Fergana

Fergana is the youngest of the valley's cities. After Russian forces abolished the Khanate of Kokand in 1876 and created the Fergana Oblast, the military governor Mikhail Skobelev chose a site on empty land a few kilometres south of the old silk town of Margilan for a garrison and administrative centre, rather than build inside an existing Muslim city. The new town, laid out from 1877 on a fan of straight avenues radiating from the military and administrative quarter and planted with plane trees, was named New Margilan, then Skobelev in 1907 after the valley's first Russian military governor.

The town grew as the administrative and commercial capital of a cotton-growing province, with Russian officials, merchants, a garrison and, after the railway reached the valley, warehouses and cotton-cleaning plants. In 1924 it was renamed Fergana, after the valley itself, and under Soviet planning it acquired textile mills, a fertiliser works fed by gas piped from western Uzbekistan and an expanded oil refinery, the valley's first having been built near the city in 1908, which drew workers from across the Soviet Union.

Independence in 1991 left Fergana the capital of a densely populated and economically strained province. Many Russian and other Slavic residents left in the following decades, the valley saw unrest and, in 1989, ethnic violence against Meskhetian Turks that led to their mass departure, and the industrial plants shed jobs. In recent years the city has been repaved and replanted and tourism to the surrounding craft towns has grown, with Fergana serving as the base.

Fergana has a double character: a planned Russian town at its centre and a thoroughly Uzbek valley city around it. Russian is still widely spoken in the centre, where Soviet-era apartment blocks, a theatre and a regional museum stand among the avenues, while the outer mahallas keep the customs of the valley — the mahalla committee, the dawn wedding plov, Friday prayers and the dastarkhan spread for guests.

The city has no great monuments of its own, and its cultural life is that of a provincial capital: the regional drama theatre, concerts in the park, sports grounds and the celebrations at Navruz in March, when the parks fill and sumalak is cooked overnight. Its real cultural weight comes from the towns around it, whose weaving, pottery and knife-making are treated as national heritage, and whose masters are well known in the city.

Manners follow valley custom. Elders are greeted first, often with a hand placed on the heart; guests are pressed to eat and served tea before anything else; bread is broken by hand and never placed face down. Dress in the street is modest and rather formal, and alcohol, though sold openly, is drunk discreetly. The Fergana Valley is proud, hospitable and slightly wary of outsiders' assumptions about it, and interest in local crafts is the surest way into a conversation.

About 320,000 people live in the city, in a province of several million packed into irrigated land between the mountains. The centre is a mixture of Soviet apartment blocks and low pre-revolutionary houses; most families live further out in courtyard houses in mahallas that run without a clear break into villages and into Margilan a few kilometres north. Housing and land are in short supply and households are large.

The economy rests on administration, trade and industry. The oil refinery and chemical works, textile mills and food processing remain significant employers, the bazaar and small businesses absorb many more, and farming — cotton, wheat, fruit and vegetables under irrigation — surrounds the city. Wages are low, and labour migration to Russia, Kazakhstan and Tashkent is a fact of life in almost every extended family, with remittances paying for houses and weddings.

The day begins early, with the bazaar busiest before mid-morning and offices open by nine; the hottest hours empty the streets, and the avenues and parks fill again in the evening, when families walk, eat ice cream and sit under the trees. Water for irrigation, winter gas and electricity supply, air quality near the industrial zone and work for young people are the persistent local concerns.

Fergana eats valley food. Plov is cooked in the valley manner, with rice, mutton, carrot and onion simmered together in one cauldron so the grains absorb the stock and darken, and it is a midday dish; wedding plov is served in vast quantities early in the morning. Every teahouse has its own version, and cooks in the valley argue about the right rice, fat and proportion of carrot.

Lagman is the other staple: wheat noodles pulled by hand and served in a broth with mutton, peppers, tomato and herbs, or fried dry. Samsa, lamb or pumpkin pastries baked on the wall of a tandoor, are eaten through the morning; manti, large steamed dumplings, come with sour cream; chuchvara are small dumplings in soup; shurpa, a rich mutton and vegetable soup, is winter food; and shashlik is grilled over charcoal at the markets and in the evenings. Korean-style salads and pickles, sold by the weight at the bazaar, have been part of the local table since Korean deportees settled in Central Asia in the 1930s.

Bread is baked in the tandoor as obi non, round loaves stamped in the middle, different in each town of the valley. The orchards around the city supply apricots, cherries, peaches, grapes, pomegranates and melons in great quantity, eaten fresh in season and dried for winter, and piled in the market rows with nuts and halva. Green tea is drunk through the day, black tea in winter, and coffee shops have appeared along the central avenues in recent years.