Essence of Oasis

by Helen Matthews

I wasn't expecting the duck pond. During the nerve-wracking drive across the Kyzyl Kum desert from Khiva in a car with the petrol gauge stuck on empty, my guide, Otabek, had told me about the disastrous Soviet attempts to improve irrigation. The canals that drew water from the Amu Darya were too shallow so the water evaporated, and meanwhile the Aral Sea was drying up. To arrive at journey's end in Bukhara and find a large rectangular pool of water surrounded by restaurants strung with fairy lights was surreal. The last straw was the ducks' floating house, or rather palace - a splendidly kitsch wooden structure with a blue minaret at each corner in tribute to the local architecture.

The ducks were large and white. I would have called them Aylesbury ducks, but they were clearly a long way from home. They worked in two gangs of three, visiting the restaurant tables and demanding pay-offs in bread. In return, the local cats were firmly kept in their place. The ducks were less successful in seeing off the other hazard of the place - giant wasps with a fondness for shashlik. These appeared from nowhere as soon as the giant kebabs arrived, and disappeared when the last morsel had been consumed. Rice, green tea and even cola were of no interest. Despite the wasps, the ducks did a pretty good job. Perhaps the stuffed mallard nailed to a mulberry tree in the corner was there to serve as an awful warning.

The following morning I discovered that I had not been hallucinating and that the pond was in fact Lyab-i-Hauz, a sort of Bukharan Piccadilly Circus, where everyone you know will eventually pass by. It was a ten minute walk from my hotel, a converted merchant's house in the Jewish Quarter, and it would have been easy to linger, sipping green tea and people-watching, for hours, but I had not come all the way from England to drink tea by a duck pond. I turned left and headed for the Ismail Samani park, a pleasant green space named after the tenth-century Ismail Samani Mausoleum. The intricate brickwork of this strange cube-shaped structure now provides ample nesting sites for the local pigeons.

Nearby is the Chasma-Ayub, on the site of a spring supposedly found by the prophet Job striking his staff on the ground in the approved Old Testament manner. The twelfth-century building is surmounted by a strange structure of later date, not really a dome, but more reminiscent of an inverted ice-cream cone. Inside I found a small exhibition about the Bukharan water supply, including gruesome details of the parasitic worms that used to infest it. I declined the opportunity of tasting the spring water and strolled on towards my goal.

On the way, I passed the Bolo-Hauz Mosque with its elegant painted porch supported by twenty columns reflected in a large pool, and a disused water tower with a delicately skeletal iron frame. At last I reached the 'Ark', the palace of the former Emirs of Bukhara. It was here that the players of the 'Great Game', British officers Connolly and Stoddart, had come to do their diplomatic best, and in the Registan square outside where they had been beheaded when their diplomatic best had been found wanting. This was what I had come to see. But I found it lacking in atmosphere. Although the main courtyards and some buildings survive, much of it is now in ruins, something that became apparent as I walked past the walls to the Zindon, or jail, to peer down the 'black hole' where Stoddart was imprisoned. But there were no ghosts here, only souvenir-sellers.

Having done my duty to Stoddart and Connolly, I wandered through the bazaar to the Kalon Mosque. With its roof of 288 miniature domes, this is one of the showpieces of the city. But again, the atmosphere was slightly lacking. The building was heavily, but cheaply, restored in the 1990s, and the modern restorations can be easily identified by the flaking paintwork and cracking glaze on the tiles.

I strolled further among the mosques and medressas of old Bukhara until they merged into a blue-glazed blur and eventually found myself back at Lyab-i-Hauz. Sipping tea and watching the ducks prepare for another evening shift, I finally realised that I had been looking in the wrong place for the essence of Bukhara. The clues had been there in the pools, the spring and the water tower. This was an oasis town, its lifeblood provided by its precious water. Its true heart was not the city within a city where petty Emirs amused themselves playing envoys off against each other, but by the cool waters of the pool. I poured another cup of tea and prepared to share my bread with the ducks.¦

First published in VISA 81 (Oct 2008)