Tashkent
— — a city rebuilt in mosaic and pale stone.
Not only on a wall.
“A city the Silk Road kept and the earthquake of 1966 remade. The old quarter holds the Khast-Imam library and the seventh-century Quran said to be the oldest in the world; the metro below ground holds chandeliers, marble, and station mosaics that read like rooms. Chorsu Bazaar smells of cumin and warm bread by mid-morning. The Tian Shan keeps the eastern horizon.
Tashkent, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Tashkent sits at about 480 metres above the Chirchiq river valley, in the foothills of the western Tian Shan range. The city of roughly 2.9 million is the capital of Uzbekistan and the largest urban centre in Central Asia. The earthquake of April 1966 destroyed much of the old low-rise town and triggered a decade of Soviet-era reconstruction in wide boulevards and modernist civic blocks. The old quarter survives around Khast-Imam, where the Mui Muborak madrasa holds the Uthman Quran, dated to the seventh or eighth century and one of the world's oldest manuscripts.
Tashkent reads as two cities stacked. The pre-quake old town keeps Timurid-era tilework at Khast-Imam, where turquoise majolica covers the iwans and the Barak-Khan madrasa. The Soviet city below ground is its own monument: the metro, opened 1977 and the first in Central Asia, runs across fifty-some stations whose chandeliers, marble, and mosaic friezes were treated as civic interiors. Photography was forbidden until 2018 because the system was classified. Above ground, the post-quake civic centre runs in wide ceremonial boulevards lined with poplars.
Tashkent International handles the main air routes into Central Asia and connects to the metro by city bus in thirty minutes. The Afrosiyob high-speed train links Tashkent to Samarkand in two hours fifteen minutes and to Bukhara in three and a half. Chorsu Bazaar opens before sunrise around the blue dome at the western edge of the old city. The metro runs roughly 0500 to midnight; a single ride is the easiest way to see the city's stranger architecture. Tickets are sold by the ride at station kiosks.