One of the most unusual ornamental decor motifs is the vak. It represents stylized heads of a person or fantastic and real animals – dragons, donkeys, bulls, lions, dogs, horses, elephants, etc. placed at the ends of spiral shoots of branches with islimi leaves. This motif takes also place in the pictorial version – a tree, in the crown of which, there are all the same heads or naked bodies of people hanging from branches like fruits or flowers.
This motif came from fairy tales and myths, where the vak was referred to as a fantastic tree. Its fruits in the form of the heads of living beings could talk among themselves at sunrise – “vak-vak” and offer prayers to God.
The motif of the talking tree – darakht-e guia – is found in the poetry of Ferdowsi, as well as in Turkic folklore – danyshan-agach. It is believed that its roots go back to the culture of India, and the vak-vak motif itself is, accordingly, of Indian origin. Its foreign genesis was determined primarily by the fact that when creating fantastic or demonic images, Muslim artists could turn to foreign cultural texts.
Meanwhile, the first examples of this motif took place in ancient Roman architectural decoration. Its early examples in Central Asia are recorded on the marble panels of the Ghaznavid palace (Lashkari Bazaar, Bust, Afghanistan), where spiral branches end with images of winged griffins and lions, various polymorphs (a lion-like sphinx with a female crowned head, a female bird). Perhaps, as a result of Roman-Kushan connections, this motif penetrated into the ancient art of India. Several centuries later, already during the military campaigns of Mahmud Ghazni to India, the vak-vak became popular in Ghaznavid architecture and, further, in the art of the entire Muslim East, especially in miniature and carpets of Iran and Azerbaijan.
On the territory of Uzbekistan, the vak motif was quite rare.