The Thread That Binds Three Generations

How a Bukhara sun-medallion suzani traveled from a grandmother's loom in 1962 to a gallery wall in Brooklyn

My grandmother began the sun-medallion suzani in the spring of 1962, in the old city of Bukhara. The cream cotton ground was stretched across a wooden frame nearly eight feet wide. Pomegranate thread came from a dyer on Lyabi-Hauz; the pink from a woman in the Jewish quarter who mixed cochineal with alum into the specific salmon shade that marks every Bukhara textile.

The Language of Sun-Medallions

Every suzani tells its story through the central medallion. My grandmother's was a Bukhara sun — sixteen radiating petals outlined in cypress green, filled with the salmon-pink that distinguishes the city's tradition from Samarkand's cypress trees or Tashkent's pomegranate vines. Each petal took roughly two weeks of morning light and steady hands.