousant, quartier Aboulouïs Farobi.

Maison de mahalla Saïd Imam.

Joueurs d'échecs, rue Umazova.

Chaïkhana du marché Siyab.

Bakhora et Kumush (2001).

Le Registan, la nuit.

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The factory (1)

Vernissage dans une fabrique du village éponyme du pays.

Sunday, Nargiza drive me with her small car Chevrolet Spark in the eponymous village in the country located a few kilometers away in the south of Samarkand. We are going to visit a factory of tapshans. A worker is busy varnishing with an air gun table legs of solid wood with woodturning design. The compressor make a lot of noise. The boss says that he does not complain about business. It sells between ten and fifteen tapshans per month for 250 dollars apiece for a basic model. The legs are shaped by lathes the armrest bars and the outer parts of the frame carved with more or less sophisticated designs. They use walnut or sycamore for these pieces and fir or birch for the tray. The current size is two meters by three meters. One day is enough for four people to make a simple tapshan.
- There are also tapshans whose feet and frame are made of metal, said the boss. We do not manufacture them here. You have to go to the blacksmith.
- And what about the carpets and the cushions?
- We do not provide the accessories.

Because the plate of the tapshan should be covered with a carpet, if possible made locally. A normal tapshan is also equipped with thin mattresses called kurpachalar in uzbek and kurpachaho in tajik and with cushions (yostiq in uzbek and bolish in tajik, also sometimes the russian word padouchka). Hand-sewn, their velvety fabric is decorated with floral patterns. A coffee table called khantakhta (in uzbek and tajik) for receiving the food tray is disposed at the center.
- Khan for king and takhta for the wooden tray, says the artisan. Takhta, it is also how we call in Samarkand the zinc plate on which the washerwomen of dead men are washing the bodies before wrapping them in shrouds. It is only the rich people who can afford the coffee table in addition tapshan ! The poor people will content themselves with a tablecloth (dastarkhan).
- How long are manufactured the tapshans ?
- It has always been so.

Éléments de décoration.

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Nafisa

Parents de Nafisa dans leur maison du quartrier Motrit à Samarcande.

Back to Samarkand where we are expected by Nafisa's parents for lunch. Nafisa has left Uzbekistan for France ten years ago in order to perform masterfully conducted studies. She acted like many young people of her age, went abroad after the Bachelor by the impossibility to find on-site quality higher education. Sometimes you must baksheeshing to access the unversity where you can buy a degree which is so devalued. These young people often speak two or three local languages ​​from different families (Uzbek, Russian, Tajik) and western (English, French or German). They leave for Europe, Canada or the States. More rarely in Russia, yet neighbouring country. But Russia is above all, for men and women in Central Asia, a land where they go by necessity and without great pleasure. After independence, with the economic difficulties, hundreds of thousands go there in search of a work often hard, dangerous and underpaid, requiring no qualifications, women working often under difficult conditions in great cities markets. Contributing with their work to support their families or left alone at home to manage the house, the women participate in fact in the questioning about power relations traditionally patriarchal. If labor migrants consider their situation as temporary and eventually return home, most students left in western countries will not return, which will have certain consequences for the future elites in these countries. The decision to leave is reinforced, among girls, by the desire to escape the tradition of arranged marriage from 20 years and to the family containment that results. Make the great journey requires from them a strong character and a lot of courage.

Nafisa's parents live in a neighborhood called Motrid. The name is a reference to Madrid, as well as we find, at the north of Samarkand when we take the direction of Lake Aydar-Kul, a village named Farij (Paris). This toponymy comes from the time when Tamerlan brought european craftsmen to build his palace. The house is traditional. The intimacy of family life is given by the wall that closes the property. Buildings, apartments and outbuildings are arranged around an area that has a well and a vegetable garden. Formerly, a cow by the sweet name of Macha was grazing there attached to the pole. Nafisa drove her to graze in a field they had on the banks of the Zeravshan. The tapshan is the first thing you see when you arrive. It is installed in the entrance, out of direct merciless sunlight in August. This is a sober tapshan, wooden, with carpets and kurpachalar on which took up Nafisa's parents. How to install on the tapshan worth noting in particular. It is imperative to remove their shoes as is done before walking into a room in the house to protect carpets and not introduce inside dirt from outside. We sit cross-legged, heels under the buttocks or legs folded up on the side. This posture is uncomfortable for me, but I try to adapt myself opting for the compromise that is the semi recumbent position sometimes adopted by men.
- For as long as I can remember, said Nafisa's father, there has always been a tapshan home. This is a new, it was purchased from a craftsman. We put it under cover in the fall and winter. Formerly, we made it ourselves, with bricks and some boards. Those could stay outside all year round.

