The fertile Silk Road valley few travellers know

BBC News

5 days ago

In recent years, Uzbekistan has embarked on an ambitious nationwide tourism boom that is transforming much of the country. But its beating heart is in a stunning and largely secluded valley.
It's dawn in Tashkent when the hulking Soviet-era train groans into the station and shudders to a halt. I've taken several crowded trains across Uzbekistan by now, but this one, bound for the eastern city of Margilan – the gateway to the Fergana Valley – is devoid of foreign travellers.
Inside, I sit beside a family of three. The matriarch, Gulnora, wears a striking headscarf patterned in bold geometric motifs. I point to it and say, "Ajoyib!", the Uzbek word for "great". She smiles and tells me she got it from the valley we're headed towards.
The day before, at Tashkent's blue-domed Chorsu Bazaar – one of Central Asia's oldest markets – I came across a mound of strawberries. Though small in size, they tasted like bursts of spring. Sticky-fingered, I asked the vendor through Google Translate, "Where are these grown?" He immediately answered, "Fergana."
On the train, I offer the last of my strawberries to the family. Gulnora smiles again and opens her own box in response. Inside is a rainbow of fresh and dried fruit: mulberries, apricots, apples, oranges and strawberries, all coming from the valley. She then pulls out a small ceramic quarter plate and arranges a small feast for us.
Cradled between the Tien Shan and Alay mountain ranges, the Fergana Valley stretches across eastern Uzbekistan, southern Kyrgyzstan and northern Tajikistan. It is one of Central Asia's most fertile regions; this lush intermountain basin, irrigated by the Naryn and Kara Darya rivers, has nurtured both crops and culture for centuries. It is also the birthplace of Uzbekistan's celebrated silk, ceramic and fruit production – a veritable holy trinity that forms the backbone of Uzbek culture.
Like much of modern-day Uzbekistan, the Fergana Valley lay along the fabled Silk Road, serving as a conduit for trade, ideas and artistry between China, Persia and the Mediterranean for centuries. In recent years, Uzbekistan has been leaning into its Silk Road roots with an ambitious new tourism drive that is seeing its historical trading hubs of Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva developing at breakneck speeds. But while relaxed visa restrictions, more connecting flights and the arrival of the nation's first major international biennial has placed Uzbekistan on more travellers' radars, critics point out that its flashy recreations of traditional Uzbek culture run the risk of turning it into a veritable Silk Road theme park.
Yet, away from the nation's sanitised new resorts and ersatz "ethnographic parks", a quieter cultural revival is unfolding in the Fergana Valley. This traditional hub of Uzbek culture receives only a fraction of the visitors who flock to Uzbekistan's major cities, but it remains a living museum of craftsmanship.
Ikat textiles from Margilan, one of the valley's oldest cities, are worn across Uzbekistan as skullcaps, headscarves and modern shirts and dresses. Meanwhile, ceramics from Rishtan are used in households across the country to serve food and tea. Fruit from the valley is a staple of Uzbek hospitality and cuisine, with dried apricots and raisins served alongside tea and pomegranates and cherries mixed into plov, Uzbekistan's national dish.
I put my hand on my heart, as many Uzbeks do, to thank Gulnora for her company on the train, and disembark in Margilan to find my guesthouse. Appropriately named Ikathouse, it is lined with traditional wooden divans draped in vibrant ikat textiles. I soon learn that the property belongs to the family of Rasuljon Mirzaahmedov, a fifth-generation ikat weaver who has collaborated with fashion designer Oscar de la Renta to create a collection featuring Fergana's signature adras (cotton-silk blend), atlas (satin ikat) and baghmal (velvet ikat).
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Margilan is the birthplace of Uzbek ikat, one of Central Asia's most complex textile traditions. Known locally as abrbandi, this silk-weaving tradition stretches back 1,000 years and was plied along the Silk Road as early as the 11th Century. While the ikat technique came to Uzbekistan after the Arab Conquest in the 7th Century, legend has it that Uzbekistan's long love of silk began in the 4th Century when a Chinese princess smuggled silkworm eggs in her hair when she eloped to the Fergana Valley. Unlike other places in Uzbekistan today, the labour-intensive weaving in Margilan is still done by hand.
At Yodgorlik, one of the city's oldest silk factories, silkworms munch steadily through piles of tender mulberry leaves, growing fat until they spin delicate cocoons of raw silk. "We only use cocoons that the larvae have left behind," explains Luiza Kamolova, Yodgorlik's director. "If we kill the larvae, we kill the future of Uzbekistan's silk."
