A walk round this beautiful old city and World Heritage site on the ancient Silk Road with Chris Aslan Alexander. Dating back at least 1500 years and some say much older, Khiva has some of the best-preserved examples of Islamic architecture in Central Asia. A Zoom link to the tour will be sent out a day or two before hand.
Chris Alexander has had a highly unusual career. He was born in Ankara, but moved with his family to Beirut in Lebanon, living through the civil war before they were evacuated. He spent his teenage years in the UK followed by two years at sea. Making the most of long student summers, he travelled along the ancient Silk Road, starting in Turkey and working his way overland through the Caucasus, Georgia, the Caspian Sea, Central Asia and China, writing articles for some of the NGOs who hosted him en route. One of them, Operation Mercy, asked him to come back to Khiva, Uzbekistan and write a guidebook to boost tourism.
Chris ended up spending seven years in Khiva, running a silk carpet workshop in conjunction with UNESCO, weaving to life 15th century carpet designs, natural dye techniques and creating income for over eighty people, most of them women. To find out more about his exploits, read: A Carpet Ride to Khiva – Seven Years on the Silk Road.
Expelled during an anti-NGO purge, Chris went on to live in the remote mountains of Badakshan on the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan. Here he worked on a text-book for learning the local oral language – Shugni – spoken in just three valleys, and also started a project training yak herders in the High Pamirs to collect down from their yaks; a luxury fibre similar to cashmere that was being thrown away.
Living in Badakshan, he was gored by a yak, swam to Afghanistan and back, was interrogated and accused of espionage for Sweden, asked to smuggle gems, and managed to avoid avalanches, rock slides and scorpion-stings.
Chris then moved to Kyrgyzstan, leading a rapid-response team of Uzbek speakers to provide trauma counselling in the aftermath of an inter-racial pogrom that left thousands without homes and hundreds dead. He lived in a remote village nestled in the mountains and forests of Southern Kyrgyzstan, trying to start a school for wood-carving, before returning to the UK.
He is now based in Cambridge where he splits his time between writing, lecturing for the Arts Society, and leading tours back to Central Asia.