Siab Bazaar: Samarkand's Main Market

Samarkand's monuments are behind ticket barriers. Its market is not, and for many people it turns out to be the part of the city they enjoyed most.

Siab bazaar sits immediately north of the Bibi-Khanym mosque, at the foot of the Afrasiyab plateau, on ground that has held a market for a very long time. It is where the city actually shops.

The layout

The core is a long covered hall with parallel aisles, and the trade is sorted by category, which makes it easy to navigate once you know the order.

Bread at the front, in stacks, with the round Samarkand non piled highest.
Dried fruit and nuts in the main aisles: apricots, raisins in a dozen shades, figs, almonds, walnuts, pistachios.
Spices, sold from open sacks, including the cumin and coriander that go into plov.
Sweets: halva in slabs, nisholda, sugared nuts, parvarda.
Dairy: suzma, qatiq, cheeses, butter.
Fresh produce around the edges and outside, changing completely with the season.
Meat in a separate hall, which vegetarians can simply walk past.

Outside the hall the market spreads into clothes, hardware, plastic goods and cheap cafes. The tourist part is the covered section; the rest is where the city buys its buckets.

What to actually buy

Samarkand non. The city's bread is famous across Uzbekistan: round, dense, stamped in the middle, with a shiny crust that keeps for days. The claim is that it does not go stale for weeks, which is an exaggeration in the direction of something true. Buy one hot and eat it in the market.

Halva. Samarkand halva is closer to a dense flour-and-fat confection than the Middle Eastern sesame version. Taste before buying; the stalls expect it, and quality varies a lot.

Dried apricots and raisins. The best souvenirs from Uzbekistan, light, cheap and impossible to find at this quality at home. Ask to taste each type; the dark, sticky, sun-dried apricots are the ones to get rather than the bright orange ones.

Nuts. Walnuts, almonds and pistachios, sold by the kilo, usually fresher than supermarket equivalents.

Spices. Buy small quantities of black cumin and the plov spice mixes; they are excellent and weigh nothing.

Skip the "silk" scarves and the mass-produced ceramics inside the hall. For those, go to Margilan and Rishtan, or to a proper craft shop; our carpet guide covers the textiles worth spending on.

How to read a bread stall

Bread is worth a paragraph of its own, because the stall in front of you contains more distinctions than it looks.

The round loaves are stamped in the centre with a chekich, a small spiked tool that makes the pattern and keeps the middle thin so it bakes evenly. Patterns differ by baker and by town, and a Samarkand loaf is heavier, flatter and shinier than the puffier Tashkent version. Some are finished with sesame or nigella seed, some glazed with milk or egg, some enriched with fat, which is the kind you want if you are carrying it for a day.

There are conventions around it too. Bread is not put face down on a table, it is torn rather than cut, and leaving pieces on the floor is genuinely frowned on. If you buy more than you can eat, give it away rather than binning it in public; someone will take it.

Ask when the batch came out. A loaf still warm from the tandir is a completely different object from the same loaf four hours later, and the sellers know exactly which of their stacks is which.

Prices and bargaining

Food is sold by the kilo. Prices are not usually posted, but they are real prices rather than invented ones, and the tourist mark-up is modest by regional standards.

Ask the price before you ask for a quantity. Qancha? in Uzbek, skolko? in Russian.
Bargaining on food is light: you might get ten percent, or a handful extra thrown in. Hard haggling over a kilo of raisins reads as rude.
Bargain properly on crafts, clothes and anything with a tourist price, where the first quote may be double.
Carry small notes. Nobody wants to break a 200,000 som note for a 15,000 som purchase at nine in the morning.
Take a photo of the price on a calculator if numbers are the problem; every seller has one.

Cards are not accepted at stalls. There are ATMs on the main road outside.

Timing and practicalities

Mornings are best: everything is fresh, the bread is coming out, and it is cool. By mid-afternoon the produce is picked over and the sellers are packing.

Sunday is the busiest day and the most interesting if you like crowds. Monday is the quietest. The market runs daily from early morning until roughly six, later in summer.

Where: immediately north of Bibi-Khanym, a ten-minute walk from the Registan.
Entry: free.
Time needed: 45 minutes to an hour, longer if you eat.
Photography: generally welcomed, but ask before photographing faces. Sellers often pose happily and then expect you to buy something, which is fair enough.
Watch: your bag in the crowded aisles, as in any busy market.

Eating at the market

The food stalls outside the covered hall do samsa, plov, lagman and shashlik at local prices. Samsa straight from the tandoor, taken at the moment the baker pulls them off the oven wall, is the single best cheap meal in Samarkand.

For vegetarians, the Korean salad row and the dairy aisle are better than the cooked stalls; our vegetarian guide explains what to look for.

The natural route is Registan, then Bibi-Khanym, then the bazaar for lunch, then Shah-i-Zinda in the afternoon. Our Samarkand travel guide sets out the full day, and this corner of the city is where it is worth slowing down.

Featured image: BeshevI (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons.