Barely a century and a half ago, Kokand was the capital of a kingdom. The Kokand Khanate came to control the whole Fergana Valley and to stretch north as far as the steppes of today's Kazakhstan, and its capital was a holy city with, according to the chronicles, more than three hundred mosques and dozens of madrasas. That splendour was brutally cut short by the Russian conquest of 1876. Today what remains is a quiet city of tree-lined streets whose great treasure is the palace of the last khan, Khudayar: a monumental, tile-covered façade nearly a hundred metres long, hiding a maze of courtyards and halls decorated with carved wood and stucco.
Besides the palace, Kokand keeps a handful of 19th-century gems: the Norbutabiy Madrasa, still in use; the Dakhma-i-Shokhon funerary complex, where the khans and their families rest; the Juma Mosque, with its elegant minaret and its gallery of wooden columns; and several modest mausoleums, such as that of the poet Nadira. It's a 'second-tier' heritage city on the Uzbek tourist circuit, which means few crowds and low prices, ideal if you want to understand the valley's history without the masses.
This guide helps you plan your visit: how to get there through the Kamchik tunnel from Tashkent, what to see in the palace and the madrasas, how much everything costs, how to combine Kokand with Margilan (silk) and Rishtan (ceramics), and what to eat in the valley's chaikhanas. It's a short stop but packed with history, perfect as a gateway to the Fergana Valley.
Kokand began as an oasis on the Silk Road, but its big moment came in the 18th century, when the Uzbek Ming dynasty made it the capital of an independent khanate. At its peak, in the early 19th century, the Kokand Khanate ruled the Fergana Valley, Tashkent and vast steppes reaching southern Kazakhstan, and the city was a major religious and trading centre, with hundreds of mosques and madrasas. But internal power struggles, rivalry with Bukhara and, above all, the advance of the Russian Empire brought it all to an end: in 1876 the tsar abolished the khanate after General Skobelev's campaign, and Kokand became just another city in the Russian province of Fergana. The Khudayar Khan Palace, completed in 1873, just three years before the end, remained as the great witness to that lost kingdom. Its story, from oasis to khanate capital and then to Russian annexation, is told 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.
Walking today through the quiet, tree-lined streets of Kokand, it is hard to imagine that this provincial town was, barely a century and a half ago, the capital of a kingdom that stretched from the Fergana Valley to the steppes of southern Kazakhstan. And yet it was. During the 19th century, the Khanate of Kokand was one of the three great states that divided up Turkestan, alongside the Emirate of Bukhara and the Khanate of Khiva. Its capital was a holy city that the chronicles describe as bristling with minarets, with more than three hundred mosques and dozens of madrasas.
What remains of that splendour is, above all, a building that sums up an entire era: the palace of Khudayar Khan. It was the residence of the last ruler, finished in 1873, just three years before the kingdom vanished for good. Its façade, almost a hundred metres long and covered in tiles, is like the monumental epitaph of a world that history wiped out at a stroke. To tell the story of Kokand is to tell the rise and fall of that kingdom, and also the drama of a whole region caught between empires.
Kokand is old. There are signs of settlement in the area from more than two thousand years ago, when the Fergana Valley was a crossroads for Silk Road caravans. The city appears in medieval sources under names such as Khavakand or Khokand, a fertile oasis watered by the rivers that come down from the mountains. Like the rest of the valley, it passed through many hands: the Arab conquerors who brought Islam in the 8th century, Persian and Iranian dynasties, Genghis Khan's Mongol Empire in the 13th century and the Timurid Empire in the 14th and 15th.
The decisive leap came at the start of the 18th century. In 1709, Shahrukh Biy, a chief of the Uzbek Ming tribe, took advantage of the decline of the Khanate of Bukhara to break away in the Fergana Valley. He founded a small principality whose capital moved between other towns before settling for good in Kokand around 1740. This was the birth of the Khanate of Kokand. Over the following decades it grew in power and territory, drawing on the valley's farming wealth and its position on the trade routes linking Central Asia with Russia, China and India.
The Khanate of Kokand reached its peak in the first half of the 19th century, especially under rulers such as Umar Khan (1810-1822) and his son Madali (Muhammad Ali). In those decades Kokand controlled not only the Fergana Valley but also Tashkent, the largest city in the region, and vast lands to the north on the steppes of present-day Kazakhstan. There it built fortresses to keep the nomads and the caravan trade under control.
The capital went through a remarkable cultural and religious flowering. Mosques and madrasas went up, the city became an important centre of Islamic learning (hence its fame as a holy city) and the court supported poets and scholars. A leading figure of the period was Nadira, Umar Khan's wife, a refined poet who championed the khanate's literary life and who today has her own mausoleum in Kokand. Trade thrived: cloth, silk, leather, paper and farm produce passed through Kokand, and the city minted its own coins.
But the khanate had deep weaknesses. Power was fought over violently between factions and branches of the ruling family, palace intrigues and murders were common, and the constant rivalry with the neighbouring Emirate of Bukhara bled the state dry in endless wars. That inner fragility would prove fatal when a far more powerful enemy appeared from the north.
Throughout the 19th century, the Russian Empire pushed steadily south into Central Asia, in the long rivalry with the British Empire that historians named the 'Great Game'. The Khanate of Kokand, divided and weakened by its internal struggles, stood on the front line of that advance.
From the middle of the century, Russian pressure became suffocating. In 1865 the Tsar's troops took Tashkent, the khanate's most important city, and added it to their territory. Soon after, in 1868, Konstantin von Kaufman, Governor-General of Russian Turkestan, forced a treaty on Khudayar Khan that turned Kokand into a protectorate in all but name, with humiliating trade and territorial concessions. Khudayar, whose reign is remembered for crushing taxes and arbitrary rule, became deeply unpopular.
In 1875 a major revolt broke out against Khudayar, fuelled by social discontent and by the resistance of Kyrgyz tribes and religious groups calling for holy war against the Russians. Khudayar fled and sought help from the Ottoman Empire, in vain. The rebels proclaimed Nasir al-Din khan, but the chaos gave Russia the pretext it had been looking for. General Mikhail Skobelev led a ruthless military campaign, and on 19 February 1876 Russian troops took the city of Kokand. Nasir al-Din surrendered, Tsar Alexander II declared the khanate abolished, and the whole valley was absorbed into the Russian Empire as the new province (oblast) of Fergana. In just a few years, a kingdom that had lasted for centuries had ceased to exist.
Under Russian rule, Kokand lost its status as a capital but remained a trading centre for the valley, above all for cotton, which Russia began to promote on a massive scale. With the 1917 Revolution and the collapse of the Tsarist empire, the city went through a brief but significant episode. In the winter of 1917-1918 the Kokand (or Turkestan) Autonomy was proclaimed there, an attempt at autonomous Muslim government for the region. The experiment did not last. Bolshevik forces crushed it with great violence in February 1918, destroying part of the city and leaving thousands dead. The episode marked the start of Soviet rule in the valley and of the long Basmachi resistance.
In the Soviet era, as part of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, Kokand became an industrial and service town, while many of its mosques were closed or put to other uses. Cotton growing, with its huge thirst for water, transformed the valley. The palace of Khudayar Khan, symbol of the old kingdom, survived and eventually became a museum.
With Uzbekistan's independence in 1991, Kokand recovered part of its heritage and its historical memory. Today it is a quiet provincial town, proud of its past as a khanate capital, that shows visitors the palace, the madrasas and the tombs of the khans as reminders of that vanished kingdom. Every two years a large international crafts festival brings back, for a few days, the cosmopolitan life it once had, when Silk Road caravans moved through its streets and the city boasted of its three hundred mosques.
