My old "New Uzbekistan”

BERLIN, SAMARKAND AND TASHKENT

Rough thoughts after 7 years in Germany about 16 days in Samarkand and Tashkent

I walked along a wide concrete path. On either side was a garden with young trees. It was evening, about six o'clock. Hundreds of people were walking toward the stage. They were all locals with almost no tourists among them. Not far away there was a river, the Rowing Canal. A couple of seagulls were screaming and flying low. I was glad that people were walking in the green area - so few in my hometown. I was glad that there was foreign music playing on the stage in addition to our local motives. This was Samarkand City, the jewel of New Uzbekistan. After ten scalding days in Tashkent and Samarkand, I felt that there was a place where people could walk around and enjoy themselves. When I saw the stage and thousands of people in front of it, something inside me smiled. Could we do it now, too? Permission was granted.

There were more artisan workshops waiting for me a kilometre away. My aunt told me a lot about them a couple of days before my visit: that food and lodging were paid for them, that only families were invited, that most of them were from Bukhara, that the concept struck her. When I reached - this is a year after the opening of this place - the first thing I saw was the quality of the buildings. How much money does it all cost? About forty structures of large halls, restaurants and small workshops - standing on a piece of land that is surrounded by water. The name of this majestic and realised idea is "Eternal City." When I reached it, at first I thought the passages reminded me of Bukhara. I entered through a portal into the rows where food and spices were sold. But afterwards, in the small square between the workshops and other buildings, I saw pandemonium. There was music playing. And there was dancing in the center. It was three women and two men. The movements were soulful. The crowd could feel their energy. And if the first (of the ones I saw) dance was performed only by this ensemble, the next one was with the audience. I hadn't seen that before. And I had lived in Samarkand for 19 years. Later I asked them how everything was arranged, when the guys from the ensemble were sitting on tapchans near the small square. They turned out to be actors from the Khamid Alimjan Theater. They work from 6 to 22:30 p.m., when everything closes. I also had the pleasure of talking to Timur, the son of an artisan from Bukhara, who told me that the host families live in a hotel nearby. Food and lodging are paid for by the state. The young guy in his 20s clearly wants to do something of his own, new. He was drawing oriental original patterns when I distracted him. Symbolically, the conversation crossed over into his nostalgia for Bukhara. He complained that all his days are spent only on this island and he never saw the city of Samarkand. It was already ten o'clock in the evening when I walked back to the car. A pleasant chill that was maybe a couple or three degrees below my hotel room temperature was all around. The trees were being watered at this time: chestnuts, acacias, oaks... And wide lawns. How much does it cost a day to maintain all this? How much does all that water cost? Where do they get it from? And, most importantly, how long does it last? I've heard a number of about €200 a day. I don't believe it. In Tashkent City, I was told, they introduced an entrance fee - about two euros.

Is the park a right or a privilege in a desert country with recent dust storms? I saw two such storms in my 16-day vacation, and though they can’t be compared to one in September '19, I learned that nature gives us a well-deserved neck slaps on the wrist in unexpected places for not agreeing as nations on a world level, for the GDP, not the percentage of greenery or air quality, metric that we are chained to.

Someone blames developers that build everywhere. No doubt, Berlin is forever in scaffolding and cranes. But someone does cut down, already bald, the thicket of Uzbekistan. I wonder what the gardens looked like under Timur in the 15th century. Why did the historian write about melons in many gardens? Is it correct to compare it to Germany, where the forest has a sacred meaning, when we have deadly deserts instead of forests? Well to hell with scale (although maybe it's better to conserve what little there is)! Colleagues say that in Berlin you can't uproot a tree at will without the approval of the state, the authorities, even when it's growing on your property. Okay trees, but how often have you encountered digging up ancient Muslim cemeteries? They used to be located outside the city borders, near the gates. There is an Iranian mahalla in Samarkand on the "povorot" with its own shrine. The locals call it Murod Avliyo. Developers decided to construct an auxiliary building, next to a small mosque, and dug a centuries-old cemetery. The sensitive inhabitants of the mahalla even spoke of a spirit that came at night on the days of the vicious exhumation. Tall, with a beard and several children... But you, like me, should not believe in spirits! But what about the disturbed bones! Is that allowed? Does religion permit it? What about memory? What about respect - if not memory - for the passed away?

I came to Uzbekistan for my friend's wedding and my bobo's (grandfather in Uzbek) birthday. On the day of the registration, I came to pick up my friend to get him married. And then I learned for the first time in my life that there can be no light in the Uzbek capital for more than one day. There was often no light in Samarkand in the years when I lived there. We even used to celebrate a couple of New Years by candlelight. That's the regions! And here - "poytahtimiz", i.e. "our capital", in Uzbek. But I was struck by the unanimity of my relatives and friends in explaining what had happened: the line had probably blown out. Later, the power was cut off in the house where I stayed, also for almost a day. And then at our family friends' houses, so they couldn't work from home. I got scared. After all, there is a principle of redundancy, which is when there is not one station and not one cable, but several, so that in case of an accident you can switch to a working branch. Or maybe the principle works, but the system is overloaded? After all, Central Asia is a closed system, where we share limited resources with our neighbours. And the most important resource is water. I remember when I participated in various activities of UNDP, a UN subsidiary organisation, the manager of one of the projects talked about how we do not know how to save water. She gave the example of a man who shaves and opens the screen to the full. The water flows, and he slowly does his thing and a huge amount of this precious resource leaks down the drain, unused. And this man pays next to nothing. After all, he has no motivation to conserve water either. Also this time I myself saw people leaving watermelons in their tubs to cool them down. Living here in Berlin for eight years, and having once paid a €700 water bill, I understand the absurdity of the situation. Here - water surrounds both Berlin and Germany, they have access to the sea and many rivers flow through here, while in Uzbekistan there are few rivers and no sea. In Germany, water is expensive and prices are increasing day by day. But what will happen if you raise the price of water in Uzbekistan...

In the first days I met with guys who read my telegram channel. Almost all of them wanted to go abroad. I told them that not everything is great overseas, that it's difficult, and that it requires certain skills. I told them that in Germany, for example, there is almost no sun for six months. I told them that in the summer the sun is too much and it hardly ever goes down. And in winter, on the contrary, there is almost no sun, it gets bright at ten and it gets dark at three. I told them about a different attitude to life among Germans. Told them that the German people more encourage individualism, the independence of each person, even from the family. That is why children quickly leave families. One acquaintance said about her grandfather - "he is just an old nice man" ... I did not think that this had any effect on their desire to leave. And they weren't the only ones who wanted to leave, these people in their 20s and 22s. My aunt told me how the people who fill out the Green Card lottery paperwork go around universities and buy people's documents, pay money for every passport the university is willing to give them. Then they take those passports, fill out the Green Card for those people, and a little later, when one of them wins, they contact the winners and ask for, well, about $2,000 so they can go to America and get a unique code for the embassy. Many people in Uzbekistan play Green Card. But few people win. One story in particular is shocking. It's not even really a story, it's some kind of crazy trend. In my British newspaper, The Economist, I kept reading about problems at the American-Mexican border because of immigrant refugees. And then they told me that there are organisations that charge a few thousand dollars and help people get into America across that border. They told me how in these very mahallas people sell their last things and give the money in the hope of getting there, to this cherished America.

This time I came to be more with my family and loved ones. I saw all this transformation to the New Uzbekistan. I saw this negligence in the treatment of water and trees. I saw this unscrupulousness on the part of the developers. And this old fierce desire of many to leave at all costs. Or if not to leave themselves, then by all means to send their children abroad. I saw this, and I was, of course, worried about what would happen next. But at the same time for some reason I felt very happy in my homeland in Samarkand. At eight o'clock in the evening it was night, as it should be in the summer. At five in the morning the sun came out. I ate a flatbread chap-chak (a thin, airy flatbread that is only good in the first hours) with kaymak. I snacked on a tasty meal of Samarkand flatbread. Every day I saw my relatives. While here in Berlin I live my little family with my wife and son, in these little 16 days I was able to see my loved ones, all the people who raised me. When I was driving from Samarkand to Tashkent, I saw many stork nests on high-voltage poles. A family was proudly perched in each of them. I involuntarily thought that this is the real symbol of Uzbekistan. A family that clings tightly to one another.

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