Inside the boz üy · Yossi and Nura, Kyrgyzstan
How it began
It began in the Sinai desert in 1977.
I was twenty years old when I walked into my first Bedouin tent and felt something shift. Not comfort, the opposite. The wind moved through the fabric. The cold came in at the edges. There was almost nothing inside. And yet the people who lived there had a richness I couldn't name. Something in the proportion of what they possessed to what they were. The oneness with the earth, the wind, the mountains, the sea. Not poverty. A different kind of wealth entirely.
I spent three years learning from them. Then I kept moving, through every kind of wild place the planet offered. Between 1992 and 1995 I lived deep in the Bolivian Amazon, with the Uchupiamonas. The jungle at that depth is absolute. It gets inside you in a way nothing else does.
In late 1995 I arrived in Los Angeles and rented an apartment. After a few days I simply couldn't take it. I asked my landlord's permission to build a tent on the roof. He agreed.
I have lived in a tent ever since, on rooftops and in backyards, on four continents, no matter where I am. If I own the house or just rent it, I build my tent. They make the house redundant. The romance of it is overwhelming.
After five years in a Mongolian ger, I heard that the real master builders, the people who had never stopped, were Kyrgyz. I came to Kyrgyzstan to see it with my own eyes. I arrived, and instantly fell in love with the country, its people, and the boz üy. I also met Nura.
"Something is amazing about being able to carry your home on your back, so light, so elegant. I have been chasing that feeling since 1977. The boz üy is the answer I didn't know I was looking for."
Yossi Ghinsberg · Founding partner, Tündük
A life of belonging
Yossi did not arrive in Kyrgyzstan as a buyer looking for a product. He arrived the way he has arrived everywhere: ready to belong.
In the Bolivian Amazon, the Uchupiamonas people made him one of their own and their ambassador to the world, a title he still carries. With them he co-founded Chalalán, an award-winning ecolodge owned and run by the community inside Madidi National Park. Not a venture he extracted from them. One he helped them build, and then left in their hands.
As vice president of CITA International he founded twelve centres for the humane treatment of opiate addiction, from Mexico to China, insisting the people inside them be met as patients, with dignity, not as the world had written them off.
Small in scale, he would say, but planetary in spirit. He does not come to take. He comes to give. In Kyrgyzstan he carries a Kyrgyz name, Jusup Tulucadam, and he means it.
What we hold to
01
Every piece is made by hand, with techniques developed over centuries. The resourcefulness of nomads is the standard we build to. We bring an ancient craft into the modern world with care, and we do not cut the making to hit a price.
02
Quality over quantity, by conviction. From the willow frame to the wool felt, a boz üy is made to last a lifetime. We believe in having less that lasts longer, and in building the kind of thing a family keeps for generations.
03
We work only with the artisan families of Kyzyl-Tuu, the acknowledged world centre of the craft. Every boz üy carries UNESCO-recognised knowledge. We will never compromise the integrity of the making for the sake of scale.
The partners
Not a company and its vendors. Three partners in one venture, who do not hide who they are.
Portrait · Nura
to be added
Partner · Operations, Bishkek
A proud Kyrgyz woman who grew up where the boz üy dotted the hills like giant mushrooms risen from the earth. She never left. This is her country, and her people's craft, and she gives her life to sustaining it.
A mother of three, she divides her time between the family home in Bishkek and the boz üy camp she runs on the banks of Lake Issyk-Kul, where guests live in the yurt the way it was always meant to be lived in. She runs Tündük's operations the same way she runs that camp: fair to the makers of Kyzyl-Tuu, on terms they trust, in their own language. If a boz üy leaves Kyrgyzstan, it leaves under her eye.
Portrait · Adylet at the workshop
Kyzyl-Tuu · to be added
Partner · Master Builder, Kyzyl-Tuu
A third-generation master builder from Kyzyl-Tuu village, on the shores of Lake Issyk-Kul. His family was building yurts before the Soviet cooperative that formalised the craft, and he leads the family workshop that builds every Tündük boz üy.
He records a full video walkthrough of each unit before it leaves Kyrgyzstan. Nothing ships that he has not stood inside. He is not a supplier we found. He is a partner we build with.
Portrait · Yossi
to be added
Partner · The International Bridge
Has lived in a tent since 1995, on rooftops, in backyards, on four continents. Three years with the Bedouin in Sinai, three with the Uchupiamonas in the Bolivian Amazon, five years in a Mongolian ger. He came to Kyrgyzstan to see the boz üy with his own eyes, and never quite left.
A planetary citizen who comes to give, not to take, and who has spent his life belonging to the communities he works in. He carries Tündük's voice to the world beyond Central Asia. A partner who belongs at the table.