Osh
"They call it the southern capital. It feels less like a capital and more like a convergence — of routes, of peoples, of everything the north of the country is not."
Osh hits you first with noise. The bus station in the early morning — shared taxis calling destinations, vendors with trays of samsa, a man arguing on the phone in three languages switching mid-sentence — has the compressed intensity of a city that has been doing exactly this for millennia and has no intention of slowing down. I arrived from Bishkek after an overnight bus and the light was still low, the bazaar not yet fully open, and I walked toward the centre along streets that smelled of bread and diesel and the very particular scent of a morning market setting up its stalls. Osh is Kyrgyzstan’s second city but it is its oldest, and the difference between those two facts is everything.
Sulayman Mountain rises from the centre of the city with the abruptness of a geological afterthought — a bare limestone ridge, 200 meters high, surrounded by the urban fabric on all sides. It has been sacred for as long as anyone has recorded sacredness in this region: worshipped by pre-Islamic peoples, built on by the Timurids, visited by Babur — the founder of the Mughal Empire — who came here before he conquered India and reportedly wept at the view. A small mosque clings to the highest point. The climb takes twenty minutes and at the top you have the whole city laid out below and the Fergana Valley stretching toward Uzbekistan in the south. People still bring sick children here to be healed, still press their foreheads to a particular rock said to confer fertility. The mountain is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which matters less than the fact that it is still alive in the way sacred places are alive — not as a monument but as a practice.
The Jayma Bazaar is one of the largest bazaars in Central Asia and it runs along the bank of the Ak-Buura River in a way that feels entirely organic — as if commerce simply pooled here over centuries because the location was convenient and never moved on. The spice section has a quality of overload I have come to associate with the great Central Asian markets: mounds of cumin, coriander, turmeric, dried chilli, and unidentifiable mixtures in unlabelled sacks, presided over by women who know exactly what everything is and are mildly impatient with those who do not. Silk and fabric sections extend deeper into the covered areas, and the light through the canvas awnings makes everything look slightly theatrical, as though you have wandered into the set of something.
The southern character of Osh — more Uzbek, more Persian-influenced, more cosmopolitan in the specifically Central Asian sense of that word — is evident in the food. Plov here is different from the north: drier, richer, the rice more distinct, with more carrot and sometimes with dried apricot cooked in. The samsa from the clay ovens near the bazaar are massive and properly fattening and cost almost nothing. I ate one standing over a rubbish bin at eight in the morning and it was better than almost anything I ate sitting down.
The Soviet-era Lenin statue has somehow survived the transition to independence and now stands slightly confused in a park that has been renamed several times since 1991. I found it oddly moving — this relic of another imagining, still upright in a city that has outlasted every ideology that has passed through it and will outlast several more.
When to go: April through June for the best weather before the summer heat builds — the Fergana Valley gets genuinely hot in midsummer. September and October are also excellent: the light is low and golden and the bazaar trade is at its peak with autumn harvests. July and August are hot but the city functions normally; it has been managing summers for three thousand years.