My eyes are filled with cobalt blue – shimmering tiles reflect the sun’s light and the coolness is a soul-quenching hue. In Uzbekistan, the facades of the spiritual monuments are decorated with ceramic mosaics in bright turquoise, soft aqua and deep ultramarine, carefully contrasted with creamy sand and terracotta.
This secular Central Asian republic has a Muslim majority society and these colours go deep into its past. Here vast areas of arid desert adjoin mulberry orchards and wide cotton fields under an unforgiving cloudless sky.