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The plov

Plov dans la guesthouse Oxus avec Sobir et son fils, rue Rakhmatulaiev à Samarcande.

Curious name, isn'it ? Plov. Some heavy stuff falling in the stomac. But no. One day, the son of governor of Bukhara fell in love with the daughter of a poor craftsman. Knowing that the local tradition did not allow him such an union, he sank into a devastating and dumb melancholy. Then we called ibn Sina (Avicenne). This one guessed that there was a girl behind the big young man's depression, but who might that be ? While taking the pulse of the prince, he asked the state employee in charge of the census to enumerate in front of him the district names of the city. In the evocation of one of them, the prince’s pulse began beating more hardly. The street names of this district ? At a street name, prince’s pulse still accelerated. The names of the residents of this street ? When was pronounced the name of his beloved, the prince’s pulse burst out. Then Avicenne prescribes to the prince to eat once a week the palov och (the plov of the festive meals) until the reassurance, and recommended to the governor, to the great displeasure the aksakals, to authorize the marriage.

Nargiza tells me this story while we drive in the direction of Kozi-Ariq, the district where is the house of her parents to whom we are going to have dinner. The meal, naturally, consists in the national dish of Central Asia. The plov is widespread in all the Middle East but it is with the Uzbeks and the Tajiks that its preparation is the most accomplished, with sometimes some variants according to regions. Another legend (the country is not short on it) says that the plov was conceived by the cook of Alexander the Great. After the long battles, while the reserves of food were running out, the cook ordered that we go hunting the sheep of steppes and he made a dish with rice and mutton by adding desert herbs.

- To make a good plov, tells me Nargiza's dad, is needed for 7 people 1 kg of mutton or beef, 700 gr of yellow carrots, 1 kg of rice, 150 gr of onions, 25 cl of sunflower oil, some leaves of mint, pepper, salt and cumin.
While Nargiza cuts carrots in fine small slices, the meat in pieces of the size of the thumb and slices thinly onions, Rahmatullo heats the oil on a high heat.
- It has to begin to smoke, he says.
He browns the meat in the oil and adds onions while mixing slowly. When onions become golden, he adds carrots, spices, chopped mint leaves and a teaspoon of salt. He pours some water, without moving. When the water begins to boil, he reduces over low heat.
- Now, he says, you let cook uncovered.
Meanwhile, Nargiza undertakes to soak the rice. At the end of one hour, Rahmatullo puts down it on carrots always without mixing. He adds two spoonful of salt and some tepid water to cover the rice.
- Here, he tells me, begin the most delicate part of the preparation. It is necessary to move regularly and slowly the rice so that it does not stick, always without mixing.
He makes then with the spoonbill a hole in the middle of the rice to allow the evaporation of the water contained in the lower layers and the rise in of flavors in the rice which he tastes regularly.
- If the rice is still hard and if the evaporation is insufficient, it is necessary to add some water.
While he caresses with delicacy the pristine rice, Nargiza's father tells me his holidays in Bulgaria in Soviet time.
- It was in the eighties. At that time, we could travel. At the end of only five days, the friends who accompanied me asked me to prepare them the plov. We bought a sheep, took a big pan and begun the preparation. We were in a restaurant, at a table where were Germans. We suggested them sharing the plov. In exchange, the Germans offered us some beer. Then, we offered them Uzbek skullcaps as well as a book on Samarcande. A friendship between our peoples had been born thanks to our plov.
While speaking, Nargiza' father tastes the rice, watches that he does not stick on the pan. When it is just right, he leaves the plov to rest over low heat during ten minutes.

Every body takes place on the tapshan for the dinner. It's excellent. The rice is cooked just right, tender and retaining its texture, melting and fragrant. And this good bread from Samarkand with sesame seed we are sharing is delicious. Known throughout the region, it is good to eat for three months, they say. We drink tea and vodka because it is time for toast. After the tapshan is cleared, we take the elongated semi pose that allows the stomach to expand slowly. At the time of leaving, Rahmatullo thanks me for my visit and tell me that we are now united by the plov.
- When you're in a foreign country where you do not know the language, friendship is very important, he says.

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