Osh

Osh is among the oldest cities in Central Asia, with settlement traced back more than three thousand years and a market that has been held on roughly the same ground for some two thousand. Its position at the eastern mouth of the Fergana Valley made it a natural halt on the Silk Road routes running towards Kashgar over the Tian Shan, and the rock of Sulayman Mountain above the town drew pilgrims long before Islam arrived. In 1510 the Timurid prince Babur, who later founded the Mughal Empire, is said to have built a small retreat on the highest peak, and the rebuilt version still stands there.

By the 18th and 19th centuries the town belonged to the Khanate of Kokand, which governed the Uzbek traders and farmers of the valley and the Kyrgyz herders of the mountains above. Russian forces took the region in the 1870s, and under Soviet rule Osh grew into an industrial and administrative centre with textile mills, silk works and blocks of flats, while the border-drawing of the 1920s cut the valley between three republics and left enclaves scattered across the south.

Independence in 1991 came a year after deadly clashes over land between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in Osh and Uzgen. In June 2010 far worse violence broke out in Osh and Jalal-Abad, killing several hundred people, most of them Uzbek, and displacing tens of thousands; rebuilding and an uneasy calm followed. The city has kept growing through trade and migration, and in 2025 much of the old riverside bazaar was moved to a new site a few kilometres north.

Osh is a bazaar city, and the market sets its manners: greeting, tea, bargaining and long conversation are part of business rather than an interruption of it. It is also mixed, with Kyrgyz and Uzbek communities living side by side along with smaller groups, and Kyrgyz heard far more than Russian in the streets. The mix shows in architecture — the walled courtyard houses of the old mahallas beside Soviet blocks — and in food, music and dress.

The city is more openly religious than Bishkek. Mosques are full on Fridays, headscarves are common, and Sulayman Mountain is the centre of a pilgrimage tradition that predates Islam and has absorbed it: people climb to the shrines to pray for health and children, tie cloth to branches, and slide across a polished rock said to cure back pain. UNESCO calls the mountain the most complete example of a sacred mountain anywhere in Central Asia.

Southern identity is strong. Osh thinks of itself as the capital of the south and as an older, more Central Asian place than the northern capital, and the north-south division runs through national politics. Hospitality is taken seriously: guests are fed generously, elders are served first, and family celebrations — weddings, the first haircut, the anniversary of a death — fill courtyards and restaurants with long tables. Felt hats, embroidered skullcaps and bright bazaar cloth are everyday dress as much as costume.

About 320,000 people live in Osh, making it Kyrgyzstan's second city, and the built-up area spreads well beyond the official limits into surrounding villages. It is a low city of one- and two-storey houses, tree-lined avenues and Soviet apartment blocks, with the Ak-Buura river and the rock ridge as its landmarks.

Trade is the economy: wholesale and retail markets, cross-border commerce with Uzbekistan through Kara-Suu and Dostuk, transport and small workshops, together with farming on the irrigated land around the city. Many households depend on money sent home by relatives working in Russia, which pays for house-building and weddings and shows in the half-finished concrete along the outskirts. Universities and colleges, including Osh State University, bring students from across the south.

The day starts very early, particularly in summer, when the bazaars are busiest soon after dawn and the afternoon heat empties the streets; evenings bring families out to the riverside and the parks. Water, electricity in winter, traffic and dust are the usual complaints, along with jobs for the young. The memory of 2010 is present but rarely discussed with strangers, and relations between communities are handled with care.

Osh eats the Fergana table, which is closer to Uzbek than to the mountain cooking of northern Kyrgyzstan. Plov — paloo in Kyrgyz — is the central dish: rice cooked with mutton, carrot, onion and cumin in a wide cast-iron kazan, and the version made with the short rice grown around Uzgen, north-east of the city, is the most famous in the country. It is a dish for guests and celebrations, and plov houses often sell out before the afternoon.

Around it are samsa, pastries of chopped mutton and onion baked against the wall of a tandoor; shashlik, skewers of mutton grilled over coals and served with raw onion and vinegar; manty, large steamed dumplings; and laghman, hand-pulled noodles served in broth or fried with vegetables. Flat round nan bread comes from tandoors in every neighbourhood and is treated with respect, never placed face down. Uyghur and Dungan dishes appear on many menus.

The bazaar sells the region's produce: apricots, melons, pomegranates and grapes in season, and the walnuts of the forests to the north, dried fruit, and kurut, hard salty balls of strained yoghurt eaten as a snack. Green tea poured into small bowls accompanies everything, chalap — a salted, fizzy yoghurt drink — is drunk cold in summer, and on the high pastures south of the city fermented mare's milk, kymyz, is made from late spring to summer.