Long before the word Uzbekistan existed, this land was the heart of ancient Sogdiana, one of the richest satrapies of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Populated by settled Iranian peoples, the region of the Zeravshan and Fergana valleys was a mosaic of irrigated oases between two great rivers: the Amu Darya (the Oxus of the Greeks) and the Syr Darya (the Jaxartes). That is why the ancients called it Transoxiana, "what lies beyond the Oxus". Its main city, Maracanda —the future Samarkand—, was already a prosperous walled city by around the 6th century BC.
In 329 BC, Alexander the Great crossed the Oxus in pursuit of the remnants of the Persian Empire and conquered Sogdiana and neighbouring Bactria. He took Maracanda, but ran into one of the fiercest resistances of his entire Asian campaign: the chieftain Spitamenes led a guerrilla war that cost the Macedonian army years of fighting. To pacify the region, Alexander turned to marriage diplomacy and wed Roxana (Roshanak), daughter of the Bactrian noble Oxyartes, one of the few love matches tradition attributes to him. After his death, the area came under the Greco-Bactrian kingdom, a fascinating Hellenistic enclave in the middle of Central Asia.
The region's great destiny, however, was trade. From the 2nd century BC, when caravan routes opened between Han China and the West, the Sogdians became the merchants par excellence of the Silk Road. For centuries their language was the lingua franca of Central Asian trade, and their colonies stretched all the way to China. Through their oases flowed silk, paper, spices, jade, horses and also ideas: Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism and Nestorian Christianity coexisted in these cosmopolitan cities before the arrival of Islam.
At the start of the 8th century, the Arab armies of the Umayyad Caliphate crossed the Amu Darya under the command of General Qutayba ibn Muslim, who between 706 and 715 subdued Bukhara, Samarkand and the Fergana Valley. The Battle of Talas, in 751, in which the Arabs and their allies defeated the armies of Tang China, sealed the Islamic destiny of Central Asia for good. According to tradition, it was Chinese prisoners captured in that battle who taught Samarkand the secret of papermaking, which from there would spread across the whole Islamic world and later to Europe.
Under the local Samanid dynasty (9th and 10th centuries), with its capital in Bukhara, Transoxiana enjoyed an extraordinary golden age. Bukhara became one of the great centres of learning in Islam, with a library famous throughout the East, and the region gave the world some of its most brilliant minds. Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (born around 780, linked to the region of Khwarazm, present-day Khiva) wrote the treatise that gave rise to the word "algebra", and the Latinised form of his name is the origin of the term "algorithm". Ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna (born near Bukhara around 980), was the most celebrated physician and philosopher of the medieval world: his Canon of Medicine was studied in European universities for more than six centuries.
The region was also decisive for religion. Muhammad al-Bukhari (810-870), born in Bukhara, compiled the most authoritative collection of the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, the Sahih al-Bukhari, considered by Sunni Muslims the most reliable book after the Quran; his mausoleum, near Samarkand, is today a place of pilgrimage. This constellation of scholars was joined by the astronomer and geographer Al-Biruni and many others, who made this land one of humanity's intellectual beacons.
At the start of the 13th century, Transoxiana was part of the powerful Khwarazmian Empire, which stretched from the Caspian Sea to India. That splendour collapsed abruptly in 1219, when Shah Muhammad II made the fatal mistake of ordering the massacre of a trade caravan and of the envoys sent by Genghis Khan. The retaliation was apocalyptic. In 1220, the Mongol armies fell upon the region with unheard-of violence.
Bukhara was taken and sacked; according to the chronicle, Genghis Khan climbed into the pulpit of the great mosque and proclaimed himself "the punishment of God". Samarkand, one of the most populous cities in the world, was razed: its irrigation canals were destroyed, its craftsmen deported and a large part of its inhabitants exterminated. Urgench, the capital of Khwarazm, held out desperately until the Mongols broke the dykes of the Amu Darya and flooded the city. The devastation was such that many areas took generations to recover.
After Genghis Khan's death, his domains were divided among his sons, and Transoxiana became part of the Chagatai Khanate. Over time, the Mongol conquerors converted to Islam and merged with the region's Turkic and Persian population in a long process of assimilation. From that blend of Turco-Mongol blood and Perso-Islamic tradition would emerge, a century and a half later, the man who would restore Samarkand's glory: Tamerlane.
