Adventures in Central Asian Textiles - or how to get down from a yak!

Tue 25th Mar 2025

10:00 am

Lecturer: Chris Aslan

2 Lectures and an optional lunch being held at Screen 3 at Broadway Cinema on 25 March 2025.

The cost of the lectures is £25 for each attendee, and £10 for each lunch if this option is taken.

Our lecturer,Chris Aslan, was born in Turkey and spent his childhood there and in war-torn Beirut. After attending Leicester University he moved to Khiva, a desert oasis in Uzbekistan, establishing a UNESCO workshop reviving fifteenth century carpet designs and embroideries, and becoming the largest non-government employer in town. He was kicked out as part of an anti-Western purge, and took a year in Cambridge to write A Carpet Ride to Khiva. Chris then spent several years in the Pamir mountains of Tajikistan, training yak herders to comb their yaks for their cashmere-like down. Next came a couple more years in Kyrgyzstan living in the world’s largest natural walnut forest and establishing a wood-carving workshop. Since then, Chris has studied and rowed at Oxford, and is now based in North Cyprus. When he’s not lecturing for The Arts Society, he writes. His latest book, Unravelling the Silk Road, is published by Icon Books. Chris also takes tours to Central Asia, returning whenever he can, having left a large chunk of his heart out there. 

Chris has visited us previously, spinning tales of the Silk Road, and his knowledge, experience and lecturing style were hugely appreciated by our members - and we look forward to welcoming him back.

The morning will run as follows: 

10.00 - 10.30 Registration

10.30 – 11.30 Lecture 1 ‘A Carpet Ride to Khiva’ This is a narrative approach to the revival of 15th century carpets in Khiva, a desert oasis in Uzbekistan. Illuminations on vellum – containing the only surviving representations of textiles from this era – flourished, despite the Islamic prohibition on representative art and are all we had left of Timurid Carpets until Chris’s workshop began to weave them to life again.  The lecture will examine the traditional role of carpet weaving and embroidery in the social lives of Central Asian women and how social and political influences led to the decline of textile production.

11.30 – 12.00 Coffee

12 .00– 1.00 Lecture 2 ‘How to Get Down from a Yak’  Houses made from wool that are warm in the depths of winter, carpets that tell stories, woven bands that appease ancestors, embroideries that ward off evil, and kilims that store kitchenware, with everything ready to be packed and carried on yak or camel at a moment’s notice;  and the little-known nomadic textile cultures of the Kyrgyz, Turkoman and Karakalpak are explored in this lecture, along with the rise and fall of nomadism, and where the nomad life fits within the modern world. Chris also shares his own experience of working with nomadic yak herders in the High Pamirs for three years.

1 pm Optional cold fork buffet in the Mezzanine Bar (£10)