‘Can you read what it says?” It was 1992 and I was standing in Samarkand’s impressive Registan Square, looking up at Arabic inscriptions on 15th- and 17th-century buildings, when an Uzbek man approached me, speaking in Russian. The Soviet Union had just collapsed, but he had lived his life in a period when Cyrillic script had been dominant and Islamic learning discouraged. Now, seeing a stranger trying to decipher the words on the buildings of his city, he wanted to know if I could explain them to him.
Back then, I was on my gap year and living in Moscow teaching English at a specialist language school, where many of my pupils were the children of officials, diplomats and – almost certainly – KGB agents. It was a time of political transition and widespread hardship, including rising prices and struggles to access food, even through the black market. The six of us who had come from the UK were largely protected from that, as whatever we had from home was in sterling, precious hard currency, rather than roubles. When the school had a spring holiday that March, we decided to fly nearly 2,000 miles south-east and see something of Uzbekistan, then emerging from decades as one of the Soviet socialist republics.