In 1370, a warlord born near Shakhrisabz named Timur —whom the West would know as Tamerlane, a corruption of the Persian Timur-e Lang, "Timur the Lame"— seized power in Transoxiana and founded one of the largest empires in history. From his capital, Samarkand, his campaigns of legendary cruelty spread across Persia, the Caucasus, India, Anatolia and Syria; he defeated the Ottoman sultan Bayezid in 1402 and died in 1405 while marching to conquer China. His wars are estimated to have cost millions of lives, but Tamerlane was also an extraordinary patron of the arts.
For 35 years he poured into Samarkand the spoils and the finest craftsmen of his whole empire. He built the colossal Bibi-Khanym Mosque, ordered the construction of the Shah-i-Zinda mausoleum complex and was buried under the famous turquoise dome of the Gur-e Amir. His descendants, the Timurids, carried on that cultural renaissance, which combined Persian, Turkic and Islamic traditions and left its mark on the architecture, miniature painting and poetry of the entire Eastern world. In Herat, the poet Alisher Navoi raised the Chagatai language —forerunner of Uzbek— to literary status.
The most admirable of the Timurids was Tamerlane's grandson, Ulugh Beg (1394-1449). More an enlightened ruler than a conqueror, he made Samarkand the scientific capital of his age. In the 1420s he had a great madrasa built on Registan Square and, above all, an extraordinary astronomical observatory with a sextant more than forty metres in radius. There, alongside scholars such as Al-Kashi and Ali Qushji, he compiled a catalogue of almost a thousand stars and calculated the length of the year with an error of just a few seconds. His passion for science cost him his life: he was murdered in 1449 on the orders of his own son, and the observatory was destroyed, until archaeologists rediscovered it in 1908.
At the start of the 16th century, nomadic tribes of Turco-Mongol origin led by Muhammad Shaybani —the Uzbeks, who gave the country its name— put an end to Timurid rule and settled in the region. The shift of world trade towards sea routes gradually dimmed the splendour of the old Silk Road cities. Over time, Transoxiana broke up into three rival and often warring states: the Emirate of Bukhara, the Khanate of Khiva (in old Khwarazm) and the Khanate of Kokand, in the Fergana Valley. They were theocratic, slave-holding societies, famous for their bazaars but also for holding travellers and neighbouring peasants captive.
In the 19th century, Central Asia became the chessboard of the so-called "Great Game", the geopolitical struggle between the Russian Empire, advancing from the north, and the British Empire, defending India from the south. Russia absorbed the khanates one after another. On 29 June 1865, a detachment under General Mikhail Chernyayev took Tashkent by surprise, the richest city of Kokand, defended by a much larger garrison. In 1867 the Governorate-General of Turkestan was created, with its capital in Tashkent.
In the following years all three states fell: Bukhara and Khiva were reduced to vassal protectorates of the tsar, and the Khanate of Kokand was annexed outright and dissolved in 1876 after a violent rebellion was crushed. Under Russian rule, the region was redirected towards growing cotton to supply the imperial textile industry, railways were laid and Tashkent grew as a colonial capital, with a European-style "new city" next to the old Islamic town. Discontent erupted in 1916 in a great revolt against forced conscription, which was brutally suppressed.
After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Central Asia sank into years of chaos and civil war. A short-lived reformist movement, the Jadids, dreamed of an autonomous republic, and a stubborn armed resistance —the Basmachi— fought Bolshevik rule for more than a decade. Finally, in 1924, Stalin reorganised the region through "national delimitation": the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic was created, with borders deliberately drawn to mix and divide the peoples of the area, sowing tensions that persist to this day. Samarkand was its first capital, and in 1930 the title passed to Tashkent.
The Soviet regime brought mass literacy, industrialisation, legal emancipation for women and an intense anti-religious campaign that closed mosques and madrasas. But it also brought forced collectivisation, Stalin's purges and the transformation of Uzbekistan into the USSR's giant cotton plantation, the so-called "white gold". In 1966 an earthquake devastated Tashkent, which was rebuilt as a modern Soviet capital. During the Second World War, the republic took in hundreds of thousands of evacuees from all over the Union.
The ecological cost of that monoculture was one of the greatest environmental disasters of the 20th century: the drying up of the Aral Sea. Until 1960, this salt lake shared with Kazakhstan was the fourth largest on the planet. To irrigate millions of hectares of cotton, the Soviet authorities massively diverted the flow of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers that fed it. Within a few decades the sea lost about 90 % of its volume: its bed turned into a toxic desert of salt and pesticides, the port of Moynaq ended up tens of kilometres from the water with its ships stranded on the sand, the fishing industry collapsed, and salty dust storms damaged the health of the population and the climate of the whole region. It is a sober, scientific and still unresolved warning about the limits of human transformation of nature.
