The photographer Dudin's Delight

In a description in his expeditionary report, the plots displayed in the photographs are unmistakably recognizable: 

“On the one side there are fruit vendors, in front of them are sellers of sour milk, ice cream, and ice water; on one side there are teahouses and money-changing shops, on the other are tobacco shops and vendors of snuffboxes and pumpkin chillums, here they also manufacture their products. In the area between these borders, sellers of various types of pies, boiled tail fat, lamb heads, sellers of shashlik with their portable stoves, sellers of boiled lamb with troughs and baskets, etc., are located in the most picturesque disorder. Bakers with flat cakes in flat baskets roam between merchants, shouting praises to their bread. Above them, the four-cornered blue, white and multicoloured canopies. Crowds of customers in colourful striped robes, luxurious and torn; bunches of watermelons and melons glisten in the sun; bunches of apples, pomegranates, pines and grapes seem to be a colourful carpet whimsically thrown in a corner of the square. <…> By the wall of the mosque there a whole row of shoemakers banging and pounding old galoshes with their hammers in the sun. And opposite, in the shadows, the same row of barbers shaves the heads of the faithful. On the nails hammered into the cracks between the slabs of carved marble hang cells with quails towels and other items of hairdressing. Above all of this, the portals of madrasas and their slim, slender minarets, gently glittering with their painted tiles and mosaics, rise to the right and to the left.

You can learn more about the topic in the book-album “Uzbekistan in historic photographs of the 19th - early 20th centuries in the collections of Russian archives” (Volume XXXVII) in the series “Cultural Legacy of Uzbekistan”.

The general sponsor of the project is the oilfield services company Eriell-Group.