The village is Uzbek-speaking, a single street of walled courtyards, each with a kiln in the corner. They call themselves the people of the plate. A lagan is a wide, shallow dish the size of a car wheel, with a rim, glazed deep turquoise inside and left raw outside, on which plov is served to twelve people at once. If you have been to a wedding in Irad you have eaten from one.
Ismoil Yusupov, 58, is the fifth of his name in the village. His workshop is two rooms and a yard. The clay comes from the bluffs above Chopo-Jar, in sacks on a donkey named Orlov, "after a general, I don't know which." He soaks it, kneads it with his bare feet, and lets it rest under wet cloth for a week. "The clay must forget where it came from."
He throws the plate on a wheel that his uncle made in the 1970s from a lorry axle. A lagan takes him ten minutes to throw and nine days to dry and fire. Of every ten that go into the kiln, seven come out well. The three that crack he breaks into pieces and puts in the clay for the next batch. "Nothing is lost. A plate also has a grandmother."
"There are two kinds of customers. The ones who ask for the price, and the ones who ask for the plate that does not crack. I give the second kind a better plate."
He also makes big jars, küp, for the wine and cheese makers of the south, three hundred litres or more, with a neck you can put your head in. The monks of Kyzyl-Senir order them every year. The jars go down to the caves on a lorry with straw in between, and in the spring some come back, not broken.
At the end of the day we drink tea in the yard from his own bowls, the ones that are not for sale because the glaze is "a little wrong". They are the best bowls I have ever held. When I say so, Ismoil is quiet for a while. Then he says: "That's how it is with all the bowls. The ones that are a little wrong."
1 Comment
My mother has a lagan from Sopol-Tepa that has been broken and glued three times. It is the best one we have.
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