Building with Botox

We’ve spent the last week travelling to the classic tourist sights in Uzbekistan: Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva. To be honest it’s hard to do anything other than that as the road literally leads you from one place to the next with little chance to detour. Whilst the immense desert doesn’t help, you also get the feeling that the powers that be just want you to stick to the tourist trail too.

We’ve spent the majority of the previous four months in the countryside surrounded by the stark beauty of nature. Where man has made his mark it’s been on roughly honed roads and shelters. These themselves have their own beauty both in their simplicity and function. You can see the rough saw cuts of the branches that hold up the roofs of mud brick buildings. The tracks worn into the steppe in Mongolia as vehicles carve their routes across. You can see the scrapes in the gravel where diggers’s teeth have dragged loose fallen rocks. Tool marks left in the rocks and trees that were sacrificed to construct the nearby houses.

I love the honesty in these hand crafted products. There’s no pretence; no over engineering; no nod to fashion or taste. Their beauty lies in their function. Which brings me to Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva. There’s no doubt that these ancient cities are stunning but while tourists flock to gaze in wonder at the beauty; I am left just a little cold.

Of course I have nothing against restoring old buildings. It just seems that the very soul that brought these buildings alive in the first place has been plastered over in the quest for beauty. It’s just too clean, too sterile – too picture postcard perfect. Of course these are ancient buildings that have been restored during different periods over the centuries so we’re not talking ‘Mies van der Rohe Barcelona Pavilion’ perfect. They are wonky and rustic and dusty and crude and that is exactly what makes them so charming and beautiful.

But where destitute drunks would have sprawled; where wise old men would have sat playing games under the glare of the midday sun; where children would have run amok – now there’s just gawping tourists and over-eager traders. Where dropped melons would have dried in the heat of the day; where animals would have sat and shat; where dusty rugs would have been shaken and beaten – now there’s just stall after stall of cheap tourist fare.

It’s natural beauty, which it undeniably has, seems now somewhat insincere in its perfection. Layers of restoration have sought to create the ideal super-model, but in doing so it’s integrity may have been lost. I want to see the tool marks left by the first apprentice builders; I want to see ancient anarchic scrawlings of wayward teens; I want to see dirty water gushing down the streets; I want to see women yelling out of windows at errant husbands; I want to see the effects of brutal battles on the high defensive wall; I want to see the ravages of time taking their toil; I want to see it’s honesty…. it’s functionality.

But it’s hard to see past the botox injected facade to glimpse at the beautiful stories that lie hidden beneath.