I stood in Samarkand, here in Uzbekistan, in one of the most strikingly beautiful squares in the whole of the world: the Registan. Three magnificent, enormous mosques rise up to the sky, which are truly the wonders of the world - it is simply the most beautiful architecture in the Islamic universe. These golden-tinted, ornately designed buildings with turquoise domes will live forever in my mind as one of the most beautiful treasures seen on my journey around the world.
Samarkand was a key stop on the silk road, as goods including silk were traded from China to the western world of Asia. It is now located in the country of Uzbekistan. The silk road fell into lack of knowledge and became a place where very few travellers ever go. This is because trade came to be dominated by western European countries such as Britain controlling trade through sea routes, rather than the central Asian overland journeys that shaped the world before then.
The growth of China and Russia as communist countries restricted travel across Uzbekistan and the knowledge of ordinary people in the west about Uzbekistan or central Asia as a whole is more or less non-existent. This is incredible, for the secrets of Uzbekistan are a wonder to behold. There is something thrilling and mysterious about travelling on the silk road. Surely this is every traveller’s ultimate dream. There is a poem sometimes quoted, by James Elroy Flecker. It goes:
“We travel not for trafficking alone;
By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned:
For lust of knowing what should not be known,
We take the Golden Road to Samarkand.”
The spirit of the poem, of the golden road to Samarkand is what I wanted to capture forever with my photograph, which is a widescreen view of the whole of the Registan, viewed in the gold-rose tint of the soft summer light. These beautiful domes were built during the empire of Tamerlaine, who in the 14th Century ruled a vast empire across Asia with the bloody hand of the conqueror.
In the outstanding “Islamic Empires: Fifteen Cities that Define a Civilisation”, Justin Marozzi writes of the splendours of the empire of this conqueror of contradiction:
“Over four decades the city soaked up Timur’s offerings like an insatiable lover. There were blue-tiled, marble-clad palaces, azure-domed mosques, mausoleums and madrassas, rambling gardens and parks with exquisite pavilions, there was gold, silver and precious stones without count, exotic beasts, fabulous cloths, silks, tapestries, slaves and spices, but it was never enough. Each time he returned with more, she sent him back out into battle. Her glorification required ever increasing spoils from countless victories. Only constant campaigning could deliver them”.
It was an empire that amassed the riches of an often beautiful civilisation. I set about exploring the city in full. Further north, the Shah-i-Zinda complex was a beautiful place to visit, ornate and blue and vibrant with history. Here is pictured a family of four walking towards the camera, living and loving together, each person with their own story and their own hopes and dreams.
A city of the world’s desire, master craftsmen from all over the world gathered here. As Marozzi writes, “Asia surrendered her finest musicians, artists and craftsmen, to the regal vanity of Samarkand. From Persia, cultural capital of the continent, came poets and painters, miniaturists, calligraphers, musicians and architects. Syria sent her silk-weavers, glass-makers and armourers. India provided masons, builders and gem-cutters, while Asia Minor provided silversmiths, gunsmiths and rope-makers. Plunder aside, peaceful trade was the bed-rock of the empire’s prosperity”.
In the mild spring haze, I sat in an open plan cafe and drank a carton of cherry juice. I considered the beautiful courtyards of the Registan nearby, with their ornate and beautiful gilded decoration, in this case true substance as well as style. As Marozzi writes, “to the colossal scale of Timur’s buildings, be they secular or spiritual, was married the richest decoration. Before Timur few buildings, apart from smaller scale funerary monuments, were so lavishly embellished. From the later fourteenth century it became the norm.
Palaces, mosques and madrassas were wrapped in fine glazed bricks and tiles, replete with dancing frescoes and arabesques, to provide an iridescent counterpoint to the sun-bleached colours of the steppe. Bold inscriptions in Kufic script ran around marble plaques at the base of decagonal minarets, rising into sparkling lozenges of blue flowers and amber petals outlined in white faience of thousands of tiny glazed tiles. In these arid lands the blue was a refreshing reference to water and a homage to the heavens. Dados became the repositories of semi-precious stones shaped into geometric patterns, enlivened with hexagonal tiles of jet-black onyx and tracery of gold and lapis lazuli”.
I walked out towards the edge of the city, to observe the beautiful turquoise domes, waiting for sunset, when their shimmering golden tint is slowly draped by the dark colours of twilight, and I knew that here, I was in the heart of a beautiful world.
The explorer and naturalist Douglas Carruthers was once here too, and in his book “Beyond the Caspian”, he wrote of the awe-inspiring beauty, as the sun set on this dying world:
“To see it to the best advantage one should go beyond the city’s precincts, out to the waste place where old Maracanda stood. One should go at even, when the sun sinks low, and watch the pageant as it passes out over the Kyzyl Kum desert. One should wait till the great turquoise dome, reflecting the dying rays, turns pure amethyst, and remain until the whole vast pile stands silhouetted against the after-glow. Then - when the roar from the distant bazaars dies down and the air is heavy with a golden haze, when twilight falls and ghosts of all Time come up out of Afrasiab to walk with you - then you will have seen and felt the work of Timur’s hand and stood in awe”.
