Of all the things I imagined I might witness in this lifetime, a man swan-diving into a vertical oven wasn’t one. Yet there I was, on the dusty outskirts of Samarkand, at a bakery whose name translates to “hot bread,” watching as Akran – baker-slash-acrobat – patted water onto the underbelly of a disc of dough and flung himself head-first into a scorching tandor oven to slap it against its smouldering walls. With a quick twist of the legs and a well-activated core, the likes of which I’d yet to see outside a 6am Reformer Pilates class, he was back out again, unburnt, unbothered, repeating the process a hundred times, thankfully sparing us any insight into what Uzbekistan’s workers’ comp might look like.
Bread is Uzbekistan’s lifeblood. A sacred symbol of life and prosperity, it’s never cut with a knife, never placed face-down, never wasted. Plov, the national rice dish, is similarly revered: a medley of rice, vegetables, meat and spices, cooked in cast-iron cauldrons – or kazans – large enough to feed a hundred. It also comes with a star-crossed origin story. Legend has it, a 10th-century prince, lovesick and forbidden from seeing a craftsman’s daughter, was revived by plov – a remedy prescribed by Ibn Sina, legendary physician and philosopher. (Another version credits Alexander the Great, but that one’s far less romantic.)
It’s the Ibn Sina legend, and its framing of food as emotional remedy, that inspired the inaugural Bukhara Biennial, Recipes for a Broken Heart, which ran from September to November of this year. If not to mend a broken heart, then at least to nourish a mind dulled by too much Western minimalism, I arrived in Uzbekistan – the latest Central Asian art-and-culture hotspot – just in time for the closing week, ready to be fed.
Against the backdrop of Uzbekistan’s renewed cultural momentum, the Bukhara Biennial gathers artists, makers and chefs from around the world to reinterpret the Silk Road city’s deep well of exchange and tradition. “For more than a millennium, Bukhara has been a place where people came together to find togetherness in the quest of a better life through a search for spiritual, intellectual and worldly knowledge,” says curator Diana Campbell, who developed the event alongside commissioner Gayane Umerova.
Once a strategic midpoint on the Silk Road, the city is layered with Persian, Islamic, Soviet and Central Asian influences. Over 2,000 years old, its historic centre is a walkable weave of breathtaking madrasas, mosques, caravanserais and bazaars, and a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1993. For the Biennial, 70 site-specific projects from around the world are scattered across the city, with artists like Koryosaram designer Jenia Kim and Egyptian food artist Laila Gohar collaborating with local artisans to bring the event to life.
Day one
After three days of slack-jawed awe in Samarkand, marvelling at the grandiosity of Tamerlane-era madrasas, mosques, minarets and mausoleums – most notably the towering majesty of Registan Square – we arrive in Bukhara for the Biennial. We take a Yandex from the train station (essentially Uber, Uzbek-style), which costs us 80 cents and is soundtracked by Digi Nabinament fizzing through the speakers. We pass dusty desertscapes and rows of nondescript buildings until a turn off the highway leads us into the narrow, winding streets of an ancient town, far more in keeping with my expectations of Silk Road times.
We check into Komil Boutique Hotel, once the 19th-century home of a wealthy Bukharan merchant, now run by Komil, its affable namesake owner, whose family lived here for decades before opening it as a guesthouse in 2000. We're shown four rooms and asked to pick our favourite, opting for the most palatial of the lot, with its carved wooden ceilings and intricate, hand-painted floral walls. Our enthusiasm over the impromptu tour registers and Komil takes it as a cue to usher us through the hotel’s dining room and historic spaces. Here, hot-pink Ikat bedding cohabits with centuries-old rooms, once used to receive important guests, their walls heavy with floral plasterwork.
Our spirits are already exceedingly high. Without submitting to Google Maps, we set out in search of lunch and wind up in the courtyard of Kervansaray. It’s that awkward in-between time – too late for lunch, too early for dinner – which means we have the place to ourselves. The young waiter rattles off historical facts and hurries between rooms, at one point, inexplicably, wheeling out a subwoofer and playing Justin Bieber and Major Lazer at full volume before asking for requests. “Do you want Taylor Swift? David Guetta?” We decline in favour of traditional Uzbek music. He immediately onsides us by guessing we’re 25, then glitching at the idea of two childless, unmarried women travelling in their 30s – a recurring theme on this trip.
Our first brush with the Biennial is walking underneath Through Bloom and Decay, a chandelier of medicinal flowers suspended from the interior dome of the bazaar. Created by Tashkent artist Munisa Kholkhujaeva and Anton Nozhenko, the work draws on Ibn Sina’s medicinal plant studies and ancient Central Asian rituals to trace the cycle of life, death and renewal.
