Osh
"The mountain is inside the city but belongs to another time entirely. You climb it and the city below looks like something you imagined."
Sulayman Mountain appeared before the rest of Osh did — a massive limestone outcrop rising abruptly from the flat valley floor, incongruous and unmissable, its flanks dotted with small shrines and pilgrims moving slowly upward along paths worn into the rock over centuries. I arrived in the afternoon, and the mountain was already glowing that amber-gold colour that limestone achieves in the hour before sunset, and I understood immediately why Babur built a house up there (the ruins remain), why the Soviets built a museum inside the rock itself, why the mountain has been a pilgrimage site for something like two thousand years. It simply demands attention. It is the kind of geographical feature that makes religious interpretation feel less like invention and more like the only honest response.
Osh is the largest city in southern Kyrgyzstan, the second city of the country, and sits right at the Fergana Valley’s eastern edge — technically across the border from Uzbekistan but as much a part of the valley’s economic and cultural fabric as Andijan or Namangan. A majority of the population is ethnically Uzbek, and the bazaar — the largest in Central Asia, they say, though everyone says their bazaar is the largest in Central Asia — functions as a hub for the entire region, drawing traders from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, China, and points further.
The Jayma Bazaar sprawls for nearly a kilometre along the Ak-Buura River, and on a Thursday morning it is one of the most overwhelming things I have walked through — livestock in one section, spices bleeding colour into the dust, Chinese-made electronics next to hand-embroidered Kyrgyz felt carpets, a row of women selling fresh samsa from trays balanced on their heads. The river runs alongside the market, and in summer people wade in it between stalls without anyone finding this notable. I ate a chuchvara dumpling soup — lamb-filled, in a clear broth with a drizzle of vinegar and dried chili — at a stall run by an Uzbek woman who served it in a bowl that had a small chip in the rim, which I mention only because somehow the chip made the soup better.
Sulayman Mountain deserves more than a quick climb. The Archaeological Museum built into the rock — you enter through a doorway in the cliff face, descend into chambers lit with fluorescent tubes, and find rock art, carved petroglyphs, and exhibits about the mountain’s religious history — is genuinely interesting if you allow it to be. Babur’s house at the summit is a small reconstruction, but the view from the top is remarkable: the entire Fergana Valley laid out to the west, the Tian Shan rising to the north, the town below looking smaller and more provisional than it feels from inside it.
Osh has a complicated history — ethnic violence between Kyrgyz and Uzbek communities in 1990 and again in 2010 left deep marks the city hasn’t fully absorbed — and that history is present in the city’s sometimes tense social texture, in neighbourhood boundaries, in conversations that pause when a certain subject surfaces. I am not equipped to write about it with the depth it deserves. But the city that exists now, with its extraordinary mountain and its enormous bazaar and its plov that the locals will tell you, very seriously, is the best in all of Central Asia, is a place I found compelling and would go back to.
When to go: May through September — Osh sits at around 1,000 metres and has cooler summers than the valley floor. The bazaar operates daily but Thursday and Sunday see the fullest activity. Cross the border from Andijan by shared taxi — approximately 90 minutes with border formalities included.