Amid the Winter’s Snow

On the day of the first heavy snow in Tashkent, I went out to the former Abdul Kassim Medressah, which now houses artisans’ workshops and shops selling craft work from around Uzbekistan. The city looks very different under a fresh coating of snow.

The Medressah is an attractively simple building from the early nineteenth century. The shops and workshops are housed in what were once students’ cells around the Medressah courtyard. The doors were firmly shut against the cold but we went inside into the warmth, ducking our heads to go through the low stone doorways, and examined miniature paintings, pottery, painted boxes, woodcarving and silk scarves.

I was especially impressed by one of the workshops where the artist was selling miniature paintings, some copies of Timurid originals, some from his own imagination, all with a fantastic detail that needed to be looked at through a magnifying glass to be fully appreciated. One beautiful picture showed a scene from Navoi’s “the Language of the Birds”, with various different birds clustered around the hoopoe. The birds were portrayed in a way that conveyed their character as participants in the story but at the same time was accurate enough that they could have been illustrations in a bird book.

The best work in these crafts workshops finds a balance between the traditional and the contemporary, using traditional styles and materials to produce something that is attractive and useful today. It’s the same idea that is behind a fashion project supported by the British Council that brings together the Tashkent Textile Institute and the London College of Fashion, the idea of making something that is modern without being cut adrift from the past, or traditional without being just a copy of something that belongs to another time.