Nukus shouldn't exist as a travel destination, and yet it is one of the most fascinating stops in Uzbekistan. This Soviet-looking city, planted in the middle of the Karakalpak desert hundreds of kilometres from everything, guards a secret that took decades to reach the outside world: the Savitsky Museum, home to the planet's second-largest collection of Russian avant-garde art, thousands of paintings banned by Stalin that one obsessive, courageous man gathered and hid in the most remote corner of the Soviet empire to save them from destruction.
That man was Igor Savitsky, an artist and archaeologist who arrived in Karakalpakstan in the 1950s and devoted his life to rescuing works by persecuted artists, buying them from widows and families, sometimes without the money to pay for them, and keeping them in a far-flung museum the censors' reach never touched. Thanks to him, masterpieces of the Russian avant-garde and of the Central Asian orientalist school survive today that anywhere else would have ended up in the fire or the gulag. Walking through its rooms, in the middle of nowhere, is one of the most moving cultural experiences the country has to offer.
But Nukus is also the gateway to another, much sadder story: that of the Aral Sea, one of the greatest man-made environmental disasters. From here you can take excursions to Moynaq, the former fishing port now stranded in a desert of rusting ships, and 4x4 tours to the current Aral shoreline, across canyons and steppe. This guide helps you plan the city and its museum, and prepare the adventure towards the sea that is no longer there.
Nukus is a young city in an ancient land. The territory of Karakalpakstan, in the Amu Darya delta, was in antiquity the heart of Chorasmia (Khorezm), an irrigation-based civilisation with imposing mud-brick fortresses whose ruins still dot the desert. But today's Nukus is a Soviet creation: until the 1920s it was a village, and in 1932 it was designated capital of the newly created autonomous republic of Karakalpakstan, within Uzbekistan. It was planned as a modern city on a grid, with wide avenues, administrative buildings and factories. Its name became forever linked to Igor Savitsky, who in 1966 founded the museum that bears his name there and turned this remote capital into a sanctuary for forbidden art. In recent decades, the tragedy of the Aral Sea —almost entirely dried up by the Soviet cotton industry— has shaped the region's fate. Its history, from Chorasmia to Savitsky and the Aral, is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The far west of Uzbekistan: the autonomous republic of Karakalpakstan, with the astonishing Savitsky Museum in Nukus and the haunting ship graveyard of Moynaq, a testament to the Aral Sea disaster.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Imagine that the most dangerous works of art of the Soviet empire, the ones Stalin wanted erased from history, were neither destroyed nor burned, but hidden in plain sight in the most remote and dusty corner of that same empire, kept safe precisely by its remoteness. That, in a nutshell, is the incredible story of Nukus, the capital of Karakalpakstan, a Soviet-looking city planted in the middle of the desert in north-western Uzbekistan.
Nukus doesn't have the beauty of Samarkand or the fame of Bukhara. It's a young city of wide avenues and grey buildings, in a very harsh land shaped by the desert and by the tragedy of the Aral Sea. And yet it holds one of the great cultural secrets of Central Asia: the Savitsky Museum, the second-largest collection of Russian avant-garde art in the world. To understand how that treasure ended up here, and what happened to the land around it, you have to go a long way back, to a civilisation more than two thousand years old, and also much closer to the present, to the life of an obsessive and brave man.
Long before Nukus existed, this region was the heart of Khorezm (Chorasmia), one of the oldest and most surprising civilisations in Central Asia. In the delta of the Amu Darya, where the great river fans out before flowing into the Aral Sea, an irrigation culture flourished from the first millennium BC that tamed water in a hostile environment. The Khorezmians built huge mud-brick cities and fortresses, some of which still stand, half worn away by the wind, in the desert around Nukus: these are the so-called 'desert fortresses', such as Ayaz Kala and Toprak Kala.
Khorezm was a contemporary of the Achaemenid Persians, Alexander the Great, the Parthians and the Kushans. It practised Zoroastrianism, had its own script and its own calendar, and was a trading hub between the nomadic steppes to the north and the Silk Roads to the south. With the arrival of Islam in the 7th and 8th centuries, and later under dynasties such as the 12th-century Khwarazmians —who went on to build an empire before being wiped out by Genghis Khan in 1220—, the region remained a centre of culture and irrigation.
