Holiday #396, Samarkand
275 x 345 mm, 296 pages
Paris, France (English-language)
Biannual
Relaunched in 2014
Publisher and creative director: Franck Durand
Editor-at-large: Marc Beaugé
Design director: Marin Muteaud
‘It is written in English, but its heart is French’
The international travel and style review that lets us imagine the holidays of our dreams. Relaunched by Paris-based creative director Franck Durand in 2014 after a 37-year hiatus, Holiday is a modern classic built on its fifties heyday. Recently marking 10 years since the magazine’s relaunch, this issue is an ode to the Uzbekistan city of Samarkand—one of the oldest occupied cities in Central Asia and a prominent trading hub on the Silk Road.
Artistic director and chief curator of the Center for Contemporary Arts in Tashkent Dr. Sara Raza opens the issue, speaking to Christopher Niquet about her personal ties to the region, as well as discussing post-Soviet shifts in the cultural landscape; 30 Samarkand residents pay homage to the city they call home; Renata Mosci Sanfourche visits Uzbekistan’s shrinking Aral Sea to speak with filmmaker George Itzhak about his hopeful feature ‘Waiting for the Sea’, documenting the electronic music festival Stihia which now occupies the scorched landscape; the Sadriddin Ayni Memorial House Museum, former home to the ‘father of modern Tajik literature’, opens its doors to Heidi Ellison; and a dip into photographer Hassan Kurbanbaev’s archive all offer a snapshot of the somewhat typecast city.