That evening, the city gathers for the opening night of the Biennial’s Rice Festival – a stroke of excellent timing on our part. Giant kazans bubble over open fires as chefs from across Uzbekistan, convened for a kind of plov cook-off, ladle out steaming rice, each version revealing subtle regional inflections. It’s a modern revival of an old tradition once staged under the Emir of Bukhara – a public tasting of rice cultures from across the land. Anticipation hangs thick in the air. Three winners emerge – one from Tashkent, one from Bukhara, one from Samarkand – all set to cook again at the festival’s finale later that week.
Post-plov, a DJ set blends traditional Halfa vocals and electronic beats, and we dance alongside far more coordinated youth, bodies enmeshed in what more closely resembles a rave, except we’re completely sober and it’s 7pm. When the party winds down, we retreat to Labi Hovuz in the Lyabi-Khauz complex at the heart of old Bukhara for a debriefing glass of wine before bed.
Day two
Our second day begins with Korean Buddhist monk and chef Jeong Kwan cracking open jars of kimchi and fermented soybean paste she started during the Biennial’s opening week. These long-fermented ingredients embody the temporal rhythms of her spiritual practice – patience, attentiveness, transformation – and are made all the more sweet by the knowledge that everyone who attended her kimchi workshop months prior is now opening their own jars at home. “Food is taking energy from the sun, from the space, from the people” she says, peering in. “I am very curious what is happening in these jars.” She’s not the only one. A large crowd has gathered, craning over one another for a better look as she beckons us forward for a communal sniff. She takes a bite, pauses and beams. “I really didn’t know it would be so tasty!” she laughs.
Ayvan (Persian for “terrace”) takes our patronage come lunchtime – another wealthy-merchant-owned restaurant, dating to 1886. The interiors are beautiful. The menu leans a little too continental for our tastes, but we settle in with soup and local wine. On the walk over, I spot a triad of policemen wearing the swaggiest outfits I’ve ever seen on law enforcement: boxy hats, leather jackets, fur trims. I aim my iPhone in what I hope is a surreptitious manoeuvre. One of them catches my eye. Down the phone goes.
The afternoon kicks off with A Drop of Milk in the Ocean, a performance by Mongolian artist Nomin Zezegmaa. Seated cross-legged, she knots blue cotton thread, occasionally adding strands of white horse mane, while improvising a story rooted in Mongolian oral tradition. Suutei tsai, an acquired taste of salted milk tea, is served as she performs.
Later, we head to Magoki Attori Square for a sunset performance by the Sozandas, female ritual leaders of Bukhara. Set against the backdrop of the mosque, the piece moves between Tajik and Uzbek poetry, shashmaqom music, Zoroastrian symbolism and dance. Artist Anna Lublina weaves in the story of Jewish Sozanda Tufahon Pinksahova to explore ideas of coexistence – a lived archive of Bukhara’s multi-ethnic, multi-faith past. The question posed: What does peace mean?
We close the day, along with what feels like the rest of the festival crowd, at Joy, the hottest table in town. Dinner is plov – which we’ll seemingly never tire of – spinach manti and achichuk, a simple salad of tomato, onion and herbs.
Day three
After filling our boots at breakfast, we walk to Abdulaziz Khan Madressa, where I pay what I'll later realise is an extortionate amount for a pair of camel wool socks. The vendor rubs my banknotes across her stall, presumably a superstitious gesture to summon more wide-eyed tourists ready to burn cash like me.
At Mazza Café, we find some of the best plov in town, momentarily forgetting we’ll be eating it again for dinner at the plov party that night. Our three-course lunch costs €7 and is eaten beside a group of older men in traditional Uzbek dress, the waiter thanking us by placing his hand over his heart – a beautiful Uzbek gesture of respect I already know I’ll miss when I go home.
Replete and ready, we head to watch artist and bee activist Vahap Avşar perform Swarm Works. With a group of tiny beekeepers, he opens up sculpted wooden snow leopards, an endangered Uzbek species, to reveal hives hidden inside. The kids gingerly pass honeycomb frames, still swarming with bees, down a line, mimicking their seasonal migration in a slow, sweet relay. If there’s enough honey, it’ll be turned into medovik, a dense, sticky cake made to be shared.
Heaven is an Uzbek market, and Bukhara’s does not disappoint. Women selling qurut – rock-hard fermented yoghurt balls that have long outlived the invention of refrigeration – flash their gold teeth as we pass. The produce stalls are a colour wheel: pomegranates, persimmons, pickled carrots, mounds of spices in red, gold and green. We walk through meat markets, past honey stands, into light-dappled rooms selling milk. Merchants press almonds and cups of tea into our hands. Car boots are lined with bread. Hunks of fresh halva displayed on prams.
