The Fergana Valley is Uzbekistan's breadbasket and workshop, and also its most authentic, least touristy corner. Tucked between mountains at the far east of the country, it's the most fertile and populous region in all of Central Asia: a vast plain of cotton fields, orchards, vineyards and fruit trees, dotted with towns and villages where the country's great craft traditions are kept alive like in few other places. Here silk is still woven with centuries-old techniques, Uzbekistan's most famous blue ceramics are fired, and bazaars and trades survive that have already disappeared elsewhere.
The city of Fergana itself isn't monumental: it's a calm, green, orderly place with wide tree-lined avenues and parks, founded by the Russians in the 19th century as a colonial administrative centre. Its charm isn't in its monuments but in being a comfortable, pleasant base for exploring the valley's real treasures, all close by: the silk of Margilan, the ceramics of Rishtan and the lavish palace of the khans of Kokand, the former capital of a powerful khanate.
This guide helps you get around the valley in a practical way: how to get there across the mountains from Tashkent (by train, plane or over the Kamchik Pass), how to organise visits to Margilan, Rishtan and Kokand from Fergana, which crafts to buy and how, and what to expect from a more rural, genuine region. Fergana doesn't have the visual impact of Samarkand or Bukhara, but it offers something different and valuable: the chance to immerse yourself in the Uzbekistan that works, farms and creates, and to discover first-hand why this valley was for centuries the craft heart of the Silk Road.
The Fergana Valley is one of the oldest and most fertile inhabited regions in Central Asia, home to a farming tradition thousands of years old and already famous in antiquity for its 'heavenly horses', which Chinese emperors coveted and which drove expeditions and trade along the Silk Road. The valley was a crossroads of peoples and cultures, became Islamic after the Arab conquest and, over the centuries, belonged to various empires and khanates. In the early 18th century the Khanate of Kokand emerged, with its capital in that valley city, and it became a powerful state until the Russian Empire conquered it in 1876. The Russians then founded the city of Fergana (first called Skobelev and later Novy Margelan) as an administrative centre. In the Soviet era the valley became a major centre of cotton and silk production, while keeping its strong traditional and religious identity. Today it's the most populous region in Central Asia and the craft heart of Uzbekistan, famous for Margilan silk and Rishtan ceramics. The full story, from the heavenly horses to the Khanate of Kokand and the Soviet era, is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Uzbekistan's orchard: a fertile, densely populated valley, cradle of silk and ceramics, the former heart of the Khanate of Kokand, famous for the ikat of Margilan and the palaces and madrasas of Kokand.
Read the history of Fergana Valley →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The Fergana Valley holds a place of honour in the history of the Silk Road, and it all began, curiously enough, with some horses. In Antiquity, this fertile valley, isolated among mountains, was the kingdom of Dayuan, a land the Chinese learned about around the 2nd century BC thanks to the journey of the explorer Zhang Qian, sent west by the Han emperor. Zhang Qian came back with astonishing news of unknown lands and peoples, and with one piece of news in particular that fascinated the Chinese court: in Fergana they bred extraordinary horses, tall, fast and hardy, which sweated a reddish substance and which the Chinese called 'celestial horses' or 'blood-sweating horses'.
Those horses, far superior to the ponies of the steppes, became an object of strategic desire for the Han empire, which needed them for its cavalry against the nomadic peoples. The emperor sent envoys to obtain them and, when the kingdom of Fergana refused, he even sent armies on very long and costly military campaigns across thousands of kilometres to get hold of them, around 100 BC. That interest in the horses of Fergana spurred contacts between China and Central Asia and helped open the trade routes that, centuries later, we would come to know as the Silk Road.
So this remote valley was, in a very concrete way, one of the cradles of that great system of exchange between East and West. Thanks to its exceptional fertility —watered by the rivers that come down from the mountains— and its position as a gateway between the Chinese lands to the east and those of Central Asia and Persia to the west, the Fergana Valley was from very early on a crossroads of peoples, goods and cultures, and it kept that role throughout its entire history.
After the Arab conquest of Central Asia in the 8th century, the Fergana Valley became Islamised and part of the cultural world of Islam, without ever losing its character as a fertile, populous and somewhat remote region. During the Middle Ages it passed through the hands of the same dynasties that ruled the rest of the region —Samanids, Karakhanids, Khwarazmians— and, like the whole territory, it suffered the Mongol invasion of Genghis Khan in the 13th century. It later became part of the empire of Timur and his successors, the Timurids.
The Fergana Valley gave the world a historical figure of the first rank: Babur, born in 1483 in Andijan, in the valley itself. A descendant of Timur on his father's side and of Genghis Khan on his mother's, Babur inherited a small principality in Fergana as a young man, and from there, after a life of wars, losses and adventures that he told himself in his famous memoir, the Baburnama, he ended up conquering northern India and founding the Mughal Empire, one of the great dynasties in Indian history, which would build wonders such as the Taj Mahal. The fact that the founder of the Mughal Empire was born in this valley gives an idea of its historical weight.
