Gijduvan Ceramics: The Narzullaev Workshop
Brown, green and yellow glazes from a town outside Bukhara, made by one family for six generations. What to look for, what it costs, and how to visit.
Uzbek ceramics divide roughly into two camps. Rishtan in the Fergana Valley works in cobalt and turquoise, cool and bright. Gijduvan, about forty-five minutes northeast of Bukhara by road, works in brown, ochre, green and yellow, warm and earthy, and the difference is visible across a room.
The name most associated with the Gijduvan style is Narzullaev (also spelled Narzullayev), a family of hereditary potters who turned their house into a workshop and museum. The official tourism portal describes the style as polychrome, in a yellow-green scheme with floral and geometric patterns.
What makes it Gijduvan
Three things identify a Gijduvan piece.
The palette. Manganese brown, copper green, iron yellow and a warm cream ground, with blue used sparingly if at all. The colours come from local mineral pigments rather than imported cobalt, which is the historical reason the style looks the way it does.
The bleed. The glaze is applied so that the colours run slightly into each other in the kiln, softening the edges of the pattern. In Rishtan work the lines stay crisp; here they are meant to blur.
The motifs. Large stylised flowers, rosettes and leaf forms filling the whole surface of a bowl, often arranged around a central medallion, with a border of repeating marks at the rim.
Once you have seen a dozen pieces you can tell the two schools apart without being told, which makes shopping in Bukhara's bazaars much more interesting.
The Narzullaev workshop
The family compound in Gijduvan combines a working pottery and a museum of the family's and the region's ceramics. The tourism portal credits Usto Ibodullo Narzullaev with founding both, and calls him the founding father of Gijduvan ceramics; its article on the Gijduvan masters names his sons Alisher and Abdullo as the ones carrying the work on. On generations, the portal calls Ibodullo a fifth-generation potter and counts seven generations in the dynasty as a whole.
What you see on a visit: the clay preparation, pots being thrown on foot-driven kick wheels, the pigments being mixed, brushes cut from local materials, and the kiln. Ceramics is a slow craft and much of what happens here happens at the speed it did a century ago.
There is usually a chance to try the wheel, and longer classes can be arranged in advance. The family also embroider, and the suzani work is displayed alongside the pots.
Lunch is often part of a visit, eaten in the courtyard, and it is one of the better meals you will have outside a city.
Buying
Buying at the workshop means buying from the maker at a fair price, which is not always true of the same-looking pieces in a Bukhara shop.
- What to buy: a plate or a bowl travels better than a jug or a vase. Small dishes are cheap and make good gifts.
- Prices: the workshop doesn't publish a price list, and they range widely with size and with which family member made the piece. Ask the price before anything is wrapped.
- Packing: they will wrap things properly. Put ceramics in hand luggage if you can, or in the middle of a bag surrounded by clothes.
- Authenticity: ask who made the piece and whether it is signed. Family members sign their work, and the signature is on the base.
- Food safety: ask before using older-style glazed ware for food, particularly acidic food. Modern workshop pieces are made for use, but be explicit about the question.
Bargaining is limited here; the prices are set and reasonable. Save the haggling for the bazaars.
How a piece is made
Watching the sequence is the best part of the visit, and it helps to know what stage you are looking at.
It starts with clay dug locally, cleaned of stones, soaked, kneaded and left to rest, sometimes for weeks. The potter throws on a wheel kicked by foot, which turns more slowly than an electric one and leaves the faint ridges you can feel on the inside of a finished bowl.
The piece dries, is trimmed, and then gets a white slip, a liquid clay coat that gives the pattern something to sit on. Painting is done freehand with fine hair brushes, and there is no drawing underneath: the master paints the same composition he has painted for forty years, straight onto the pot.
The pigments are mineral. Manganese for brown and black, copper for green, iron for yellow and ochre, ground and mixed in the workshop. The portal adds that the body itself uses three local clays, white, red and yellow. A transparent glaze goes over the top before firing.
In the kiln, pigment and glaze melt into each other rather than sitting in separate layers, and the soft edges this produces are the signature of the style rather than a defect in it.
Getting there
Gijduvan is about 45 kilometres northeast of Bukhara on the road to Samarkand, which makes it easy to fit in.
- As a half-day trip: taxi from Bukhara, roughly 45 minutes each way. Agree a return fare and waiting time before you set off.
- On the way to Samarkand: the better option. Ask your driver to stop; it adds an hour or two to a transfer you were making anyway. Our Samarkand to Bukhara guide covers the route.
- Booking: the workshop doesn't list public opening hours, so have your guesthouse phone ahead and arrange a time. The workshop is a family home as well as a business, and turning up unannounced with a group is less welcome than arranging a time.
While you are in the town, the Ulugh Beg madrasah of 1433 stands in the centre, one of the three that he built, and the Abdulkhalik Gijduvani complex is an important Sufi pilgrimage site. Both take twenty minutes and are on the same street.
How it fits with the rest
If you are following craft rather than monuments, this is one stop on a circuit that also takes in Rishtan's ceramics, Margilan's silk and the paper mill at Konigil outside Samarkand.
What these places have in common is that the craft nearly died in the Soviet period, when mass production replaced workshops, and came back through a handful of families who kept the knowledge. That is worth remembering when you are deciding whether to buy the factory-made plate in a souvenir shop or the slightly more expensive one with somebody's name on the bottom.