Boysun

The valley around Boysun has been occupied for a very long time. In 1938 the archaeologist Alexey Okladnikov excavated the rock shelter of Teshik-Tash in the hills nearby and found the burial of a Neanderthal child surrounded by ibex horns — a discovery that put the district into every account of Central Asian prehistory and is still argued over by specialists. The limestone above the town is riddled with caves, among them Boybuloq, the deepest known cave in Central Asia, which Soviet and later Russian speleological expeditions have pushed further into over decades.

The town grew where the mountain route between the Kashkadarya steppe and the Surxondaryo plain crosses a fertile bowl of orchards and pasture. It was part of ancient Bactria, then of the successive Islamic states of the region, and by the nineteenth century belonged to the Emirate of Bukhara, whose grip on these upland districts was loose. Distance from any capital is much of the reason its customs survived: songs, healing rituals, epic recitation, weaving and embroidery persisted here after they faded in the cities, and in 2001 UNESCO proclaimed the Boysun cultural space a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.

Soviet rule brought schools, a hospital, collective farms and the exploration of coal and other minerals in the district. Since independence the biggest change has been the railway: the Tashguzar–Boysun–Kumkurgan line carries traffic between Tashkent and the Afghan border entirely within Uzbekistan and passes through the town.

Boysun's reputation rests on what its people have kept. The district's repertoire of epic songs performed by bakhshi singers to the two-stringed dutar, its wedding and seasonal rituals, its shamanic healing practices and its weaving and embroidery were the basis of the 2001 UNESCO proclamation, and later of the district's inscription on the wider lists of intangible heritage. Ethnographers and folklorists have been coming here since Soviet times, and the attention has helped keep the traditions in daily use rather than on a stage.

The best-known expression of this is the spring folklore festival held in and around the town, which brings singers, wrestlers, horsemen and craftspeople together and draws visitors from across Uzbekistan. Horse games, including the rough contest played with a goat carcass known here as kupkari or uloq, belong to weddings and holidays as much as to festivals.

The population is mixed: Uzbeks of once semi-nomadic tribal descent, Tajik speakers in the mountain villages, and families with roots in the wider south. Households are large, extended and organised around the mahalla, the neighbourhood association that arranges weddings, funerals and mutual help. Religious practice is unshowy but steady, and shrines in the hills attract local pilgrimage. Visitors are treated as guests of the whole street, which usually means more tea and more food than they expected.

About 28,000 people live in the town, with several times that number in the surrounding district of villages, pastures and orchards. Life runs on agriculture: wheat and barley on the slopes, orchards of apricot, apple and walnut, vineyards, and above all sheep and goats taken up to high pasture in summer. Honey from the mountain villages is a local speciality and a useful cash crop, as are dried fruit and nuts.

The day starts early, with the bazaar busiest in the first hours after dawn and the tea houses along the road filling with drivers and traders. Public jobs — the school, the hospital, the district administration — and the railway account for much of the salaried work. Coal and other minerals have been worked in the district, and a steady trickle of trade moves through on the Termez road.

The pressures here are those of rural southern Uzbekistan: low incomes, large families and young men leaving for work in Tashkent, Kazakhstan or Russia, with their remittances visible in new brick houses and metal roofs. Water, electricity and gas supply can be uneven in winter, and snow can cut off the higher villages for days. Tourism is small but growing, built on the festival, the mountains and the caves, and a handful of families now take paying guests.

Boysun eats the food of the southern mountains, which is plainer and more mutton-centred than the elaborate cooking of Samarkand or Bukhara. Tandir go'sht, mutton sealed into a clay tandir oven and roasted slowly in its own fat, is the dish for a celebration, and shashlik grilled over charcoal is the everyday version. Shurpa, a broth of mutton with potato, carrot and onion, appears at almost every table, and plov of rice, meat and carrots cooked in a cast-iron kazan is what a wedding or a funeral feast requires.

Dairy from the flocks shapes the rest. Qurt, strained yoghurt salted and rolled into hard white balls, dries in the sun and keeps for months, and it is eaten as a snack or crumbled into soup; fresh soft cheeses, sour milk and clotted cream go with bread at breakfast. That bread is obi non, a round disc stamped in the centre and baked against the wall of a tandir, and it is bought daily.

The orchards supply the sweet end: apricots eaten fresh in June and dried for winter, apples, walnuts, mulberries and grapes, along with mountain honey. Green tea is drunk all day, poured first back into the pot and then into small bowls, and it is set in front of a guest before anything else is discussed.