Over the following centuries, the Fergana Valley remained a prosperous and contested region, its cities, bazaars and crafts flourishing on the back of a rich agriculture. Its relative isolation among the mountains always gave it a strong identity, somewhat different from the rest of the country, more traditional and religious, a trait that has lasted to this day. In the early 18th century, that identity took shape as a new state of its own: the Khanate of Kokand.
In the early 18th century the Khanate of Kokand arose in the Fergana Valley, with its capital in the city of the same name. Over the course of that century, and above all in the first half of the 19th, Kokand became one of the three great states that divided Central Asia between them, together with the Emirate of Bukhara and the Khanate of Khiva, and it came to rule a vast territory that included Tashkent and much of present-day Kyrgyzstan and southern Kazakhstan. It was a time of splendour: the court of Kokand was a centre of poetry, music and architecture, and the city filled up with mosques, madrasas and palaces.
The monument that best sums up that golden age is the Khudayar Khan Palace, built in the 1870s by the last important khan of the state, with its imposing tiled façade more than a hundred metres long: a final hymn to the luxury of the court just as the khanate's days were numbered. Because, like its neighbours Bukhara and Khiva, Kokand was swept up by the Russian empire's advance into Central Asia as part of the Great Game, the struggle between Russia and Britain for the region.
The end was more brutal than that of its neighbours. After years of tension, wars and a major revolt, the Russian empire decided not to keep Kokand as a vassal protectorate —as it did with Bukhara and Khiva— but to abolish it altogether. In 1876, after crushing the resistance, Russia dissolved the Khanate of Kokand and annexed it outright, incorporating it into Russian Turkestan. The Fergana Valley thus lost its independence and came under direct rule from the Russian colonial authorities, who founded a new city, Fergana, as the administrative centre of the province.
Unlike the ancient cities of the valley, the city of Fergana is a relatively recent creation: it was founded by the Russians in 1876, after the conquest, as the administrative and military centre of the new province, under the name Skobelev (after a Russian general) and, before that, Novy Margelan ('new Margilan'). Hence its colonial-city look, with wide avenues, an orderly layout and parks, so different from the maze-like old towns of the rest of the country. Later it would take the name of the region, Fergana.
Under Russian and then Soviet rule, the Fergana Valley was turned into a major area of intensive agricultural production, especially of cotton, the 'white gold' that the Soviet Union exploited on a massive scale in Central Asia, with huge social and environmental consequences (extreme water use, monoculture, forced labour at harvest time). With its fertility and dense population, the valley was one of the pillars of that cotton economy. At the same time, silk and traditional crafts survived and were partly industrialised.
The Fergana Valley always kept a strong identity, very traditional and religious, that set it apart from the rest of the Soviet republic of Uzbekistan. That population density and that marked personality, together with the artificial borders drawn by the Soviets —who split the valley between Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan in a convoluted way, with enclaves and arbitrary boundaries—, would make the valley, after independence, one of the most complex and at times tense areas of Central Asia, with episodes of inter-ethnic conflict. But they also kept it as the great storehouse of the country's craft and cultural traditions.
After Uzbekistan's independence in 1991, the Fergana Valley remained the most populous region and one of the most important in the country, and also one of the most sensitive, because of its density, its traditional identity and the complicated borders that divide it between three states. For years it was a somewhat closed area, less visited by tourists, partly because of that complexity. But in recent decades, as the country has opened up, it has gradually found its way onto travel routes, offering a face of Uzbekistan very different from that of the classic monuments circuit.
Today the valley's great draw is precisely that it is the living craft heartland of Uzbekistan. Few regions in the world preserve the great traditional crafts so well and in such concentration: the ikat silk of Margilan, hand-woven with centuries-old techniques; the blue and green glazed ceramics of Rishtan, famous throughout Central Asia; the knives and embroidered caps of Chust; woodcarving, suzani embroidery and much more. Visiting the workshops, watching the masters at work and buying directly from the artisans is an experience that hooks many travellers and a way of helping these crafts survive.
Add to all this the valley's agricultural wealth —its legendary fruit, its overflowing bazaars— and its genuine atmosphere, more rural and traditional than that of the tourist cities. Fergana, the quiet provincial capital, is the comfortable base from which to discover it all: the silk, the ceramics, the palace of the khans of Kokand, the markets and the everyday life of the most densely populated region in Central Asia. It is not the Uzbekistan of blue-domed postcards, but it is perhaps the most authentic one, and the one that best shows the hands that, for centuries, created the material wealth of the Silk Road.