Nowhere is Bukharan hospitality more visible than at the closing night of the Rice Festival. A celebration of the white, starchy staple as cultural connector, it features dishes from across the Global South: West African ceebu yapp, Brazilian feijão e farofa, Korean bap with kimchi, Indian mutton biryani, Saudi ruz bukhari – and of course, three Uzbek plovs by regional masters including Bahriddin Chusty. Each bowl tells a story of migration, resilience, devotion, colonial entanglement, or simply what people cook to feed the ones they love. It’s food doing what food does best – bringing people together.
Once the bowls are scraped clean, it’s time to dance. I haven’t heard every DJ in Uzbekistan, but I believe Diana Campbell when she says Sabine from Sublimation is the best. Shut your eyes and it could be 2 a.m. in a warehouse somewhere. Open them and it’s 8 p.m., outdoors, in a public square in Bukhara, surrounded by velvet-clad grannies and throngs of Uzbek kids with serious rhythm. I didn’t expect to sober-rave in Uzbekistan. I definitely didn’t expect to feel comfortable doing it. But limbs flying, I’m starting to see the appeal.
The party brings locals and visitors together, shoulder to shoulder, dancing after dinner from paper bowls. The usual barriers between art and audience, chef and diner, insider and outsider completely dissolve. Where other art or fashion events can feel exclusive or self-serious, this is the opposite. The Biennial is meant for everyone: generous, open, joyful.
Day four
To gaze out from a balcony towards Ulugbek Madressa and Toqi Ghar Zharon is to feel how far you are from everything you’ve ever known. Were it not for the selfie sticks and Patagonia fleeces below, you might think it was the 17th century still.
We spend the morning drinking coffee in silent wonderment, having checked out of Komil and into the similarly historic Duston Boutique for our final night. Bek, an ambitious young Uzbek who tells us of his plans to move to Slovenia to start a tourism company, checks us in. It’s a rare and humbling privilege to travel to a place still mostly unshaped by the heavy hands of global travel algorithms, and Bek is proud that Uzbekistan is being put on the map. “I just hope it doesn’t become mass tourism,” he says, as we look out over the skyline to the Khan minaret. Duston, he tells us, used to house the Emir’s artisans. These days, it’s better known for its excellent breakfasts: fried eggplant salad, samsas, soft eggs and the porridge of Bek’s youth.
With no Biennial events that day, we set out to revisit our favourite installations and catch what we missed – from Home of Hope by Jenia Kim at the Rashid Madrasa to Navat Uy, the rock-sugar pavilion by Laila Gohar and Ilkhom Shoyimkulov, catching the sun outside the Gavkushon Madrasa. We skirt through the interconnected caravanserais to find Eight Lives by Oyjon Khayrullaeva, heart mosaics on mosaic floors, subtle and unexpected, tucked in shadowed hujras.
At the Shakhrud Canal, Longing, a suspended ikat tapestry, fades from deep blue to desert sand, evoking the vanishing Aral Sea.
Outside the Ayozjon Caravanserai, Subodh Gupta’s enamelware installation speaks to the poetry of shared meals, made from Soviet-era cooking utensils still common in Uzbek kitchens. Just nearby, inside a former prayer hall, we step into The Blue Room – a collaboration between ceramicist Abdulvahid Bukhoriy and coppersmith Jurabek Siddikov. Glazed tiles in deep botanical blue ripple across the walls; at the centre, a brass-and-copper chandelier shaped like suspended fish catches the light. “In tradition,” Bukhoriy says, “we find not endings, but beginnings.” Though international in scope, every artwork is grounded in Bukhara, made with the help of artisans from the city and its surrounding regions.
In the evening, we dine at Café Oshqozon, a brutalist restaurant by Carsten Höller in collaboration with Uzbek chef Bahriddin Chustiy and Pavel Georganov, that pushes the idea of single-ingredient cooking to its most ascetic limit. Each dish centres on one starring element – tomato, quince, lamb – plus salt, the only allowed embellishment. It’s ladies night tonight, and we dine in the good company of women from Japan, Russia and Kazakhstan. While the menu is built around singular ingredients, the only one anyone wants to talk about is from Kazakhstan: horse meat. Mentioned in passing, our Kazakh tablemate ends up good-naturedly fielding our many inquisitions, explaining how her mother will often buy a horse for $2,000USD and divide it among relatives, enough to feed the family for two or three months. The conversation continues into the night, eventually straying from quadrupeds until we’re deep in the kind of exchange that feels emblematic of the festival and its host city: cross-cultural, connective, held together by food and curiosity.
