Headline, May05, 2013

'''BUKHARA : 

THE NOBLE-THE SUBLIME-TH​E LOST'''

Don't overlook Bukhara when travelling the ancient Silk Road. And allow fair history to record that it was the failure of  -''water''-  which hurried on the isolation of Bukhara. The Zerafshan river, flowing 500 miles out of the Pamirs, expends its last breath on the oasis, and is withering away.

To north and the west the sands have buried a multitude of towns and villages which the exhausted irrigation could not save. Even in the nineteenth century, the accounts of travellers were filled with ambiguity. To Muslims, Bukhara was ''the Noble, the Sublime''. It was wrapped round by eight miles of walls and fortified gates, and its mosques were beyond counting.

Bukhariots, it was said, were the most polished and civilized inhabitants of Central Asia, and their manners and dress had become a yardstick of oriental fashion. Yet, this century Bukhara seems remote. Searching for the bazaars which were the pride of the region, one finds them almost gone.

Only the market crossroads  -lanterned cupolas rising from a nest of semidomes  -marked the last arcades where the trade of China, India, Afghanistan and Russia had mingled across 24 covered acres. Now, in place of the early exotica,   -the camels hair and silks, the porcelain and Tartar gold, the suits of chain mail, matchblocks and Khorasan swords, you see only sequin-splashed frocks and slippers.

The old Soviet empire it seems has turned everyone poor. Sad traders peer from their kiosks like glove-puppets, or threaded the bazaars with a predatory vigilance. In late 90s they had almost nothing to sell. Once the name ''Bukhara'' had been synonymous lustrous dyed silks and the Rugs of the Turcomans who traded here; and carpets of Persian design were woven on domestic looms all over the city. But under Stalin, such home industries became criminal. Mass production laid a dead hand on all the old crafts. 

One building, and one era, overbear Bukhara like a disfiguring memory. For more than a thousand years, successive incarnations of a vast-palace fortress, the Ark, have loomed against the north-west walls. Shored up in secrecy, its final, monstrous embodiment is withdrawn from human reach on a dishevelled glacis, which the binding timber -ends speckle like blackheads, and the ramparts which crown it are: 40 -foot scarps. 

No matter which direction you walk on, you are walking over the debris of all Bukhara's later history. After the Mongol sack, the city had revived under the house of Tamerlane, and when the Uzbeks seized it in 1506, they continued its splendour for another hundred years.

And now its war memorials stand. The inscribed names exceed 10,000. Weeds are pushing through paving-slabs. Nearby  is the plinth where Lenin had stood. It rises in a ghostly white platform,   -abandoned, as if he had just stepped down from it in the sunlight and walked away.

With respectful dedication to The Lost Heart of Asia!

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless