Samarkand in the Snow

By Rob Packer

I have the ability this week to show up in a place where the first snow of the year is falling. At the weekend, I was in the Chong-Kemin valley of Kyrgyzstan just after the first snow fell. Now I’m in Samarkand where Tuesday’s rain became Wednesday’s snow. It goes without saying that snow was the last kind of weather I was expecting. I’m sure the BBC’s weather website, which is the most accurate you can find for Kyrgyzstan, said that the average temperature was around 5°C or 10°C. Added to that, if you say “It’s Tashkent!” in Russian in Central Asia, it means it’s really hot. Neither of these mentions snow, so I’m glad I brought my walking boots.

The Registan with snow falling all around.

After a lot of trudging through the streets of Samarkand from the old city of Afrosiyob, which work badly in bad weather, I arrived at the Hazrut-Hizr Mosque, which has a wooden portico nothing like anything I’ve ever seen in a mosque before: a wooden, ribbed ceiling.

Fear of Disappointment

By Rob Packer

It’s taken fifteen years for me to reach Samarkand. If you’ve been dreaming of visiting somewhere for this long, you really hope it’s going to live up to all those expectations, especially if the version of you that first hatched the plan is a demanding 12-year-old.

I’ve written before that what drove me to learn Russian is my Romanian heritage. While I have no doubts that this was the main driving factor behind my decision, I’ve only started to realise recently that what sealed the decision was a BBC television documentary from 1994. It seems that the BBC runs an update on their Great Railway Journeys of the World every decade or so, and the second series of the early 90s was, like me at the time, filled with optimism for our new free world in a reunited Europe, although with the fickle memory of a 12-year-old I’m not sure that I saw more than one episode of the series. The episode that I saw was presented by Natalia Makarova, a ballet dancer and Soviet defector, who was followed by a camera crew on her first trip back to Russia after the fall of the USSR, and the first trip for her son who was born abroad. They travelled from St Petersburg to Tashkent via Moscow, Volgograd, Astrakhan and then Central Asia. My memory of the sections of the programme in Petersburg and Moscow is mixed up with news coverage of the time, but my visual memory of the post-Moscow part includes views of the statue of Mother Russia in Volgograd, collecting caviar from a sturgeon in Astrakhan and a trip to Samarkand’s Registan. It was the view of Samarkand that sealed my fate: I was obsessed and had to go there one day. Learning Russian would be my first step.

The Registan. When I first saw a film of here 15 years ago, it was sunny, but the madrasahs are impressive rain or shine.

As time went on and the promise of an open and democratic CIS faded, my enthusiasm for Russian faded too