26 May Khiva to Tashkent

We had breakfast early in order to get to the local museum that we had missed when it closed early, and also the Khiva Silk Workshop, a venture started twelve years ago by an English young man, Chris, who helped the locals design carpets and tapestries from old tiles and carpet fragments from Timurid times as part of Mercy and UNESCO. We wanted to avoid the heat as much as possible. 

The museum had some costumes and beautiful old wooden carved doors, nothing too spectacular, with most items being from the late-1900's. The silk workshop was more interesting.

We purchased 1 of her Suzannis

Christopher Aslan Alexander originally traveled to the walled city of Khiva,  to write a guidebook which was requested by the local mayor in hopes of increasing the number of tourists to the town. He stayed  on to work with UNESCO/Mercy to develop a traditional, fair trade carpet-weaving workshop. The book is a wonderful chronicle of his adventure plus many insights into textile natural dyes and designs. The workshop created their own designs for carpets looking at the unique tiles within  Khiva's walls as well as old Timurid miniatures. While Chris knew nothing of carpets when he started the project he certainly guided it well.

Beautiful Original Sign for Workshop

We toured the carpet workshop and also the newer Suzanni workshop. Suzanni means needlework and beautifully made tablecloths, wall decorations, bed linens and prayer mats were made originally by young girls and their mother's as part of the girl's dowry. As we did not have room for a carpet we bought several of the suzanni's which also use the designs of the tiles and wood carvings for their inspiration but are much smaller and lighter to carry. The Suzanni workshop was also started by Chris with Mercy and also the British Counsel in Tashkent. These two shops are ones that Leslie hunted out and insisted the guide take us there. The carpet shop had a well worn copy of Chris' book "A Carpet Ride to Khiva" on hand and after thumbing through it Leslie wanted to try and find a copy of it as an ebook if possible for reading on the flight home.

Carrying our purchases we went back to our hotel, showered, and left at 11 AM for the visit the ruins at Ayazkala.

We arrived two hours later at the yurt camp at Ayazkala, where we were to have lunch in a yurt that our guide had promised was air-conditioned, and he had promised that the forts to be visited could be reached by car so would not require a long hike in the midday sun. Both of these statements turned out to be inaccurate.

Our guide Faysullo started walking from our car toward a hilltop fortress about a kilometer uphill from our camp, stopping only when he had walked 50 yards and noticed we were still standing by the car. After some discussion of options, and David showing a dirt track leading up to the side of the fortress, it was agreed that we would pay the owner of the yurts $10 to take us up to the fort in his ancient 4-wheel drive Russian truck. 

Old Russian Truck gave us a lift

Climbing into the huge fortress revealed double-walls with roofing so that defenders could move about during a siege without danger from arrows, but the center of fort had no buildings or features, although it did have sherds of pottery. Apparently this fort's heyday was in the 4th to the 6th Centuries AD. Just below it is another fortress that seems to have been part of the same complex.

Ayaz Kala

After lunch in the yurt during which we talked with an Australian married to a Californian who had been traveling for a month and were going to sleep in the yurt, and armed with new assurances from our guide that the remaining forts were accessible by our sedan, we headed off toward Toprak Qala and nearby Kyzl Qala about an hour away. In the heat neither one turned out to be worth even a few hundred yards walk, but we did photograph the latter from the area the car parked. These two also dated from the 4th Century AD, but there were other forts among the 50 or so that have been discovered that date back to the 4th Century BC before Alexander's conquest.

Kyzl Kala

 We had dinner in the principal hotel in Urgench, the only diners in a grand hall, after using the hotel's Internet for an hour, then went to the airport. Only our flight was leaving that evening, but it was a full flight that stopped in Bukhara for a few passengers to get on or off and then made it to Tashkent before midnight. We gathered our luggage into our new car and checked in to our hotel, but this time the internet access was pretty slow, and we went to bed without much progress on our correspondence.