Craft · Karakalpakstan
Karakalpak jewellery
The heavy silver jewellery of Karakalpak women: the bride’s breast ornament, nose-ring, moon-shaped brooches and tumar amulets against the evil eye.
Craft · Karakalpakstan
The Karakalpak yurt and felt
A portable home of wooden lattice and felt that goes up in a few hours: the skills of building Karakalpak yurts joined UNESCO’s list in 2025.
Photo: Jean Housen · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Men’s work and women’s work
The yurt is the portable dwelling of nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples: a circular lattice wall and a domed roof of wooden parts, covered with felt and bound with ropes — hence its other name, ‘felt house’. A hearth stands at the centre and the interior is divided into women’s and men’s sides. The word o‘tov was used especially for a yurt freshly covered in new white felt and raised for a young bride.
As UNESCO describes it, men and their apprentices make the wooden frame and the wooden, leather, bone and metal fittings by hand, while women make the interior decorations and outer coverings through weaving, spinning, braiding, felting and embroidery.
Heritage today
In 2025 the ‘Traditional knowledge and skills in making Kyrgyz, Kazakh and Karakalpak yurts’ were inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List. A yurt is treated as a sacred family relic handed down from parents to children, and weddings, birth rites and funerals were held in it. Uzbekistan has also nominated traditional felt making (2026; no decision yet). Today you can spend a night in a yurt at the yurt camps in the desert areas of Karakalpakstan and Navoiy Region.
Sources (3)
Photos
Craft · Fergana
Rishtan ceramics
The blue and turquoise pottery of Rishtan in the Fergana Valley, famed for its ishkor glaze made from plant ash and its local red clay.
Craft · Bukhara
Gijduvan ceramics
Pottery from Gijduvan near Bukhara, glazed in browns, yellows and greens — the best-known centre of the Bukhara–Samarkand school.
Craft · Fergana
Margilan atlas and adras
Margilan’s ikat silks: pure-silk atlas and half-silk adras. UNESCO recognises the town’s work to safeguard them as a model practice.
Craft · Bukhara
Bukhara gold embroidery
Embroidery in gold and silver thread on velvet and silk — the art of the Bukhara emirs’ court and still the city’s most precious craft.
Craft · Khorezm
Khiva woodcarving
The carved doors and columns of Itchan Kala: Khiva’s carvers never paint the wood, finishing it only with natural oil; the Juma Mosque alone has more than 200 columns.
Craft · Namangan
Chust knives
Hand-forged knives from Chust in Namangan Region: a blade with a slightly upturned tip, the maker’s stamped ‘signature’ and a decorated sheath.
Craft · Namangan
Chust doppi (skullcap)
The four-sided Chust skullcap, with white pepper-pod motifs on dark green, is the best-known emblem of Uzbek dress — and every oasis has its own doppi.
Craft · Samarkand
Samarkand paper
Paper made from mulberry bark — the finest writing material of the 9th–10th-century Islamic world, revived at Konigil at the end of the 20th century.
Craft · Bukhara
Suzani and Bukhara embroidery
Large hand-embroidered hangings called suzani; the Bukhara school is known for fine designs covering almost the whole cloth in reds and greens on a pale ground.