On 31 August 1991, as the Soviet Union was falling apart, Uzbekistan declared its independence. Power remained in the hands of Islam Karimov, a former Communist leader who had taken office in 1989 and would rule the country with an iron fist for a quarter of a century. His regime maintained stability and a certain national identity, rehabilitating Tamerlane as a founding hero, but it did so at the price of harsh authoritarianism, elections without any real opposition and serious reports of human rights violations, the darkest episode being the Andijan crackdown in 2005.
Karimov died in September 2016. His successor, Shavkat Mirziyoyev —prime minister for thirteen years—, surprised many by launching a period of gradual opening. He freed political prisoners, eased controls on the press and religion, made the currency convertible, improved relations with neighbouring Central Asian countries and, above all, opened the country to international tourism by scrapping visas for dozens of nationalities. Uzbekistan set out to become again what it had been for centuries: a crossroads open to the world.
Today, with more than 36 million inhabitants, Uzbekistan is the most populous country in Central Asia and one of its economic engines, rich in cotton, natural gas, gold and a young, enterprising population. Its Silk Road cities —Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva— are among the fastest-growing cultural destinations in the world, while the country deals with inherited challenges: the environmental legacy of the Aral, pending reforms and the balance between tradition and modernity. Travelling to Uzbekistan means glimpsing, on a single trip, Persian Antiquity, Timurid splendour and a country reinventing itself.
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Wedged between the Tian Shan and Pamir-Alai mountains, and watered by the Syr Darya River, the Fergana Valley is the most fertile and densely populated region of Central Asia. Its towns and fields, now divided between Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan following borders drawn in the Soviet era, form an agricultural patchwork of cotton, fruit trees, mulberries and vegetable gardens that earned it the nickname of the region's "garden".
The valley has a very ancient history: it was known in the Chinese chronicles of the Han dynasty for its legendary "heavenly horses" of Fergana, so prized that they prompted military expeditions from China. A crossroads of the Silk Road and an essential passage between the steppes and the mountains, it was always a strategic and contested enclave, and it remains the demographic and agricultural heart of the country.
Kokand was the capital of the Khanate of Kokand, one of the three states that divided Central Asia between them before the arrival of the Russians. At its height, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the khanate came to control much of the valley and the routes towards the Kazakh steppes. That grandeur is still on display at the Palace of Khudayar Khan, built in the mid-19th century, with its monumental tiled façade and more than a hundred rooms, one of the most spectacular buildings in the country.
The Khanate of Kokand was annexed and dissolved by the Russian Empire in 1876, after a fierce rebellion. Besides the palace, the city preserves madrasas, mosques and the necropolis of the khans, which make it the valley's great historical stop. It was also one of the centres of the short-lived Muslim autonomy movement after the Russian Revolution, crushed by the Bolsheviks in 1918.
If any city embodies the silk-making tradition of the Silk Road, it is Margilan, the historic capital of Uzbek silk for more than two thousand years. In its workshops, and above all at the Yodgorlik factory, the vibrant ikat (khan-atlas) is still made by hand, a technique in which the threads are dyed before weaving to create the distinctive blurred-edge patterns and intense colours worn by Uzbek women.
This craft knowledge, passed down from generation to generation, has turned Margilan into a living cultural centre, with one of the most authentic bazaars in the valley. The Fergana region is also renowned for its glazed ceramics, especially those of Rishtan, with their characteristic turquoise blue, which carry on one of the oldest and most prestigious craft traditions in Central Asia.
Northwestern Uzbekistan is taken up by the Republic of Karakalpakstan, an autonomous republic that covers about a third of the national territory but is sparsely populated and mostly desert. Its name comes from the Karakalpaks ("black hats"), a Turkic people with their own language, related to Kazakh, and a distinct cultural identity within Uzbekistan.
This land, crossed by the lower Amu Darya and bordering Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, partly corresponds to ancient Khorezm and preserves the ruins of numerous mud-brick desert fortresses, known as qalas, some of them more than two thousand years old. Its capital, Nukus, is a quiet city with a Soviet layout that has become famous for an unexpected reason: it is home to one of the most surprising art museums in the world.
In the middle of the desert, Nukus holds the State Museum of Art of Karakalpakstan, known as the Savitsky Museum in honour of its founder, the Russian artist and archaeologist Igor Savitsky. Between the 1950s and the 1980s, Savitsky gathered and saved from destruction thousands of works of Russian and Soviet avant-garde art banned under Stalin's socialist realism, hiding them in this remote city far from Moscow's censors.
The result is one of the largest collections of Russian avant-garde art in the world, often called "the Louvre of the steppes", alongside a remarkable collection of folk art and archaeological finds from Khorezm. That such an artistic treasure is kept in such an out-of-the-way corner is one of Uzbekistan's great paradoxes and attractions.
No place illustrates the Aral Sea disaster better than Moynaq. Until the mid-20th century, this town was a thriving fishing port on the shores of the fourth-largest lake on the planet, with a fleet and canneries that employed thousands of people. The Soviet diversion of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers to irrigate cotton pushed the water back by dozens of kilometres, and today Moynaq sits stranded in the middle of the desert.
Its most famous image is the "ship graveyard": a row of rusting fishing boats lying on the sand of what was once the seabed, one of the starkest testaments to a man-made environmental catastrophe. Visiting Moynaq, with its memorial and museum, is a sober look at a warning about the ecological cost of monoculture and water management, a problem the region is still trying to mitigate.
Founded by the Sogdians around the 6th century BC under the name Maracanda, Samarkand is one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world. Conquered by Alexander the Great in 329 BC and razed by Genghis Khan in 1220, it reached its peak when Tamerlane made it the capital of his empire in 1370. Its most dazzling monuments date from that golden age: Registan Square, surrounded by three madrasas with colossal portals; the great Bibi-Khanym Mosque; the Shah-i-Zinda necropolis, with its avenue of tile-clad mausoleums; and the Gur-e Amir, where Tamerlane himself rests beneath a ribbed turquoise dome.
It was also the scientific capital of Ulugh Beg, whose 15th-century observatory, with its gigantic sextant, put Samarkand at the forefront of world astronomy. Declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 2001 as a "crossroads of cultures", the city remains Uzbekistan's tourist emblem and one of the most recognisable images in all of Central Asia.
If Samarkand is the city of imperial glory, Bukhara is the city of learning and faith. Capital of the Samanid dynasty in the 9th and 10th centuries, it was one of the greatest intellectual centres of Islam, birthplace of Avicenna and home of Imam Al-Bukhari. At one time it had hundreds of mosques and madrasas, earning it the title of "the Noble" and of holy city of Central Asia. Its old town, preserved almost intact, is an extraordinary example of a medieval Islamic city and was declared a World Heritage Site in 1993.
Among its treasures are the 12th-century Kalyan Minaret, so imposing that —legend has it— even Genghis Khan ordered it spared; the Ark citadel, former residence of the emirs; the delicate Samanid mausoleum of Ismail, a 10th-century brick masterpiece; and the old covered bazaars where trading still goes on. Until the Russian conquest, Bukhara was the capital of an emirate famous for its splendour and also for its tyranny, the setting for episodes such as the captivity of British envoys during the Great Game.
In the west of the country, in the heart of the oasis of ancient Khwarazm and on the edge of the Kyzylkum Desert, stands Khiva, the best-preserved walled city on the Silk Road. Its inner town, Itchan Kala, was the first site in Uzbekistan inscribed by Unesco as a World Heritage Site, in 1990. Within its mud-brick walls are crowded minarets, madrasas, mosques with a thousand wooden columns and the khans' palace, in an ensemble that seems frozen in time.
Khiva was the capital of the Khanate of Khiva, heir to the historic region of Khwarazm, a land linked to the scholar Al-Khwarizmi. Famous and feared for its slave market, it held out against Russian attacks until it became a protectorate of the tsar in 1873. Today it is one of the most photogenic destinations in Central Asia, especially at sunset, when the sun turns its towers and walls golden.
About ninety kilometres south of Samarkand, across the mountains, lies Shakhrisabz ("green city" in Persian), the town where Tamerlane was born in 1336. The conqueror wanted to turn his hometown into a monumental centre and ordered the construction there of the Ak-Saray, the "White Palace", whose entrance portal, more than forty metres high and covered in mosaics, is still astonishing in ruins. Tamerlane is believed to have prepared his own crypt in Shakhrisabz, although he was ultimately buried in Samarkand.
The historic centre of Shakhrisabz, with the remains of the Ak-Saray, Timurid mausoleums and religious complexes, was declared a World Heritage Site in 2000. Less visited than the great capitals, it offers an intimate look at the origins of the dynasty that gave Uzbekistan its most glorious era.