The Karakalpak people, who give the republic its name today, are more recent: a Turkic-speaking people, related to the Kazakhs, semi-nomadic and fishing, who settled in the Amu Darya delta and on the shores of the Aral between the 16th and 18th centuries. Their name means 'black hats', after their traditional headwear. For centuries they lived from livestock, irrigated farming and, above all, fishing in the Aral Sea, then one of the largest lakes in the world.
The Nukus you see today, on the other hand, is a 20th-century creation. Until the 1920s it was nothing more than a small village on the banks of the Amu Darya. Everything changed with the arrival of Soviet power and its reorganisation of Central Asia into republics and regions along ethnic lines. In 1925 a Karakalpak autonomous region was created and, in 1932, the Karakalpak Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, which was soon incorporated into the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. Nukus was chosen as the capital and planned from scratch as a modern city: a grid layout, wide avenues, administrative buildings, factories and apartment blocks.
The Soviet period brought modernisation, schools and hospitals, but also the dark side of the system: forced collectivisation, political repression and, above all, the decision that would mark the region's fate forever: turning Central Asia into the USSR's great cotton plantation. To irrigate the vast cotton fields, Soviet planners massively diverted water from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, the two rivers that fed the Aral Sea. The consequences, which would become catastrophic in the following decades, were starting to take shape.
It was in that Soviet Nukus, remote and seemingly grey, that something extraordinary was about to happen in the world of art, thanks to a man who came looking for ancient ruins and ended up saving the memory of an entire generation of artists.
Igor Savitsky was born in Kyiv in 1915 into a well-off family, and studied art in Moscow during terrible years, those of Stalinism, when the only movement allowed was 'socialist realism' and anything that strayed from it —Cubism, Constructivism, abstraction, any avant-garde— was condemned as 'bourgeois formalism'. Many artists of the brilliant Russian avant-garde of the 1920s were silenced, sent to the gulag or shot, and their works hidden, destroyed or forgotten.
Savitsky arrived in Karakalpakstan in 1950 as an artist on an archaeological expedition devoted to ancient Khorezm. He was captivated by the region, its folk art and its ruins, and in 1957 he settled in Nukus for good. At first he focused on gathering Karakalpak folk art and archaeological pieces, but soon his great obsession began: rescuing the Soviet avant-garde painting the regime had banned. He travelled the country looking for 'lost' works —'rolled up under the beds of old widows, buried in family junk, in the dark corners of studios', as it would later be told— and bought them from the families and widows of persecuted artists, often on credit, promising to pay later with budgets the museum itself didn't yet have.
In 1966 he managed to found a state art museum in Nukus, becoming its first director, and there he built up that impossible collection: tens of thousands of works that anywhere more visible would have been confiscated. The remoteness of Nukus and the relative indifference of the local authorities, more concerned with cotton than with art, allowed the collection to grow almost in secret. Savitsky worked himself to exhaustion, exposed to toxic restoration chemicals, and died in 1984 without seeing his achievement fully recognised.
While Savitsky was saving paintings, a few hundred kilometres away one of the greatest environmental disasters in history was unfolding. Diverting the Amu Darya and Syr Darya for cotton caused the Aral Sea, which in 1960 was the fourth-largest lake in the world, to shrink relentlessly. In just a few decades it lost more than 90 % of its volume, split into several bodies of brackish water and exposed a vast salt desert —the Aralkum— on the former seabed. Fishing, which supported tens of thousands of people in Karakalpakstan, disappeared; ports such as Moynaq ended up more than a hundred kilometres from the water; the winds whipped up toxic dust storms laden with salt and pesticides, and the population's health deteriorated badly. The Aral tragedy is told in more detail on the Moynaq history page.
With Uzbekistan's independence in 1991, Karakalpakstan remained an autonomous republic within the new country, and Nukus stayed its capital. Savitsky's collection, which could only be shown in full after the opening of perestroika and the fall of the USSR, finally began to receive the international recognition its founder always knew it deserved: today the Savitsky Museum is famous in the art world and draws travellers from all over the planet to this remote corner.
Nukus today lives with that dual identity: capital of a land battered by the Aral disaster, with economic problems and a shrinking population, and at the same time guardian of a unique artistic treasure and gateway to an awe-inspiring landscape. Its museums and its desert excursions show two sides of the same story: that of human creation saved against all odds, and that of human destruction paid for over generations.
