This how women dressed in 19th century Bukhara

In the outskirts of Bukhara, marshrutkas are zooming round the ring-road that circles the old town. We find one that will take us around to the house where Fayzulla Khujayev, who helped the Bolsheviks to plot against the last Emir and later led the Bukhara People’s Republic, used to live. 

His family were wealthy traders, and it wasn’t until his father sent him to Moscow in 1907 that he realised how far the almost medieval Bukharan khanate had fallen behind Europe. On returning to Central Asia, he founded the Young Bukharan Party, and invited the Tashkent Bolsheviks to seize Bukhara after the Russian revolution. The attempt was unsuccessful, and Khujayev fled to Tashkent, only returning after the Emir of Bukhara was ousted. The Emir fled to India, taking his dancing boys with him, but rather unchivalrously leaving his harem behind. 

First president of the Uzbek SSR

Fayzulla Khujayev, meanwhile, was appointed head of the Bukharan People’s Republic, and, when the current boundaries were drawn up, became president of the Uzbek SSR. However, he started to oppose Moscow’s directives, particularly those creating a cotton monoculture in the Uzbek SSR, and in 1938 he was executed in one of Stalin’s purges of the Communist Party.

While his old house has been preserved as a monument, these days there is little emphasis on Fayzulla Khujayev himself. Since Moscow is still blamed for many of Uzbekistan’s current problems, the man who brought Bukhara under Soviet control is seen as a traitor, yet he also worked to modernise his homeland and fought to retain a degree of independence. 

The house, signposted ‘House of a Wealthy Local Merchant’, was built around a large courtyard with a raised wooden gallery running around it. The courtyards in Bukharan homes were almost always built on the side away from the road so that women could sit unveiled with the men of the family. Opening onto the courtyard, behind the carved wooden walls and painted cloisters, are reception rooms, and separate rooms for summer and winter. 

Life behind walls

The house is curated by three middle-aged Uzbek women, and as we are the only visitors this afternoon, they all show us round, and point everything out to us. While we examine the ‘ichikari’, women’s quarters, they explain that the women of some Bukharan households, as late as the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, never went beyond the courtyard of their house, except to go from their father’s house to their husband’s. 

I try to imagine growing old shut in an enclosed place like this, surrounded always by the same faces. The thought makes me intensely claustrophobic; the delicately carved walls here and at Sasha & Son begin to look like prison bars, the vines like creeping chains.

In one room there’s a rack of stiff 19^th century clothes, and they dress me up as a Bukharan woman in layers of petticoats, a stiff silk frock and cloak. It’s heavy and enveloping in the hot summer day, but rather beautiful. 

But there’s more, they say, for going out. For this, they put over my head a veil, not a floating piece of net, but a kind of grille in stiff horsehair, the shape – and weight – of a coal scuttle. Over this goes a weighty black headdress, and a thick blue cape with a hood that rises to a peak over the veil and trailing sleeves. I feel bowed down and disoriented by the heavy weight on my head, and the lack of vision.