Long Way Round

You hear Misgaron before you see it. A hammer on copper has a note that no other tool has, bright, a little cold, like a spoon on a glass. At the end of the Row, behind a door painted blue by someone in 1987, Anvar Saidov, 63, beats a tray.

His family has made trays, jugs and cauldrons here since before the Russians came. His grandfather made the cauldrons for the khan's kitchens. His father made them for the Soviet canteens. Anvar makes them for weddings, because a family that is to cook for three hundred still needs a copper kazan, and a copper kazan, he says, cooks differently from the aluminium ones the shops sell.

"Aluminium is fast and angry. Copper is slow and kind. The plov knows."

A big cauldron takes him eleven days. He sits cross-legged on a low stool, the sheet of copper on his knees, and strikes in a spiral from the edge to the centre, ten thousand blows, each the same weight as the last. At the end the surface is covered with little dents, which are not mistakes: each dent holds a drop of hot oil.

There were thirty smiths on the Row in his father's time. Now there are four. Two of them sell Chinese kitchenware at the front and hammer at the back, for show, for tourists who do not come. The younger generation went to Almaty or into the shops. Anvar's son is an accountant. He comes on Fridays and holds the sheet steady, "so that he remembers what a day sounds like."

On the wall behind the anvil hangs a photograph of the Row in 1974. Thirty doors, thirty men, all with the same posture. Anvar points at the third door from the left. "That is mine. The one next to it was my uncle's. The one after that, I don't remember. He left for Tashkent."

I ask what he would change. He thinks. "I would tune them," he says. "All the tin and copper on the Row, hung up like bells, from the mouth to the end. Then in the evening you could play Misgaron." He laughs and strikes the tray, once. The note goes up and does not come down for a long time.