Nurata

Nurata stands where underground water from the Nuratau reaches the surface at the edge of the Kyzylkum, and that spring is the reason for the town. The oasis lay on a branch of the caravan roads between Bukhara, Samarkand and the steppe to the north, and it marked the line where settled farming gave way to the grazing grounds of nomadic herders. Local tradition, repeated by guides and by many Uzbek visitors, holds that the earth fortress above the spring, called Nur, was built during Alexander the Great's campaign in Sogdiana in the 4th century BC; what survives are weathered clay ramparts and ditches on the hill, which have never been fully excavated.

With Islam the spring took on religious meaning. The pool below the mosque came to be regarded as holy, its fish protected by custom, and the complex of mosque, bath and shrine that grew around it made Nurata a pilgrimage stop for people from across the region. Under the Emirate of Bukhara it was a modest provincial town with a bazaar, orchards and a system of karez channels carrying water out to the fields.

Russian and then Soviet rule brought a road, a district administration and collective farms, and the town became a service centre for herding and cotton districts rather than a caravan halt. Its modern revival came with tourism after independence, when the road between Samarkand and Bukhara, the yurt camps in the dunes and the community homestays set up in the Nuratau valleys turned Nurata into a place travellers stop at on purpose. It is now part of Navoiy province, and the Nuratau-Kyzylkum Biosphere Reserve in the mountains behind it protects what is said to be the only surviving wild population of the Severtsov's wild sheep.

Nurata's identity is built around its spring. Uzbek families arrive in coaches and shared cars to pray at the mosque, drink the water, and look at the fish swimming in the pool, which no one takes or harms; the custom is old enough that the fish are part of how the town describes itself. Vendors around the square sell bread, sweets and small souvenirs to pilgrims, and the atmosphere on a spring weekend is closer to a family outing than to a solemn shrine.

The area is also a meeting point of two ways of life. The town and the irrigated fields belong to the settled world of the oasis; the desert beyond belongs to herders who still keep sheep, goats and camels in the Kyzylkum and who supply the yurt camps with their tents, milk and skills. In the Nuratau valleys to the north, Tajik-speaking villages have their own dialect, songs and long tradition of walnut and orchard farming, and homestay hosts there often speak of themselves as mountain people rather than as townsfolk.

Craft survives in embroidery above all. Nurata suzani, worked in fine silk stitches on cotton with characteristic curling floral motifs, is known well beyond the district and is still made at home by women who sell through the bazaar and guesthouses. Manners are those of rural Uzbekistan: greetings with a hand on the heart, elders served first, shoes left at the door, and a guest never allowed to leave without tea.

Something over 30,000 people live in Nurata, the administrative centre of a district of scattered villages in Navoiy province. Most housing is single-storey, built around courtyards with a vine and a raised wooden platform for sitting and eating, and the town spreads along the road rather than upwards. Uzbek is the language of the town; Tajik is spoken in many of the mountain villages.

Work is divided between farming, herding and, increasingly, tourism. Irrigated plots around the town grow wheat, vegetables, melons and fruit; flocks of sheep and goats graze the stony foothills and the desert margins; and families in the Nuratau make a living from walnuts, apples and honey. Guesthouses, homestays, drivers, cooks and camel handlers now form a season-long industry that runs from April to October, and a share of the district's young men work in Russia or in the mining towns of Navoiy province and send money home.

The day begins early, with the bazaar and the bread ovens busy soon after dawn and work in the fields done before the heat. Afternoons in summer are spent indoors or under shade, and the evening brings people out to the square around the spring. Water is the constant concern — the supply from the mountains is limited and irrigation draws heavily on it — along with the slow depopulation of the higher villages as young families move down to the towns.

Cooking here is plain, mutton-based and generous. Plov, the rice pilaf with mutton and carrot, appears at every celebration and is cooked in enormous kazans for weddings. Shurpa, a broth of mutton with potato, carrot and onion, is the everyday soup; shashlik is grilled over charcoal at the bazaar and the roadside; and dimlama, a slow-cooked pot of meat and vegetables layered in a sealed pan, is common in homes. Samsa, pastry triangles filled with mutton and onion and baked against the wall of a tandoor, are sold hot around the shrine.

Bread comes from clay tandoors and is treated with respect, broken by hand and never laid upside down. Dairy is the mark of the desert and the mountains: fresh and soured milk, home-made butter, and qurt, hard salty balls of dried strained yoghurt carried by herders. Camel's milk from the Kyzylkum is drunk fresh or fermented as chal, and yurt camps often offer a bowl to guests.

The Nuratau valleys supply walnuts, apples, apricots, grapes and mulberries, dried in the sun for the winter, and honey from village hives is a prized gift. Melons ripen through late summer and are sold in piles at the roadside. Green tea, poured and returned to the pot before serving, accompanies everything, sweetened with lumps of navat sugar and drunk from wide bowls rather than cups.