Our driver meets you at Samarkand station or airport and takes you to your hotel. From Tashkent the Afrosiyob high-speed train takes about 2 h 30 min, and we book the ticket on request.

In the afternoon your guide takes you to the Eternal City, an 11-hectare quarter of the Silk Road Samarkand complex built as an old town of narrow streets. More than 50 workshops work here: woodcarvers, potters, jewellers, carpet weavers and paper makers, and you watch them at work. Look for the woodcarvers, who cut doors, columns and boxes by hand in the manner of the Samarkand school.

Good to know: Master classes in the Eternal City are booked in advance. Tell us which craft you would like to try, and we arrange it for your dates.

Overnight in Samarkand

Konigil is about 13 km from Samarkand, on the Siab stream. At the Meros mill, founded in 1996 by the brothers Zarif and Islam Mukhtarov, Samarkand paper is made the way it was before the craft died out in the 19th century. Young mulberry bark is soaked, scraped and boiled, then beaten into pulp by wooden poles that a water wheel lifts and drops. You follow the whole cycle and lift a sheet out of the vat yourself. The dried sheets are polished with a stone until they shine; the mill makes 100–120 of them a day.

Lunch in the teahouse by the stream, with Samarkand plov, and time in the mill shop for notebooks, postcards and miniatures painted on the paper. The story of the paper is in our article on Samarkand paper at Konigil.

In the afternoon, back in town, a workshop where silk carpets are knotted by hand. The silk is dyed with plants such as pomegranate peel, walnut shells and onion skins, and a large carpet can keep a weaver busy for a year or more.

Good to know: Meros is a working mill, so we agree the time of your visit and the paper-making session with the masters in advance. Ask before you film them.

Overnight in Samarkand

A free morning: Siab Bazaar is the place for Samarkand non and halva to take with you. Then to the station for the Afrosiyob to Bukhara, under two hours. Bukhara station is in Kagan, about 12 km from the old town, and our driver meets you there.

In the afternoon, the trading domes with your guide. Four covered bazaars of the 16th century still stand over the old merchant crossroads: Toki Sarrafon of the money changers, Toki Zargaron of the jewellers, Toki Telpak Furushon, where caps were sold, and Tim Abdullakhan, the hall of silk and carpets. Today they sell caps, knives, jewellery, carpets and souvenirs, and next to Telpak Furushon a blacksmith forges knives in front of you. How the domes work is in our guide to the bazaars of Uzbekistan.

In the evening, Lyabi-Hauz, a few steps from the domes, where Bukhara spends its evenings by the pond: see Lyabi-Hauz and Chor Minor.

Overnight in Bukhara

In the morning, the blacksmiths’ museum of the Kamalov family, smiths in Bukhara for six generations. Here the Bukhara scissors are forged in the shape of a stork: open them, and the beak becomes the two blades. The long curved beak was made for trimming raised gold embroidery, which ordinary scissors cannot do.

Gold embroidery is the next thread. Under the emirs it was a court art: robes of silk velvet were embroidered with gold thread in the court workshops, and almost everything went to the court. At Sitorai Mohi-Hosa, the summer palace 4 km north of the old town and a museum since 1927, you see gold-embroidered robes next to Bukhara suzani. A suzani is the large embroidered cloth a bride prepared for her dowry, and your guide shows you how to read the back of one before you buy.

The afternoon is yours for the workshops of the old town. On request we arrange a session with a Bukhara miniature painter or a visit to a gold-embroidery workshop, and for the evening, dinner with a local family.

Overnight in Bukhara

Gijduvan is about 45 km north-east of Bukhara, a working town with its own school of ceramics: flower ornament combined with geometric patterns, with green and blue prevailing. In the town’s best-known family workshop the sixth generation of potters is at work, and their museum holds ceramics from many centres of Central Asia. You see the whole process, from the clay to the kiln, and then sit at the wheel or paint a plate with a master, subject to the master’s schedule.

In Gijduvan also stands the small madrasah that Ulugh Beg built in 1433, the third and last of his madrasahs after Samarkand and Bukhara. Lunch is in town, known across the region for its fried fish and its shashlik. More on the town is in our article on day trips around Bukhara.

In the afternoon, back to Bukhara and a transfer to the station or the airport, or to your hotel if you stay on.

Good to know: Ask the workshop to wrap your plates well and carry them in your hand luggage.