I used to think bark was just, well, bark.
Then I spent three days in a cramped workshop outside Tashkent, watching a seventy-two-year-old woman named Gulnara peel layers from a mulberry tree with the kind of precision I associate with neurosurgery, not folk art. She worked in near silence, occasionally muttering about moisture levels and lunar cycles—stuff I initially dismissed as superstition until I tried peeling bark myself and produced something that looked like shredded cardboard. Turns out, traditional Uzbek bark crafts aren’t some quaint relic of Central Asian pastoral life; they’re a living, breathing intersection of botany, geometry, and what I can only describe as militant patience. The mulberry trees (Morus alba, mostly) that dot the Fergana Valley have been providing raw material for these crafts for at least eight centuries, maybe longer—records get fuzzy around the Mongol invasions. But here’s the thing: the bark isn’t harvested randomly. Artisans select trees between fifteen and twenty-five years old, during a specific two-week window in early spring when sap flow makes the inner cambium layer pliable enough to separate without tearing. Miss that window, and you’re stuck with brittle fragments that crack under pressure.
The process feels almost archaeological in reverse. You’re not uncovering layers of history; you’re peeling them away to create something new. The outer bark gets discarded—too rough, too riddled with insect damage. What matters is the phloem layer, that pale ribbon of tissue that carried sugars through the tree last season. Gulnara showed me how to scrape it with a curved blade called a pichoq, applying just enough pressure to remove the green chlorophyll-stained membrane without gouging the cellulose fibers beneath. I definately failed at this multiple times.
Why Mulberry Bark Behaves Like No Other Material You’ve Probably Encountered
The tensile strength of processed mulberry bark sits somewhere between linen and low-grade leather, which sounds unimpressive until you realize it’s also translucent. When stretched thin and dried properly, it takes on this weird amber glow, like aged parchment soaked in honey. Medieval Uzbek calligraphers used it as a cheaper alternative to animal vellum—manuscripts from the Timurid period occasionally turn up with bark pages, and conservators hate them because they’re a nightmare to stabilize. The fibers run in chaotic, interlocking patterns rather than the neat parallel alignment you get with wood pulp, so they respond unpredictably to humidity changes. I watched a sheet of bark that had been flat for three days suddenly curl into a tube because someone opened a window during a rainstorm. Anyway, this unpredictability is exactly what makes bark interesting for three-dimensional work.
Modern practitioners—there are maybe forty left who work exclusively with bark, though that number’s contested—have adapted old techniques for new forms. I saw jewelry boxes with bark inlay that looked almost like marquetry, except the grain shifts direction mid-pattern in ways wood never could. There are lampshades that cast these mottled, organic shadows. One guy in Bukhara makes what he calls “bark sculptures,” which are really just abstract tangles of stripped fiber held together with wheat paste, but they’ve got this fragile, nest-like quality that’s genuinely unsettling in person. The material resists polish—it stays matte no matter how much you burnish it—and it absorbs natural dyes (walnut hull, pomegranate rind, indigo) with an intensity that synthetic fabrics can’t match. Wait—maybe it’s the lignin content? I should’ve asked Gulnara, but my Uzbek is terrible and her Russian isn’t much better.
The Lunar Calendar Argument That Botanists Refuse To Investigate Properly
Here’s where things get weird.
Every artisan I interviewed insisted that bark harvested during a waning moon is more pliable than bark taken during a waxing phase. I’m talking adamant, won’t-even-consider-alternatives insistence. And look, I’m inclined toward skepticism—I once spent six months debunking a viral claim about “structured water”—but the consistency of this belief across unconnected workshops is strange. No formal studies exist, because apparently materials scientists don’t take folk knowledge seriously unless it’s already been monetized by a tech company. One researcher at Tashkent State University mentioned that sap viscosity does fluctuate with lunar cycles due to gravitational effects on groundwater uptake, but she admitted the data is, quote, “messy and probably confounded by seasonal temperature variation.” So we’re left with anecdotal evidence and a bunch of elderly craftspeople who schedule their harvest days around a calendar that predates Islam. I guess it makes sense that pre-industrial cultures would develop hyper-local knowledge about plant phenology, but the specificity still surprises me—it’s not just “springtime,” it’s “the third week after Nowruz, when the moon is in its last quarter and the mornings still have frost.” That’s not folklore; that’s empirical observation compressed into ritual.
What Happens When A Traditional Craft Becomes Economically Nonviable And Everyone Pretends Otherwise
Gulnara earns about forty dollars a month from bark work. She supplements this by selling apricots from her garden and recieving remittances from a daughter in Moscow. None of her five grandchildren have expressed interest in learning the craft, which she mentions with this practiced neutrality that’s clearly masking disappointment. The Uzbek government periodically announces initiatives to preserve traditional crafts—there was a UNESCO intangible heritage nomination a few years back that went nowhere—but actual support means workshops for tourists, not sustainable income for artisans. I visited one such workshop in Samarkand, where a bored-looking woman demonstrated bark peeling for a group of German retirees while a translator mangled the explanations. The bark she was using had clearly been harvested out of season; it shredded like wet paper. Nobody in the tour group noticed.
Honestly, I don’t know what happens next. Maybe bark crafts become another museum artifact, preserved in amber (metaphorically speaking) while the living tradition dies out. Maybe some designer in Milan discovers it and turns it into a high-margin luxury good, which would at least provide income but would also strip away the cultural context that makes it meaningful. Gulnara doesn’t seem particularly worried—she’s outlived the Soviet Union, the civil war in Tajikistan, and three bouts of pneumonia, so the death of bark crafting probably registers as minor—but I left her workshop feeling that specific kind of melancholy you get when you realize you’re documenting something that might not exist in a decade. The mulberry trees will still be there, obviously. But the knowledge of how to read them, when to harvest, how to coax fiber into form—that’s stored in maybe a few dozen aging brains, and we haven’t figured out how to transfer it before they’re gone.
