Istaravshan

Istaravshan claims a very long history. Local tradition and Tajik scholarship identify it with Cyropolis, the town said to have been founded by Cyrus the Great of Persia in the 6th century BC and stormed by Alexander the Great in 329 BC during his campaign on the Syr Darya, and the town celebrated its 2,500th anniversary in 2002 on that basis. The identification is debated, but excavation on the Mug Teppa mound has shown occupation reaching back into antiquity.

In the early medieval centuries this was part of Ustrushana, a principality between Sogdiana and the Fergana Valley whose capital, Bunjikat, lay near present-day Shahriston. The region was absorbed into the Muslim world in the 8th and 9th centuries, and the town grew as a market and craft centre on the roads linking Samarkand, Khujand and the Fergana towns. Its finest surviving monuments, among them the blue-domed mosque and madrasa known as Kok Gumbaz, belong to the later Islamic centuries.

Under the name Ura-Tyube the town was fought over by the khanates of Bukhara and Kokand before Russian forces took it in 1866. It became a district centre of Soviet Tajikistan, gaining light industry, schools and blocks of flats while keeping its old quarters and its craft trades largely intact. In 2000 the government restored a historical form of its name, and it has been Istaravshan since. Today it is one of the larger towns of Sughd province and one of the most visited for its architecture.

Istaravshan is known across Tajikistan as a town of craftsmen. Its knives, made with forged blades and decorated handles, are the best-known product and are sold from dedicated rows in the bazaar; woodcarvers, embroiderers, skullcap makers, potters and metalworkers also keep workshops here, often as family trades passed down through generations. The reputation is old enough that Istaravshan knives are given as gifts far beyond the town.

Life is organised around the mahalla, the neighbourhood, whose households gather for weddings, funerals and religious holidays and share the costs and work of them. Weddings are large and public, with music, drums and the shashmaqom and folk repertoire of the region, and a bride's dowry traditionally includes embroidered suzani hangings. Nowruz in March is the great festival of the year, with sumalak, a sweet wheat-germ paste, cooked overnight in enormous pans while women sing beside them.

Religion here is Sunni Islam, practised within the framework the state sets, and the town's old mosques and mausoleums remain places of prayer and visiting rather than museums. Both Tajik and Uzbek are widely spoken, reflecting the mixed population of the Fergana fringe, and Russian is still understood by older people. Manners are formal and unhurried: greetings with a hand on the heart, tea before business, and a reluctance to let a guest leave hungry.

About 65,000 people live in the town itself, with many more in the surrounding district of irrigated villages. The economy rests on farming, trade and small manufacturing: orchards and vineyards on the plain, market gardening, food processing, textiles and the craft workshops. As in the rest of Tajikistan, a large share of working-age men spend part of the year working abroad, mostly in Russia, and the money they send home pays for houses, weddings and schooling.

The day begins early. The bazaar is busiest in the first hours after dawn, when produce arrives from the villages, and quietens through the hot afternoon before a second round of activity in the evening. Lunch is the main meal, tea is drunk all day, and summer evenings bring families out to the parks and into shaded courtyards. Children walk to neighbourhood schools, and most households keep a vegetable plot, a vine and a few fruit trees.

Housing is a mix of single-storey courtyard houses in the old quarters and Soviet-era blocks near the centre, with new brick houses spreading onto the edges of town. Everyday concerns are familiar across the country: work and the cost of living, electricity supply in winter, irrigation water in summer, and the condition of the roads. The town's craft economy has been helped by domestic tourism, and Tajik visitors come from Khujand and Dushanbe for the knives and the monuments.

Istaravshan eats the food of the Fergana Valley, shared with neighbouring Uzbekistan. Oshi palov — rice cooked with mutton, yellow carrot, onion and cumin in a cast-iron kazan — is the dish of weddings and guests, and every family has an opinion on how it should be made. Non, the round flatbread stamped in the centre and baked against the wall of a clay tandoor, appears at every meal and is never placed face down.

The tandoor also turns out sambusa, triangular pastries of minced mutton, onion and fat, and the grills of the bazaar produce shashlik, skewers of mutton and tail fat cooked over charcoal. Manti, large steamed dumplings, and lagman, hand-pulled noodles in a broth of meat and vegetables, are the other everyday dishes, alongside shorbo, a plain mutton and vegetable soup. Qurutob, the national dish of layered flatbread, yoghurt and vegetables, is eaten here as elsewhere in Tajikistan.

Fruit is the pride of the area. Apricots, grapes, melons, peaches, pomegranates and cherries ripen through the summer, and much of the crop is dried on rooftops for the winter. The bazaar's dried-fruit and nut rows sell apricots, raisins, walnuts and almonds by the sack. Green tea is drunk constantly, served in bowls with bread, sweets and dried fruit, and chalop, chilled yoghurt with dill and chopped vegetables, cools the hottest weeks.