Russian State Museum of Oriental Art (Gosudarstvennyi Muzei Vostoka) has an extensive collection of Central Asian suzani—a type of richly embroidered textile that once served as wedding embroidery to protect…

For centuries, Tajik families have used a “gahvora” (cradle) to contain babies. The gahvora is one of the oldest traditions in child care and it is still preserved in the…

The founders of Central Asian countries’ national cinema include Kazakhstan’s Shaken Aimanov, with his masterpiece “The Land of Fathers”, Kyrgyzstan’s Melis Ubukeyev, with his work “White Mountains”, Uzbekistan’s Shukhrat Abbasov,…

Dance is an integral part of life in Central Asia; it can be seen both in rural settings and on the proscenium stage, from highly developed virtuosic classical styles to…

Tajikistan has a rich heritage of exquisite wood carvings. Dr. Larisa Dodkhudoeva from the Institute of History, Archeology, and Ethnography named after Donish talks about the origins of this art…

Lazgi is a must-see of Khorezm. Lazgi is the dance with a feel-good factor, making you feel a joie de vivre or zest for life. There is an opinion that…

Researcher Cloe Drieu studied the earliest films in Central Asia that go back as far as 1924, a year that marked a political birth, with the ethnic and territorial delimitation…

The cultural heritage of Central Asia is in serious danger due to the relative poverty of the population, the high levels of corruption, and the radical rewriting of history that…

My recent visit to Tashkent (the capital of Uzbekistan) was marked by the exploration of several theaters. I saw two plays: The first, Zavtra (Tomorrow), was staged by Artyom Kim,…

The Ilkhom Theatre was started in 1976 as one of the experimental studios under the aegis of the Komsomol Youth organization, and in my master’s thesis,[1] I traced its transformation…