Uzbekistan: a Passion for Printing

In a small, mud-walled workshop on a winding street in the labyrinth of Tashkent’s Old Town, delicate silk scarves imprinted with bold designs flutter in the air.

“Seven block-printing stamps were used to make this scarf,” said artisan Yuriy Pak, showing off a gossamer gold silk creation emblazoned with circular designs enclosed in elaborate borders.

Casually attired in jeans, a T-shirt and baseball cap, Pak looks like an unlikely ambassador for one of Central Asia’s traditional design techniques. But the 60-year-old craftsman is at the vanguard of efforts to keep the ancient art of block printing alive in Uzbekistan.

“We decided to revive this form of applied art here,” Pak told EurasiaNet.org with a sweeping gesture taking in the scarves drying from washing lines and spread over tables in his higgledy-piggledy workshop in the shadow of Tashkent’s imposing Hazrat Imam Mosque.

A fragment of block-printed fabric reportedly recovered from the Samarkand tomb of Bibi-Khanum, the wife of 14th-century conqueror Tamerlane, is testament to the age-old roots of this art form in the land that is now Uzbekistan.

For centuries, chitgarlik – as block printing is called in Uzbek – has been handed down from one generation to the next, with some families boasting genealogical trees of master craftsmen dating back to the 19th century and beyond.

These days, the survival of a craft dating back centuries is under threat.

picture: http://www.queenieaustralia.com/formal-dresses-sydney-shops

Artisans under whom block printing was kept alive during the Soviet era are aging and dying, and the younger generation is often reluctant to uphold the tradition. There are now only a handful of craftsmen and women practicing the art of block printing by hand in Uzbekistan, in places like Bukhara and the silk-weaving center of Margilan in the Fergana Valley.

Pak is keeping the skill alive in Tashkent, though it was not passed down in his family, which is part of...