As I saw night fall on Samarakand, I too felt that there is truly a lasting wonder here, a priceless jewel that has withstood the erosion of the sands of time.
The empires of Central Asia may have fallen into disregard, but their beauty lingers on. Until relatively recent times, the visitors to this centre of the world from the west were a handful of spies, such as Colonel Charles Stoddart and Arthur Connolly, executed in the ark of Bukhara by the Emir, Nasrullah Khan. Related in “The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia”, Peter Hopkirk writes of an under-reported war between Britain and Russia to control the geographical area as a strategy for Britain to protect the route to its money-making mine of exploitation in India. In another example of war driven by money, uninterested in an alliance with the British, the Emir sliced off both their heads by the ark fortress in Bukhara.
There in Bukhara was my destination, across the barren desert plains. I travelled on a train west through the Kyzylkum desert, looking out at the empty wilderness. I journeyed on, the industrial steel of the enormous Soviet train thundering through the desert, protecting the passengers from the biting coarseness of the desert wind.
Bukhara. Oh, Bukhara. Bukhara is one of the most beautiful places I have travelled to. Well off the beaten track, past the road through the desert, stands this ancient city, with its turquoise domes and ornate madrassas, where weary caravan traders would once rest their weary legs and trade their goods.
It is an enchanting city where I spent beautiful time staying. Every day I would walk to the square of Lyabi Hauz; by a wonderful green water lake of utter peace and tranquility.
Every day I would sit at the cafe outside, by the square of the lake and drink a carton of cherry juice, and read. I would see the life of Bukhara walk by, and the green water was just so peaceful. It was tranquility itself, a traveller’s paradise and I only wish more people knew about the beauty and rich cultural history of Bukhara, because with its Persian influence, unique desert architecture and beautiful atmosphere, it is a jewel of the silk road.
I walked in Bukhara in the sunshine, among its ancient alleys kissed by shadows, considering the ghosts of Avicenna. A silhouette of a woman in pink emerged in an arch of an empty doorway flooded with white light, a trademark of my photography work, as the image was captured. The title is a reference to the philosopher Ibn Sina, known in the west as Avicenna, who created many influential works in the history of the intellectual world, such the canon of medicine. He is perhaps the most famous intellectual that ever came from Bukhara.
I continued on, and came to the tower. Childhoods of dust, here in Bukhara, among the ancient world. I came across a group of children here, playing together among the ruins of history. I was happy with the documentary shot of the children's lives here in Uzbekistan, yet in truth, I was aggrieved that it did not do so well on my social media account, Instagram, when other photographs like simple sunset shots often got over 1,000 or sometimes even over 2,000 likes. My photograph tells a story; the boy and the girl are far away from each other on opposite sides, looking at each other but being unable to engage because of the distance between them. The girl is surrounded by two of her girl-friends, gossiping and playing and keeping the boy and the girl apart, frustrating the boy’s hopes and dreams and breaking his heart.
I walked through Bukhara on these quiet summer days, and one day, while walking, I came across two boys on a bike, friends forever in the harshness of the desert, finding happiness through play and joy in the world. It was as if the boy in red was saying: “hold on my friend, I know where we are going”. The resulting photograph, one of my personal favourites, is about putting your trust and your faith in friendship and working together on this journey of life. It is about holding on to the bike of your friend and hanging on for the ride. I will always be that kid, hanging on to the edge of the bike, going wherever the journey will lead me.
Beyond the desert was Khiva, at the furthest edges of the desert steppe, a historical outpost of ancient architecture preserved in the raging sands of time. The seat of the mysterious ancient empire of Khorezm, at the end of the road, a powerful civilisation which was razed by the Mongol hordes, and of which almost nothing remains. Here the recent writer Christopher Alexander, in “A Carpet Ride to Khiva”, lived for a number of years, setting out an enjoyable memoir of attempting to establish a self-sufficient carpet weaving workshop, employing local women and disabled people as apprentices, to generate income and preserve the culture of a forgotten world.
There is an ancient saying attributed to Francis Bacon: "if the mountain will not come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must come to the mountain". Yet there is so much wonder and beauty in the world, that sometimes the mountain can come to Muhammad, as it did here in Uzbekistan, in the cold white light.
Yet I spent more time in Bukhara than planned, the city a beautiful lady of the desert revealing her secrets to me by peeling back the veil further with each passing day.
I walked through Bukhara and entered a picturesque courtyard, shielded from the sun. I came across a scene of two old men playing chess under the shadow of the tree in the courtyard. So much of the character of their lives came out during their game of chess, a competitive yet friendly test of status, respect and mental challenge. Documentary photography when the chance arises is something that I love, as well as the impressionistic pieces that permeate my work. I sought to capture in motion the lives and pastimes of the people of this ancient city, and bring Bukhara's ancient traditions to life.
