Navruz
21 March, the spring equinox — a New Year welcomed with cauldrons of sumalak, green samsa, street festivities and neighbourhood clean-ups.
Mahalla and hashar
© Екатерина Борисова, CC BY-SA 4.0
The neighbourhood community gathered around its guzar square, which shares weddings and funerals and keeps its streets in shape through hashar — the backbone of Samarkand life.
A town within the town
Mahalla comes from an Arabic word for ‘place’; the poet Alisher Navoi called it ‘a little town within the city’. Historically, mahallas often formed around and were named after a trade — the jewellers’, coppersmiths’, cutlers’ or tanners’ quarter — a system that flourished under Timur. At the heart of each lies the guzar, with its mosque, teahouse, pool and shops.
Each mahalla was run by an elder, the oqsoqol, chosen by the community, and weddings, funerals, canal cleaning and street repairs were all shared tasks. The Soviet state curtailed the mahalla’s powers but never its customs, and after independence it was enshrined in law as a body of citizens’ self-government.
Hashar and life today
Hashar is unpaid communal work by neighbours. In the past it dug canals, raised houses and brought in harvests; today mahallas still hold collective clean-up days before Navruz, Independence Day and the Eid holidays. When a household has a wedding or a funeral, the whole mahalla turns out to help — one person hangs the cauldron, another carries tables and chairs, while women bake bread and lay the table.
The old part of Samarkand, with its narrow lanes, inward-looking courtyard houses and teahouses on the guzar, is the place to feel traditional mahalla life. Greet people as you walk: saying hello to strangers is normal here, and a chat often ends with an invitation to tea.
Traditions
Traditions
Hospitality and the dastarkhan
‘A guest ranks above your father’: in a Samarkand home the guest takes the seat of honour, and bread, tea, sweets and hot dishes reach the dastarkhan in turn.
Weddings (toʻy)
From matchmaking to the bride’s bow — an Uzbek wedding is a chain of rituals, and in Samarkand its story reaches back to the age of Timur.
Ramadan and the Eids
Iftar evenings in the month of fasting, the sweet table of Eid al-Fitr and the sacrifice of Eid al-Adha — festivals whose dates move each year with the lunar calendar.
The teahouse and the gap
Every mahalla’s teahouse is the daily club of its men, while the gap is a long-standing custom of friends taking turns to host one another.
Maqom and musical heritage
The subtle modes of Shashmaqom, Hoji Abdulaziz and his ‘Samarkand Ushshoq’, and the Sharq Taronalari festival — Samarkand’s musical memory.
