Mahalla and hashar
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.
Navruz
21 March, the spring equinox — a New Year welcomed with cauldrons of sumalak, green samsa, street festivities and neighbourhood clean-ups.
© Shahriyor06, CC BY-SA 4.0
A festival thousands of years old
Navruz falls on the spring equinox, and 21 March is a public holiday in Uzbekistan. It has been celebrated in what is now Uzbekistan for at least two thousand years, and Samarkand’s link to it is ancient: on the south wall of the famous mid-7th-century Afrasiyab murals, scholars identify a procession honouring the ancestors during the Nowruz festival. The paintings can be seen in the Afrasiyab Museum.
Under Soviet rule the festival was not officially recognised and in the 1980s was actively restricted; after independence it became a national celebration. Since 2009 Navruz has been on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, inscribed by Uzbekistan together with other countries.
Customs
Before Navruz, homes and streets are spring-cleaned in communal hashar work days, new clothes are bought and relatives and neighbours visit one another. Women stay up all night cooking sumalak, halim simmers in cauldrons, and spring greens go into koʻk somsa and koʻk chuchvara dumplings. Folk songs such as ‘Boychechak’ (Snowdrop) and ‘Sumalak’ are sung, and kurash wrestling and folk games are staged.
In Samarkand the holiday brings festivities and concerts to parks and mahallas, and in recent years to the Eternal City complex as well. If someone offers you a taste of sumalak, accept — it is a gesture of goodwill and a wish for plenty.
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.
