A Carpet Ride to Khiva opens the door to the closed world of the remote Uzbek desert
(18/12/2009)

Chris Alexander's debut book, A Carpet Ride to Khiva, offers an evocative new voice that opens the door to a closed world - showing us how different life is for people in Uzbekistan but just as interestingly, our similarities across the cultural divide.

This young man settled in Khiva in Uzbekistan and established a UNESCO-supported carpet workshop using traditional weaving techniques and local weavers from the female and disabled local population, ancient Persian manuscripts as inspiration for design and natural dyes from the region. After seven years theworkshop that Alexander set up had become fully self-sufficient and employee-owned.

A unique, beautiful and moving account of seven years living in the remote Uzbek desert, A Carpet Ride to Khiva started when Christopher travelled to the remote walled city in Uzbekistan on the route of the ancient Silk Road, to write a guidebook. For most people, the Silk Road conjures images of the exotic and the unknown. But when most travellers simply pass along it, Chris Alexander chose to live there.

While ostensibly writing a guidebook, Alexander found life at the heart of the glittering madrassahs, mosques and minarets of the walled city of Khiva immensely alluring, and stayed.

Immersing himself in the language and rich cultural traditions Alexander discovers a world torn between Marx and Mohammed, a place where veils and vodka, pork and polygamy freely mingle, against a backdrop of forgotten carpet designs, crumbling but magnificent Islamic architecture and scenes drawn straight from The Arabian Nights.

Accompanied by a large green parrot, a ginger cat and his adoptive Uzbek family, Alexander recounts his efforts to rediscover the lost art of traditional weaving and dyeing, and the process establishing a self-sufficient carpet workshop, employing local women and disabled people to train as apprentices.

A Carpet Ride to Khiva sees Alexander being stripped naked at a former Soviet youth camp, crawling through silkworm droppings in an attempt to record their life-cycle, holed up in the British Museum discovering carpet designs dormant for half a millennia, tackling a carpet-thieving mayor, distinguishing natural dyes from sacks of opium in Northern Afghanistan, bluffing his way through an impromptu version of My Heart Will Go On for national Uzbek TV and seeking sanctuary as an anti-Western riot consumed the Kabul carpet bazaar.
It is an unforgettable true travel story of a journey to the heart of the unknown and the unexpected friendship one man found there.

Its story is similar to Greg Mortensen's Three Cups of Tea, its wry humour reminiscent of Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's The Settler's Cookbook, its cultural geography crosses with Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red and its lyricism echoing Sara Maitland's A Book of Silence.

Christopher Aslan Alexander was born in Turkey and grew up in war-torn Beirut. After university he moved to Central Asia. While writing a guidebook about Khiva, he fell in love with this desert oasis boasting the most homogenous example of Islamic architecture in the world, and stayed.

ISBN: 9781848311251
Format: Hardback (216mm x 135mm x mm)
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd
Publish Date: 7-Jan-2010