I continued to walk, and entered the Po-i-Kalyan mosque area, when I came across a group of men prostrating on the ground during the afternoon call to prayer. I am sure I was not supposed to be photographing here, yet I wanted to show what others do not show so people can feel what others do not feel.
The journey alone, through the desert heat was hard. I continued on.
Head full of dreams, heart full of lead.
Day turned to night, but night brought no release, my eyelids like anchors, heavy as the heart, that could never sink to the bottom of the ocean.
Bactrian Nightmares, from among the many nameless hotel corridors where I stayed along my journeys. A dark shot here from the fractured edge of the mental universe was compared to the film “The Shining”. It is about the darkness, loneliness and sacrifice of travel and about the relentless darkness of a life on the road. This is a vision of a nightmare. It is about insomnia, being forever awake, and never asleep, on the edge of insanity and on the edge of dreams.
Awake and dreaming on the mind’s edge, I was flying across Central Asia, afloat in the sky, and I soared high above the clouds. I created a very radical artwork - purplish-red, the huge clouds in an otherworldly formation, almost as if it were the after-effects of the atomic bomb. I called this “If I looked into your eyes, I might never return back to earth”. It was made while thinking about a girl I liked, and how I could not make eye contact. If I did, I might never return. That was not to be, but it created a beautiful moment and the photograph remains forever.
Yet I remembered the beauty of the road and the silken dream of this journey of life. I remembered the white spray of the water from the Lyabi Hauz in Bukhara, washing over my mind with its immense current, projected from the wellspring of peace. Electricity, it was one of my most well received artworks, a boy in the vastness of a white wave of static current. There is something serene but electrically charged about this work, here along my travels. Significantly, the title is a reference to lyrics in the song High Hopes by Pink Floyd - “dragged by the force of some inner tide”. I strongly recommend listening to the timeless beauty of this song and its penetrating lyrics.
At night I walked through the city of Bukhara, a circular dome arising from the darkness. In the moonlight, the imagination wandered, and anything was possible. I could have been borne aloft in the air, floating on a magic carpet, carried on the currents of the wind, above the dome and into lands beyond.
In One Thousand and One Nights, one of the stories told by Scheherezade relates of Prince Husain, the eldest son of the Sultan of the Indies, who travels to Bisnagar (Vijayanagar) in India to buy a magic carpet, and “whoever sitteth on this carpet and willeth in thought to be taken up and set down upon another site will, in the twinkling of an eye, be borne thither, be that place nearhand or distant many a day's journey and difficult to reach." In other words, it is an allegory for the imagination. If one imagines a scenario, it can come true, and the imagination and consciousness is a beautiful fragment of truth, in and of itself. It is true of the memoir of travel. I will to remember the beautiful memories from my travels around the world, and somehow, out of nowhere, once again the memories come alive, like a genie summoned by rubbing a lamp.
Of course a French writer added in the story of Aladdin into the One Thousand and One Nights in 1710, ostensibly nothing to do with a magic carpet, yet synonymous with the tale in the western mind, due to a popular children’s film. It is a true example of orientalism.
In the highly influential book “Orientalism”, Edward Said argues that the societies and cultures of the East are essentialised and portrayed as static and undeveloped objective concepts, that are always used by the powerful west as a method of control and oppression over the people of the east. There is no such thing as an idea of “the Orient”, and depicting it as such is usually done by writers, philosophers and colonial administrators for it to be studied, depicted, and reproduced in order to have knowledge and power over the 'otherness' of the eastern world (to which the west considers itself superior). I agree wholeheartedly with Said, and much of the book you are reading deals with themes of the oppression by the west of the dying diversity and subjective beauty of the eastern world.
I would never dream to be an authority on “the east”, expounding a definitive picture of what the character of Uzbekistan “is”. That is why this book is about sensations and the aesthetics of an individual’s experience, and the beauty of the impressions that arise and flow when considering the oriental models of thought. One thing to be said about Orientalism as a concept however, is that it is important to preserve the scholarship of those who have devoted the time to historical research and cultural analysis, so that it may enable others to eventually experience the beauty of this world subjectively, through their own eyes. Once armed with the knowledge of scholarship, they could then appreciate for themselves the infinite complexity and diversity of the oriental world, yet in an age of mass industrialisation and the uniformity of commercial life, it could all one day be lost. And it is those very orientalists who one day may be the only record of the seeds of the beauty of a dying world.
Do not be too hard on them all, because no matter what assumptions they may bring, here in the Oriental lands, many of them saw something truly beautiful, and wanted to share it with the world.
Read on for the next chapter via the home page, as we are about to enter our journey together to - KYRGYZSTAN......