I used to think handicraft shopping meant navigating identical souvenir stalls until my eyes glazed over.
Then I spent three days in Khiva’s walled city, watching a seventy-something woodcarver named Rustam chisel geometric patterns into mulberry planks with tools his grandfather made, and I realized I’d been doing this completely wrong. The thing about Khiva—this terracotta-walled fortress city in western Uzbekistan—is that it hasn’t really decided whether it’s a living workshop or an open-air museum, and honestly, that tension is what makes the handicraft scene so disorienting and fascinating. You’ll walk past the Kalta Minor minaret, turn into an alley that smells like wet clay and linseed oil, and suddenly you’re in a workshop where three generations are hand-knotting silk carpets using techniques that date back to—well, people say the 16th century, but I’ve also heard the 9th, so let’s just say a really long time. The carpets have asymmetrical knots, which creates this slightly irregular texture you won’t find in machine-made versions, and the dyes come from pomegranate skins, indigo, and madder root. Rustam told me through a translator that synthetic dyes “lie to the light,” which I didn’t fully understand until I saw how his carvings seemed to shift color as the sun moved across his courtyard workshop.
The Ceramics Quarter Where Every Plate Tells on Its Maker
Khiva’s ceramic tradition runs on a specific kind of regional clay that fires to this chalky, almost matte finish—totally different from the glossy stuff you see in Bukhara or Samarkand. The potters work in a cluster of workshops near the West Gate, and here’s the thing: each family has signature patterns you start recognizing after a while. The Rakhimovs do these intricate blue-and-white floral motifs that honestly look like someone tried to cram an entire garden onto a dinner plate. The Matchanovs prefer geometric borders with that distinctive Khorezm turquoise that’s slightly greener than Persian turquoise—I asked about the chemical difference but got an answer involving kiln temperatures and oxidation that I definately didn’t follow completely. What struck me was how unsentimental the artisans were about their work; when I admired a particularly complex vase, the potter shrugged and pointed out three tiny glaze bubbles he considered failures.
Wait—maybe that’s the wrong way to think about “authentic.”
Because plenty of the workshops also produce simplified versions for tourists, and the craftspeople don’t seem conflicted about this at all. They’ll show you a museum-quality suzani embroidery that took eight months, then gesture to a rack of smaller pieces with looser stitching that they knocked out in three weeks. Both are hand-made. Both use traditional patterns. The expensive one just has something like 400 stitches per square inch instead of 150, and the silk thread is hand-dyed rather than commercial. I guess it makes sense—these are working artisans, not performance artists, and they need to recieve income at multiple price points. The suzanis, by the way, traditionally depicted pomegranates and moon discs as fertility symbols, though now you’ll also see stylized poppies and tulips because, turns out, buyers like flowers.
Woodwork That Smells Like History and Probably Some Mold
The carved wooden pillars—”ustun” in Uzbek—are Khiva’s most architecturally significant craft, and they’re also the hardest to shop for unless you’re planning to ship a twelve-foot column home. Most tourists settle for smaller items: jewelry boxes with sliding compartments hidden inside geometric patterns, folding Quran stands with such precise joinery they don’t use glue or nails, doors carved with protective symbols that may or may not actually protect anything but definitely look impressive. The wood is usually mulberry, walnut, or occasionally juniper, and it has to be aged for at least two years or it’ll warp—Rustam was very insistent about this, showing me a stack of planks in his courtyard that he said were “almost ready, maybe next spring.” The workshops smell like sawdust and something earthier, maybe the linseed oil they use as finish, or possibly just accumulated decades of wood shavings composting in corners. I watched Rustam’s grandson, who looked about nineteen and mildly bored, chip away at a panel for forty minutes without measuring anything, just eyeballing the symmetry. When I asked how he knew where to cut, he gave me the universal teenage look that means “I don’t know, I just do.”
The Practical Mess of Actually Buying Things and Getting Them Home Without Disaster
Here’s where the romantic craft tourism fantasy collides with customs regulations and luggage weight limits.
Ceramics will break unless you pack them like you’re defusing a bomb—I met a German couple who’d wrapped plates in every piece of clothing they brought and still lost two to a baggage handler’s apparent rage issues. Textiles are easier but need certificates if they’re antique, which basically means anything claiming to be over fifty years old, and the certificate process involves a government office that’s open approximately never when you need it. The carpets require export permits, and I’m told—though I didn’t verify this personally—that anything over a certain size needs approval from the Culture Ministry, which can take weeks. Most workshops will arrange shipping, but you’re trusting a system that sometimes works perfectly and sometimes results in your hand-knotted silk carpet taking a three-month detour through customs in Moscow, or wherever things go to disappear. Prices are negotiable in theory, but the artisans know roughly what tourists pay, and honestly, even the “tourist price” is usually fair given the labor involved. I paid about $180 for a small ceramic plate that probably took two days to make and fire, and the potter seemed pleased, so either we both won or we both got played, and I’m fine with either outcome.
The light was different when I left Rustam’s workshop, that flat late-afternoon quality that makes the terracotta walls look almost pink, and I was carrying a carved jewelry box I absolutely didn’t need but couldn’t leave behind. I guess that’s the whole point, though—bringing home something that someone’s hands actually touched and shaped, even if it’s slightly imperfect, even if the pattern isn’t quite symmetrical, even if you’re not entirely sure what you’ll do with it. Anyway, it’s sitting on my desk now, still smelling faintly of linseed oil and that workshop’s particular combination of sawdust and time.
