The tarmacked road stretching along the railway embankment belonged to meandering pedestrians, who drifted from stall to stall amid tablecloths, cardboard boxes and sheets of newspaper, laden with all manner of bric-a-brac. The range of objects on display was greater than you could hope to find in any catalog, and together with the bronzed faces of the market traders, which hung portrait-like above them, they were a veritable open-air museum, a potted history of the empire’s southern fringe.
To avoid having to force your way back and forth across the market’s boisterous polyglot current, it was usually best to choose your row and stick to it: left or right. On one side, set back from the railway lines and separated by a shallow stream, was a mud-brick wall. Along the wall were a series of gates, in front of which ran a narrow, cool stretch of pavement, carried aloft on a bed of old tree roots. The houses around the Tezikovka had also grown into hypertrophied market stalls. Their owners, in the shade of their doorways, did the same as all the other vendors, laying down sheets and covering them with every imaginable bit of household junk; only here, laid out in front of the houses, did this junk acquire its true value. Beakers and glasses of every stripe, yellowed postcards, never sent and never received, records and books, Singer sewing machines, kerosene stoves, candlesticks and candelabras, miscellaneous brackets, pipes and cogs from machines they stopped making years ago and that have, in all likelihood, long-since vanished from existence, random chess pieces, pocket torches with no batteries . . .
The children who grew up in the Tezikovsky houses, red-haired and bare-footed, learnt early on how to haggle like grown-ups. As far as their peers were concerned, streets were for football and running races, but when these children stepped out across the threshold, they found themselves in the market, intoxicated by the thrill of the barter and the sale. They soon got used to this psychological duel, this battle of wits, more a labor of love than anything else, since it promised neither party any substantial profit or loss.
Most of the time, you could spend as long as you liked hanging around the Tezikovka without interrupting life’s rhythm. Along the main thoroughfare of this singular, self-contained ecosystem, they sold mors, mineral water and the local Qibray beer, bottles sunk to the neck in buckets of water to keep cool. The food on offer was cheaper than in the city center too: plov, shashlyk, samsa and ‘ear-nose-throat’ offal pies, served with spicy adjika, enough to provoke a ferocious appetite. In the shops they sold vodka on tap, and the lion’s share of the market vendors’ profits was drunk away right there. Some people even converted their yards into makeshift cafes: the customers were seated and fed for a price that was little more than symbolic. On the fences outside the houses hung signs saying: “Telephone. 50 som a call.” Or: “Don’t use the toilet.”
If you didn’t have the energy to set foot on the Tezikovka’s main drag, you could veer off down one of its branches. The rows of stalls stretched for several hundred metres, thinning out and breaking up as they got farther from the railway. There you would find yourself, wandering past the countless temptations of the Tezikovka, surrounded by its unquenchable tyranny of choice, with that single thousand-som note in your pocket, as indivisible as life itself.
The Tezikovka was radically democratic—that’s what made it unique. It was more or less the only flea market in Tashkent with prices the poor could afford to pay, especially those from the city’s hinterland. Anyone could set up a stall there, no need to pull strings or stump up to get going. The fee was only a few kopeks. Moreover, unlike the Ippodrom Market, the Tezikovka wasn’t divided into Uzbek and Korean sectors. It was a true melting pot, and the locals there found kinship in their deep tans, no matter what shape their eyes. While Alay Bazar or Chorsu, for example, might have been imbued with an Uzbek soul, it was the timeless, primordial face of the market itself that shone through the dusty facade of the Tezikovka.
The vendors at the Tezikovka, drawn from the very margins of society, held no real claim to the scraps of sun-drenched earth where they set up stall, no sense of proprietorship. Yet anyone who happened to end up there could become a part of the Tezikovka itself, crossing through its looking glass to the other side of the counter, leaving behind the baggage of their old life. Clothes, appearances and habits all merged into one in this strange land, where the bum, the businessman and the engineer all moved seamlessly to an equal footing. Here, as nowhere else, a person could fall out of time and into a drunken stupor without attracting the least attention, not standing out in the slightest from the market’s motley mosaic. You could spend your whole life at the Tezikovka if you wanted, selling god-knows-what useless, theoretically unsellable piece of tat, living not in the past, not in the future, but in this one, infinitely expanding “today”. And one day that hopeless, nondescript piece of junk would leave the market in the guise of an antique. It would even bring in a bit of money—just enough to mark the occasion with a glass of slightly watery sour beer.
The Tezikovsky market owes its name to the legendary Tezikov, a merchant and industrialist who vanished into the vortex of 1917. Tezikov founded a leather factory in the area, employing immigrants from central Russia. The market itself grew up around the Tezikovskaya Dacha, Tezikov’s summer house, which now survives only in legend. When asked about its former location, longstanding locals would always come up with a different answer. After the Russian Revolution, the market was renamed Pervomaisky, or “Mayday Market,” but the new name didn’t stick.
In the Soviet period, the Tezikovka acted as Tashkent’s shock absorber at times of social upheaval. It grew during the Second World War, absorbing the neighboring streets, as evacuees sold their belongings, virtually their only means of avoiding starvation. The Tezikovka experienced another, final boom in the 1990s, with the flow of migrants now heading in the opposite direction, from Tashkent to Russia. As these emigrants left Uzbekistan, the market offered a chance to recoup some small part of the cost of what they couldn’t carry with them, helping them to make ends meet in those perpetually penniless times.
Just like adult trees, markets rarely survive being transplanted to new soil. And so it was with the Tezikovka, which withered away upon its relocation in the 2000s. Today’s flea market, which runs from the site of a former warehouse in the suburb of Yangiobod, is at best a distant relative of its historic predecessor.
For a while after the Tezikovsky market disappeared, Tashkent taxi drivers still managed to make a bit of money off it. “To the Tezikovka,” a passenger would say, absent-mindedly uttering the old name instead of the new. Without a moment’s hesitation, the driver would speed off to that old spot, where a blustery ring-road now runs past the slimy overgrown stream, lost in a mass of weeds.
