Chust

Chust announced itself through smell before I saw anything else — the particular hot-metal and coal-smoke scent of a forge, which I followed down a side street until I arrived at a workshop where a man was working a piece of steel on a small anvil with a hammer the size of my forearm. The blade was already recognisably a pchak — the Central Asian knife with a sheep’s-foot blade and a handle wrapped in bone or horn, used for everything from slaughtering livestock to peeling fruit to eating plov in the field. He didn’t acknowledge me for a while. I stood in the doorway and watched the blade take shape and felt the particular pleasure of watching someone do a physical thing well.

Chust is a small city in the northern Fergana Valley, close to Namangan, and it has two crafts it does to a standard that makes everything else in the valley look like a sideline. The first is pchak manufacture — the knives are sold throughout Central Asia, identifiable by the handle’s characteristic two-tone wrapping and the blade’s particular geometry. The second is duppi production: the embroidered black-and-white cotton skullcaps worn by men throughout Uzbekistan, their pattern — four white chillies curving upward against a black ground — almost unchanged for centuries. In Chust, both of these things happen in workshops that open directly onto the street, and you can walk from one to the other without any plan and spend an entire day in this way.

The duppi workshops are mostly run by women, working in rooms with good natural light, the embroidery frame on the lap or held between the knees. The pattern is worked in white thread on black cotton, the four pomegranate chilli motifs requiring somewhere around two thousand individual stitches per cap, which takes an experienced embroiderer four to six hours. I sat with a woman named Dilorom for an hour while she worked — not talking, just watching the needle move. She had the ability to carry on a conversation with her daughter in another room while not slowing or losing her place in the pattern. The cap she was working on would sell for something between five and twenty dollars. The maths of craft in the developing world is always quietly brutal.

The knife market near the central bazaar is more theatrical — vendors lay out their wares on blankets, and the pchaks range from tourist-grade objects with plastic handles to hand-forged working knives with blades of layered steel and handles of real bone, sold by men who will demonstrate the sharpness against a hair and accept payment without a receipt and wrap the knife in newspaper for travel. I bought one. It took two years of explanation at airport security before I learned to pack it differently.

The city itself is quiet and a little dusty, without the historical monuments of Kokand or the bazaar scale of Fergana city. But the combination of two hyper-specific crafts operating at such close range and such high quality makes it one of the most satisfying days I spent in the valley. There is something clarifying about being in a place that knows exactly what it is for.

When to go: Any time of year — both crafts are year-round indoor operations. Combine Chust with Namangan (40 minutes by shared taxi) for a full day in the northern part of the valley. The bazaar is most active on weekday mornings before noon.