Blog #2 - ‘Wooden Doors and Lace - Samarkand Artistic Traditions’

In the photo: the house with the brown wooden door - my home where I grew up (2019, Usman Yusupov Street, Samarkand, Uzbekistan)

Wooden doors have a special uniqueness; each door of an ancient building — like a door to a fairy tale — is decorated with wooden lace with national ornaments in the Arabic style (Samarkand wood carving). To this day, the city of Samarkand preserves this tradition of decorating gates and doors with carved wooden lace. As a child, I remember being so curious, walking by the neighbor's yard and looking through their lace door into their garden where I could see a shady yard with a grape arbor, a cozy bed of tapchan, and a wandering peacock.

  I lived in the ancient/old part of the city, where all the houses had private courtyards. Most of my neighbors were Tajiks. Since childhood, I have wanted to dress like my neighborhood Tajik girls. They were dressed in colorful, painted silk dresses made of khan-atlas, loose lozim pants, decorated with embroidered ribbon on the bottom, and a tubeteika cap. Each girl had her own unique dress, which was made for her by her mother or grandmother.