From the Ground Up

In remote western Uzbekistan, Michael Snyder discovers how millennia-old craft and design traditions are forging a modern culture among the ruins

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ON A COLD MARCH MORNING in the Qizilqum, or Red Desert, of Karakalpakstan, an autonomous republic in the far west of Uzbekistan, I woke in darkness to watch the sun rise. It peeked over the horizon just as I was clambering up the sprawling central enclosure of Ayaz Kala 3, an 1,800-year-old mud-brick citadel near the textile-wrapped yurt where I'd spent the night, staining the bastions and battlements a dazzling cadmium red. In the distance irrigation canals cut like razors through the sandy soil. To the south the fluted ramparts of the second fortress in the Ayaz Kala complex ringed a lower bluff. A hard, cold wind blasted in across the desert, sweeping over the salt flat that once protected the armies of the Khorezmian civilization, which flourished along the banks of the Amu Darya river beginning in the third century BCE, from the attacks of nomadic raiders. Each gust seemed to peel away another layer of soil. I felt—not for the first time on my trip through Karakalpakstan—completely alone.

From left: The Nukus Museum, home to a wide array of Soviet avant-garde art; a woodworker in northwestern Uzbekistan, where the craft is seeing a revival