Shahrisabz

The town began as Kesh, one of the oldest settled places in the Qashqadaryo valley, watered by streams from the Hisar mountains and standing on the road between Samarkand and Bactria. It was a town of the Sogdian world, taken by the Arabs in the 8th century, and it kept a reputation for fertility and greenery that eventually gave it its Persian name, Shahrisabz, the green city.

Its importance is bound up with one family. Timur was born near Kesh into the Barlas confederation — later Timurid histories give 1336, though sources from his own lifetime point to the late 1320s — and after he gained control of the western Chagatai Khanate by 1370 he treated the town as his home and ceremonial capital. From 1380 he built Ak-Saray, the White Palace, on a scale intended to overwhelm; its gateway, faced in ochre and glazed brick in two shades of blue, spanned 22 metres, and the two broken pylons left standing, still 38 metres high, are only the sides of it. Work went on until 1404. He also raised a burial complex for his family, the Dorus Saodat, where a crypt was prepared for Timur himself, almost filled by a stone casket inscribed for him, though he was buried in Samarkand; his eldest son Jahangir, who died in 1376, was buried in the town. His grandson Ulugh Beg added the Kok Gumbaz mosque in 1435.

The Shaybanids, and later the Emirate of Bukhara, reduced Kesh to a provincial town; the palace was destroyed in the 16th century by the forces of Abdullah Khan II of Bukhara, and neglect did the rest. In 1870 Russian troops helped the emir of Bukhara take the town. After independence the town was restored as a national monument to Timur, and the historic centre was listed by UNESCO in 2000. A sweeping redevelopment in the 2010s cleared old neighbourhoods around the monuments for parks and hotels, drawing criticism from heritage bodies and concern from UNESCO at the loss of the medieval townscape.

Shahrisabz sees itself first as Timur's town, and that identity is everywhere: in the statue on the central axis, in the school names, in the ceremonies held on national holidays and in the confidence with which guides trace his family's story through the monuments. The link is a serious matter of local pride rather than a marketing line, and Timur's standing in Uzbekistan as founder of a golden age is taken for granted here.

Beneath that lies a rural, southern culture shared with the rest of Qashqadaryo. Many families descend from once semi-nomadic Uzbek tribes, and customs that faded in the big cities survive in the villages: large extended households, elaborate wedding cycles lasting days, and kupkari, the horseback contest for a goat carcass, played on winter and spring holidays before crowds of hundreds. Mountain villages to the east are partly Tajik-speaking.

Craft is dominated by embroidery. Shahrisabz suzani and the closely worked iroqi silk embroidery used on skullcaps are known across the country, and needlework is still taught at home and sold through the bazaar. Music at celebrations mixes doira frame drums with surnay pipes, loud enough to be heard streets away. Manners are formal in the southern way: hands on the heart at greeting, elders spoken to first, shoes left at the threshold, and bread treated as something close to sacred.

About 140,000 people live in Shahrisabz, making it the second town of Qashqadaryo province after Qarshi. The redevelopment of the 2010s reshaped the centre into boulevards, hotels and park, and moved many residents to newer districts on the edges; most of the town still lives in single-storey courtyard houses with vines, fruit trees and a raised platform for eating outdoors.

The economy is agricultural at its base — wheat, cotton, vegetables, grapes and orchard fruit from the irrigated valley, with sheep and cattle on the hill pastures — together with food processing, textiles and construction. Tourism is a steady but seasonal employer, concentrated on day visitors from Samarkand, and many households rely on remittances from relatives working in Russia or Tashkent. Wages in the south are among the country's lowest.

Daily rhythm runs early: the bazaar is at its height soon after dawn, offices and schools start in the morning, and the middle of the day is quiet in summer. Evenings fill the park, where families walk beside the fountains with the palace ruins lit behind them. The conversation among residents turns on water for the fields, gas and power supply in winter, the price of fruit at market, and the mixed results of the rebuilding that made the centre grand but emptied it of its old streets.

Southern Uzbek cooking is mutton-heavy and unhurried, and Shahrisabz shares the Qashqadaryo table. Tandir go'sht, a whole cut of mutton slow-roasted in a sealed clay oven until it falls apart, is the dish the region is proudest of; it is eaten with flat bread, raw onion and tea rather than with rice. Plov is cooked in huge kazans for weddings and holidays, and shurpa, a clear mutton broth with big pieces of potato, carrot and turnip, is the everyday soup.

Manti, steamed dumplings of minced lamb and onion, and samsa baked against the wall of a tandoor are sold from stalls near the bazaar, and grilled shashlik is everywhere at midday. Bread is round, stamped at the centre and baked in clay ovens; in the villages it is joined by patir, a richer layered flatbread, and by fresh sheep's cheese. Qurt, hard salty balls of dried strained yoghurt, is a herders' food that townspeople still eat by the handful.

The valley's orchards and vineyards give the food its sweetness. Apricots, grapes, mulberries, apples, pomegranates and melons ripen from early summer and are dried for winter; walnuts and almonds come down from the mountain villages along with honey, sold at stalls on the pass road. Green tea is drunk through the day, poured back into the pot three times and served in bowls, often with navat sugar crystals and a plate of dried fruit and nuts set out before anything else.