UzbekistanOʻzbekiston

Most of Uzbekistan lies between two rivers that never reach the ocean, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya. Where their water spread into the desert, farming towns grew: Samarkand and Bukhara in the Zarafshan valley, Khiva in the Khorezm delta, Tashkent at the foot of the Tian Shan. The Greeks called the Samarkand region Sogdiana, and the Sogdians became the great middlemen of trade between China, Persia and India from roughly the fourth to the eighth century.

The phrase 'Silk Road' was coined by a German geographer in 1877 and describes a web, not a road. Caravans carried silk west, but also horses, glass, paper, paper-making, religions and diseases. Sogdian merchants wrote letters home in their own Iranian language, and a few survive from as far away as the Great Wall. The painted walls of Afrosiyob, the old Samarkand mound, show ambassadors from Korea and China arriving at a Sogdian court around 660.

Arab armies took the region in the early eighth century, and within two hundred years Bukhara was one of the intellectual capitals of Islam. The Samanid rulers patronised scholars who wrote in Persian; Ibn Sina (Avicenna) grew up near Bukhara and al-Khwarizmi, whose name gave us 'algorithm', came from Khorezm. The small brick Ismail Samani mausoleum in Bukhara is the best surviving building from that golden age.

In 1220 Genghis Khan's armies destroyed Bukhara and Samarkand; the Kalon Minaret is said to have been spared because it impressed him. A century and a half later a Turkic-Mongol commander from near Shahrisabz, Timur (Amir Temur, Tamerlane in the West), built an empire from Delhi to Anatolia. His campaigns killed on a vast scale; his capital, Samarkand, received the craftsmen he deported from the cities he took.

The result was a new architecture of scale: huge portals (pishtaq), ribbed turquoise domes on tall drums, and walls covered in glazed tile. Bibi-Khanym mosque was so ambitious that parts collapsed soon after completion. Timur's grandson Ulugh Beg preferred astronomy to conquest; his observatory measured the year to within a minute, and his madrasa is the first of the three on the Registan.

Independent Uzbekistan adopted Timur as a national founder in the 1990s, replacing a statue of Marx in central Tashkent with an equestrian Timur. Visitors meet him everywhere, which says as much about modern nation-building as about the fourteenth century. The Uzbeks themselves were a later arrival: the Shaybanid Uzbek dynasty pushed the Timurids out around 1500 and one Timurid prince, Babur, went on to found the Mughal empire in India.

From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century the region split into three rival states: the Emirate of Bukhara, the Khanate of Khiva and the Khanate of Kokand. Slave markets in Khiva and Bukhara, fed by raids on Persian and Russian settlers, gave Russia a pretext for expansion. Most of Khiva's Ichan Kala and much of Bukhara's old town, including many of the trading domes, date from these centuries.

Russia took Tashkent in 1865 and made it the capital of Turkestan. Bukhara and Khiva became protectorates, and a Russian new town with wide avenues grew beside each old one. After 1917 the Bolsheviks drew national borders in 1924 that left Tajik-speaking Samarkand and Bukhara inside the Uzbek republic and chopped the Fergana Valley into enclaves that still complicate travel today.

Soviet planners turned the republic into a cotton plantation. Canals from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya watered new fields; from the 1960s the Aral Sea began to shrink, losing most of its volume within fifty years. The 1966 earthquake levelled central Tashkent, and the city you see now, with its metro and prefabricated blocks, was rebuilt by workers from across the USSR.

Uzbekistan is mostly Sunni Muslim of the Hanafi school, but its religious life has long been shaped by Sufi orders. Bahauddin Naqshband, founder of the Naqshbandi order, is buried outside Bukhara, and his shrine draws pilgrims from across the Muslim world. Visiting saints' tombs, tying cloth to trees and circling shrines are old practices that sit alongside formal prayer.

The madrasa, a college built around a courtyard of student cells, is the building type you will see most. Many became warehouses or museums in Soviet times and are now craft shops; a few, such as Mir-i-Arab in Bukhara and the Kukeldash in Tashkent, teach again. Their facades follow a formula: a tall central portal, corner towers and tile work whose geometry avoids images of living things, with famous exceptions like the tigers on Samarkand's Sher-Dor.

Soviet rule closed most mosques; independence brought revival and then state control out of fear of militancy. Since 2016 rules have relaxed, with more mosques open and beards and headscarves less policed, but religion remains supervised. For visitors this means an easy-going atmosphere: most monuments are museums, dress rules are about respect rather than law, and working mosques welcome visitors outside prayer times.

Uzbekistan's crafts survived the Soviet period better than its merchants did. In Margilan, ikat silk (atlas and adras) is still tie-dyed thread by thread before weaving, so the blurred patterns are set before the cloth exists. The Yodgorlik factory shows every step, from boiling cocoons to hand looms.

Suzani are large embroidered hangings that brides once made for their dowries, with sun and flower motifs in regional styles: Bukhara pieces are delicate, Nurata ones have a central star, Samarkand work is bold and red. Rishton in the Fergana Valley makes blue-and-green alkaline-glaze pottery from local clay; Gijduvan near Bukhara makes brown-and-ochre wares.

In Bukhara you will also find miniature painting revived from Persian models, knife-makers and metal chasers in the trading domes, and carpet workshops weaving Turkmen and Afghan designs. Buying directly in workshops keeps money with families; anything claimed as antique needs an export certificate.

Islam Karimov ruled from independence in 1991 until his death in 2016. His state was closed, with forced labour in the cotton harvest, a heavily controlled currency and the violent suppression of protest in Andijan in 2005. Tourists needed visas, letters of invitation and a pocket of black-market cash.

His successor, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, reversed much of that. In 2017 the soʻm became convertible; visa-free entry followed for dozens of countries; forced labour in the cotton harvest was declared ended by international monitors in 2022; high-speed trains now link the Silk Road cities. Tashkent is being rebuilt with glass towers and a new city centre, and tourism has become a national priority.

Politics has not opened to the same degree. A 2023 referendum reset presidential term limits, and the 2022 protests in Karakalpakstan over planned constitutional changes were put down with deaths. For visitors, the change is visible in fast trains, card payments and friendly officials; the limits show in the press, the internet and what people say in public.