Silk carpets
Hand-knotted carpets of naturally dyed silk — in Samarkand you can follow the whole journey from cocoon to finished rug in a single workshop.
Samarkand paper
Creamy paper made by hand from mulberry bark and burnished with stone — the writing material of Islam’s golden age, revived in the village of Konigil.
© Enric, CC BY-SA 4.0
Paper of a golden age
In the 9th and 10th centuries Samarkand paper ranked among the finest writing materials in the Islamic world. Al-Tha‘alibi, a contemporary of Avicenna, wrote that it had displaced Egyptian papyrus and the parchment used before it, being ‘very beautiful, delicate and most convenient to write on’. From Samarkand the craft reached Baghdad, and from there spread across the Islamic world as far as al-Andalus.
Legend long held that the secret was brought by Chinese papermakers captured at the Battle of Talas in 751, but archaeological finds show that paper was known in the region well before then, and historians now treat the story as apocryphal. The Mughal emperor Babur noted in his memoirs that the best paper in the world was made in mills turned by the waters flowing from Konigil.
Reborn in Konigil
Factory paper drove the handmade product out in the 19th century and the old technique was forgotten. In the late 1990s the brothers Zarif and Islom Mukhtarov set up a workshop in Konigil, on Samarkand’s outskirts beside the Siyob canal, and after several years of experiments brought the craft back to life. At the Meros workshop the bark of young mulberry shoots is boiled, its inner fibre pounded by water-driven hammers into pulp, then scooped onto a sieve, dried and burnished with marble or horn.
Because it is never bleached the paper has a warm, creamy tone and lasts exceptionally well; it is used to restore old manuscripts and by miniature painters. Visitors can watch every stage, try making a sheet themselves and buy notebooks, masks and dolls made of the paper.
Crafts
Crafts
Suzani and embroidery
Bold red and black rosettes on a white ground — the Samarkand suzani; alongside it, Urgut’s embroidered skullcaps and the work of today’s needlewomen.
Ceramics
From Afrasiyab bowls lettered in Kufic script to the glazed platters of Urgut’s potters, Samarkand ceramics span more than a thousand years.
Woodcarving
From the patterned doors of Gur-e-Amir and Rukhobod to the pillars of neighbourhood houses, Samarkand’s carvers have cut geometry and arabesque into wood for centuries.
Ganch carving
Snow-white patterns carved in ganch, a mix of gypsum and clay, and the gilded kundal of Tilya-Kori — the inner world of Samarkand’s monuments.
Tiles and majolica
The carved glazed terracotta of Shah-i-Zinda, the mosaics of the Registan portals and the tiles of Gur-e-Amir’s dome — the craft behind Samarkand’s famous blue.
