Uzbekistan: Celebrating Spring in Samarkand

In the fabled Silk Road city of Samarkand there’s singing, dancing and kite flying, and the city’s a riot of color as women take to the streets in their bright Uzbek silks. Uzbekistan may have put a dampener on Valentine’s Day last month, but it’s celebrating Navruz -- “new day,” the Persian New Year -- in style.

The Navruz spring equinox festival is marked by Turkic and Persian peoples across Central Asia and in places such as Azerbaijan, Iran and Turkey (chiefly, in the latter, among Kurds). 

Despite unusually freezing temperatures and recent snow on the ground, Samarkand, with its mixed population of Uzbeks and ethnic Tajiks, is embracing the festival enthusiastically. Residents are particularly glad to be marking the end of what’s been an abnormally long, harsh winter. 

Children are performing stunts with colorful kites above the majestic turquoise domes of the Registan, and schools are competing to see which has produced the grandest stall this year. The stalls are manned by bowing girls dressed as brides or wearing traditional atlas silks, and they are plying passers-by with free snacks. These are dishes traditionally cooked up for Navruz and believed to fortify the body after the winter. 

King among them is sumalak, made of wheat shoots, oil, flour and water. Women make a culinary festival out of this cooking ritual—sumalak must be stirred continuously for 24 hours, and they gather at each other’s houses to help with all that arduous mixing, casting stones into the pot for luck. The people of Uzbekistan attach mystical properties to sumalak: One Samarkand resident said his wife had wished for a son every year while cooking sumalak, and after seven years (seven is a lucky number here) her wish was granted and he fathered a boy.

Other specialties include kok samsa (pies filled with spring greens), moshkichiri (mung beans and rice) and barak (dumplings). Stalls are piled high with specialty bread such as chapchak noni, the filling loaves that are the city’s hallmark, galla osiyo noni, a particular style of bread named after the district of Samarkand where it’s made, and go’shtli noni, stuffed with meat.

The celebrations in Uzbekistan are only just beginning: President Islam Karimov has decreed that the rest of the week will be a holiday. The only catch is that people were supposed to go to work today—but it seems, in Samarkand at least, no one told them.