The silk is then washed, stretched and tightly bundled into skeins and resist-dyed in successive stages with natural pigments: onion skins for yellow, madder roots for red, indigo leaves for blue and pomegranate skins for brown. Artisans bend and sweat over massive steaming cauldrons all day, coaxing colour into thread to build intricate patterns that emerge only after the fabric is woven. The result is a delicate, feathered blur that is worn across Uzbekistan in both traditional and contemporary fashion.
"If you think of Uzbek ikat, you think of Fergana Valley," says Charos Kamalova, founder of Teplo, a marketplace in Tashkent that showcases designers from across the nation. "Every designer working with traditional textiles uses fabrics from the region. It is just a given."
At Yodgorlik, a blue-and-white silk scarf is drying in the courtyard. "It is inspired by the colours of the Rishtan ceramics," an artisan tells me. "Have you been there yet?"
Two days later, I am welcomed to the city of Rishtan by a giant ceramic pot standing in the centre of a roundabout. According to locals, the sculpture is inspired by a local four-handled pitcher called bodiya chuqur bodiya used across Uzbekistan to boil water for tea. At Koron, a nearby ceramic showroom, I wander through rows of vibrant pottery: bowls, tiles, jugs and glazed pomegranates in every shade and size. "The pomegranate is sacred in Uzbekistan," says Ravshan Tojiddinov, Koron's founder. "We give it at weddings for fertility, paint it on ceramics for good luck and eat it to remember that life is both sweet and sharp!"
At Rustam Usmanov's workshop – the part studio, part school of one of Uzbekistan's most respected potters – I watch students sketch patterns beside stacks of half-finished vessels. "The clay we use in Rishtan has a natural reddish-yellow hue." Usmanov explains. "The entire city is quite literally built on it." This local clay is shaped and dried for up to 10 days, coated with white clay and then fired at 920C. Intricate plant-based motifs are then hand-painted before a second firing at 960-1000C locks in the alkaline glaze, revealing the intense blue tint that makes Uzbek pottery so distinct.
"Every Rishtan ceramic tells a story," one of Usmanov's students tells me. "Birds are for freedom, fruits for abundance, and the jug – for water, milk, wine – is life itself. These are not just decorations, they are blessings entering the Uzbek household."
Usmanov sees me photographing a yet-to-mature pomegranate hanging from a tree in his workshop's courtyard. He offers me some dried apricots, walnuts and apples, before echoing what Gulnora and so many others have told me: that the nearby city of Fergana boasts some of nation's best fruit.
Hopping out of a marshrutka (shared minibus) at Fergana, the valley's namesake city, I see fruit trees everywhere. Grapevines climb across mudbrick homes, cherries droop from overhanging branches and small apricot trees bloom in courtyards. On street corners, I see locals rinsing strawberries in communal basins, children chasing runaway plums down alleys and old women shaking mulberry trees to collect the berries for jam.
At the farmer's market, the offerings are dazzling: rows of sun-blushed peaches, crisp apples stacked like pyramids, purple grapes heavy on the vine and baskets of strawberries so fragrant they perfume the air. "Everything you see here was picked this morning," says a local vendor. "We grow for our families first, then the market, then whatever is left is sold for export."
Thanks to the valley's rich alluvial soils and long sunlit days, Fergana's strawberries, cherries, apples and pomegranates develop a natural sweetness and fragrance that is difficult to replicate, making Uzbekistan the top fruit-producing nation in Central Asia.
As I prepare to leave the valley, a small moment crystallises everything I have seen and tasted. At a roadside stall just outside the Margilan train station, an elderly woman wearing a dazzling ikat headscarf is selling freshly picked mulberries in gold-rimmed ceramic bowls, their juice staining the curved blue glaze. In that instant, I see how seamlessly Uzbekistan's holy trinity weaves itself into everyday life here.
In the Fergana Valley, ikat is more than a machine-made costume worn for photos in front of the glittering new Silk Road Samarkand; ceramics are more than just souvenirs to shelve back home; and fruit is more than a welcome platter at a new caravanserai-style hotel in Bukhara. In a world speeding towards curated visuals and surface-level experiences for tourists, Fergana feels like an antidote — and that's what makes it well worth the detour.
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