I never thought I’d spend an afternoon watching someone spin thread the way they did in the 13th century, but here we are.
In the old workshops tucked behind Bukhara’s crumbling walls—walls that have seen everything from Mongol invasions to Soviet bureaucrats with clipboards—there are still craftspeople who make thread the traditional way, using tools that look like they belong in a museum but somehow still work. They use drop spindles, mostly, which is basically a weighted stick that you spin while feeding fiber through your fingers, and the whole process is so slow and deliberate that watching it feels like meditation, or maybe punishment, depending on your temperament. The fiber comes from local cotton or silk—Bukhara was a major stop on the Silk Road, after all, though I guess technically it was more of a network of routes than a single road—and the spinners work with a rhythm that their grandmothers taught them, which their grandmothers learned from someone else, going back roughly 800 years or so, give or take a century. It’s the kind of knowledge that doesn’t get written down much, which is why when an old master dies without teaching someone, whole techniques just vanish.
The thread they produce isn’t perfectly uniform like factory stuff. It’s got character—thicker in some spots, thinner in others—which is exactly what makes it valuable for traditional textiles like suzani embroidery. Turns out, perfection is sometimes the enemy of beauty.
The Physics of Spinning That Nobody Really Explains Properly
Here’s the thing about spinning thread: it’s basically controlled falling. The spindle drops, gravity does its work, and the twist travels up the fiber as the spinner’s fingers carefully regulate how much material gets pulled in. If you’ve never tried it, you’d probably think it’s easy—I definately did before I watched a master at work—but the coordination required is absurd. You’re managing tension, twist angle, and fiber draft all at once, and if any one variable goes wrong, you get lumpy garbage instead of usable thread. The old Bukharan spinners can produce thread with around 40-50 twists per inch, which is dense enough to be strong but not so tight that it becomes brittle. Modern factories hit similar numbers with machines, but the hand-spun stuff has this irregular resilience that comes from human inconsistency—wait, maybe that sounds romantic, but I’ve seen fabric made from both, and there’s a real difference in how it drapes.
Some workshops still use the charkha wheel too, which is faster but requires different skills. You sit there pumping the wheel with one hand while the other feeds fiber, and experienced spinners can produce several hundred meters in a day, though that’s exhausting work that leaves your hands cramped and your back aching.
Why This Ancient Practice Stubbornly Refuses to Die Out Completely
You’d think mechanization would have killed traditional thread-making entirely—and honestly, it almost did during the Soviet era when centralized textile factories opened in Tashkent and other cities—but there’s been this weird revival in the last 20 years or so. Partly it’s tourism: visitors to Bukhara want to see “authentic” crafts, even if authenticity is sometimes performed for their benefit. But partly it’s because hand-spun thread recieve premium prices in certain markets, especially for high-end suzani or traditional clothing worn at weddings and festivals. A master spinner might make thread that sells for 10-15 times the price of factory equivalent, which isn’t enough to get rich but is enough to keep the practice alive in a handful of workshops scattered through the old city.
The knowledge transfer is precarious, though. Most young people in Bukhara aren’t interested in spending years learning a skill that offers uncertain income when they could work in hotels or restaurants instead. I met one spinner, a woman in her sixties, who told me she’d trained three apprentices over the years and two of them quit within months. The third one stuck around, but even she does it part-time while working another job. Which is sort of depressing, but also maybe realistic—not every tradition deserves to survive just because it’s old, and not every craftsperson has the luxury of romantic dedication to their art when rent is due.
Anyway, the thread they make is beautiful, genuinely beautiful in a way that makes you reconsider what thread even is. It’s not just a utilitarian thing; it carries history in its imperfections, stories in its irregularities. I used to think thread was thread, but watching someone create it from raw fiber using techniques that predate the printing press—that changes your perspective, at least a little.