Tashkent ("stone city" in Turkic) is today the largest city in Central Asia, with more than two and a half million inhabitants. Although its origins as a caravan oasis go back more than two thousand years, for a long time it was a minor town compared with Samarkand or Bukhara. Its definitive rise came with the Russian conquest: taken by General Chernyayev in 1865, it became the capital of the Governorate-General of Turkestan in 1867, and under the tsar and later the USSR it grew into the region's great administrative, industrial and railway centre.
In 1966, a devastating earthquake destroyed much of the city and left hundreds of thousands of people homeless. Soviet reconstruction gave it its current look, with wide avenues and monumental architecture, crowned by a metro whose stations, decorated like underground palaces, are among the most beautiful in the world. Today Tashkent combines that Soviet legacy with old neighbourhoods, the bustling Chorsu Bazaar under its turquoise dome, mosques, museums and a modern way of life that make it the gateway to the country.
Just over an hour's drive from Tashkent, the landscape changes completely: the western foothills of the Tian Shan offer a world of mountains, valleys and fresh air that serves as a refuge for the capital's residents. The heart of this region is Chimgan, a mountain resort dominated by Greater Chimgan (over 3,300 metres), with trekking trails and alpine meadows in summer and ski slopes in winter.
At its feet shimmers the Charvak Reservoir, a large artificial lake of turquoise water created by the dam on the Chirchik River, popular in the warm season for swimming, water sports and walks. The area, dotted with mountain villages and ancient petroglyphs in the neighbouring valley, is Tashkent's classic nature getaway and a perfect contrast to the desert cities.
As the capital of independent Uzbekistan since 1991, Tashkent concentrates the country's political power, economic activity and cultural life. It is home to the government, the embassies, the major universities and the main museums, including the State Museum of History of Uzbekistan and the Museum of Applied Arts. Its squares feature the monuments of the new national narrative, led by the rehabilitated figure of Tamerlane.
Since 2016, with the opening-up driven by Shavkat Mirziyoyev, the city has undergone a rapid transformation: new business districts, foreign investment and booming tourism that usually begins and ends its journey through the country at the capital's airport and train stations, from where the modern Afrosiyob high-speed trains depart for Samarkand and Bukhara.
In the far south of the country, on the banks of the Amu Darya and facing Afghanistan, lies Termez, one of the oldest and most distinctive cities in Uzbekistan. Located at a crossroads of routes between Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent, it was a major centre of Buddhism between the 1st and 4th centuries, in the era of the Kushan Empire. From that past remain stupas and monasteries such as Fayaz-Tepe and Kara-Tepe, where remarkable Buddhist sculptures and frescoes were found, now scattered across museums.
With the arrival of Islam, Termez also became a Muslim religious centre, as shown by mausoleums such as that of the saint Al-Hakim at-Termezi and the Sultan Saodat complex. Its status as a border and military zone kept it closed to tourism for a long time, which makes it one of the most authentic and least visited destinations in the country, ideal for anyone seeking the region's archaeological legacy.
At the foot of the Nurata Mountains, on the edge of the Kyzylkum Desert, the town of Nurata holds the ruins of a fortress whose origin tradition attributes to Alexander the Great, who is said to have founded a defensive outpost here (the Nur) during his advance through Central Asia. Next to the fortress rises a sacred spring, the Chashma, full of fish considered holy, which makes Nurata a place of Muslim pilgrimage.
Nurata is also the gateway to the desert and the steppe: from here you can reach the yurt camps that let you experience nomadic life, camel rides and the silence of the dunes. The region is also known for its traditional suzani embroidery, another of the great Uzbek crafts.
In the heart of the Kyzylkum Desert stretches Lake Aydarkul, a huge body of water that, paradoxically, is largely a product of the Soviet era: it formed and grew from the 1960s and 1969 onwards with the overflows and discharges from the Chardara Reservoir on the Syr Darya. Today its shores, between dunes and steppe, offer one of the most sought-after experiences in the country: sleeping in yurts, gazing at starry skies free of light pollution and crossing the desert on camelback.
This region of sand and steppe, the emptiest and quietest in Uzbekistan, offers a glimpse of the semi-nomadic life that for centuries coexisted with the caravan cities. It is a perfect natural counterpoint to the domes and madrasas of the Silk Road, and one of the favourite getaways between Samarkand, Bukhara and Nurata.
Hardly anything that happened to Uzbekistan happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
