Almond & pomegranate: the quiet survival of Rishton blue.
A hundred years after the last cobalt mines closed in Bukhara, a few houses on the edge of Rishton are still grinding ishkor and painting from memory.
The kiln at Rustam Usto’s workshop has been cold for two days when I arrive, and he is happy about it. A cold kiln means the last firing held — the cobalt did not crawl, the turquoise did not pool brown at the rims — and the eighty plates stacked along the wall, almond-bordered and still smelling faintly of ash, are sold before they have been wiped clean.
What the glaze remembers
Ishkor is a glaze made from the ash of a desert plant. You burn the plant, you wash the ash, you mix what is left with ground quartz and a little lead, and the result, brushed onto white slip and fired hot, is the cool, slightly sea-green sheen that no factory in Tashkent has ever matched. Rustam learned the proportions from his father, who learned them from a man named Yusufjon Avliyokulov, who is still listed in the 1924 cooperative ledger as “painter, almonds.”
“A plate is not finished when the painting is finished. It is finished when the buyer’s mother says nothing and puts bread on it.”