Tashkent is usually the traveller's first impression of Uzbekistan, and it looks nothing like the postcards of blue domes you might expect. The capital is a big, modern, green and orderly metropolis of wide avenues, parks, fountains, Soviet architecture and new skyscrapers, which surprises anyone arriving in search of the Silk Road alone. It is the largest city in Central Asia, the country's engine, and a comfortable, cosmopolitan gateway before you dive into the wonders of Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva.
But Tashkent has its own history and treasures too. It is an ancient city, another major stop on the Silk Road, whose old town still has traditional bazaars such as the huge Chorsu, with its turquoise dome, and the Khast Imam religious complex, which holds one of the oldest copies of the Quran in existence. Its modern history is defined by one date: the 1966 earthquake, which destroyed much of the city and led to a massive Soviet-style rebuilding that produced, among other things, a metro whose stations are true underground palaces.
This guide helps you make the most of the capital with a practical approach: what to see in a few days, how to get around on the famous metro and by app taxi, where the old town's heart beats, which museums are worth it and how to use Tashkent as a base for catching the Afrosiyob high-speed train to the rest of the country. It isn't the most spectacular city in Uzbekistan, but it is the liveliest and most modern, and understanding it helps you understand the country today, one that has left the Soviet Union behind and looks to the future without forgetting the Silk Road.
Tashkent is one of the oldest cities in Central Asia, with more than 2.000 years of history as an oasis and Silk Road stop, known at different times as Chach or Binkath. It was conquered by the Arabs in the 8th century, razed by Genghis Khan in the 13th and fought over by the Timurids, the Shaybanids and the Khanate of Kokand. In 1865 it was taken by the Russian Empire and made capital of Russian Turkestan, which brought a new European-style city alongside the Muslim quarter. Under the Soviet Union it became the capital of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic and the fourth most populous city in the USSR. In 1966 a devastating earthquake destroyed much of the city, which was rebuilt on a grand scale with Soviet architecture and given a celebrated metro. Since independence in 1991 it has been the capital of Uzbekistan and the largest metropolis in the region. The full story, from Chach to the Soviet era and independence, is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The capital, Tashkent —the largest city in Central Asia, with its bazaars, its metro of palace-like stations and its history of earthquakes and rebuilding— and the mountains of the western Tian Shan, with Chimgan and the Charvak Reservoir as a nature getaway.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The name Tashkent means 'city of stone', but the city is far older than that Turkic name. In this oasis watered by the Chirchik River, at the foot of the Tian Shan foothills, there were settlements more than two thousand years ago, and already in Antiquity a city known as Chach (or Shash) stood here, capital of a prosperous farming region and one of the northern stops on the Silk Road. The caravans linking China with Persia and Europe passed through here, and the city thrived as a market and a crossroads of cultures.
Like the rest of the region, Chach saw Sogdians, Zoroastrianism and Buddhism come through before the arrival of Islam. In the 8th century, Arab armies conquered the region and brought Islam to the city, which kept growing as a commercial and religious centre. Over time, the Turkic name Tashkent —'city of stone'— took hold, a sign of the growing weight of Turkic peoples in Central Asia.
Throughout the Middle Ages, Tashkent was fought over by many dynasties: Karakhanids, Khwarazmians and others. Like almost every great city in the region, it suffered the Mongol catastrophe: in the 13th century, Genghis Khan's armies laid waste to the oasis, and the city was slow to recover. It was later reborn under the Timurids, and in the 15th century it was part of the empire of Timur and his successors, though always in the shadow of the great capitals, Samarkand and Bukhara. At the time, Tashkent was an important but secondary city on the great chessboard of Central Asia.
From the 16th to the 18th century, after the fall of the Timurids, Tashkent changed hands among the states that divided up Central Asia: the Khanate of Bukhara, various local powers and, finally, the Khanate of Kokand, based in the Fergana Valley, which absorbed it at the beginning of the 19th century. Under Kokand, Tashkent was a flourishing walled trading city, with its bazaars, its craftsmen's quarters and its caravans trading with Tsarist Russia to the north.
And it was precisely that trade, along with Russian imperial expansion, that sealed its fate. By the mid-19th century, the Russian Empire was pushing relentlessly into Central Asia, as part of its rivalry with Britain known as the Great Game. In 1865, troops under General Mikhail Chernyayev took Tashkent, despite being heavily outnumbered by the defenders. The conquest was a decisive blow: Russia now held the largest city in the region.
Two years later, in 1867, Tashkent was chosen as capital of the newly created Russian Turkestan, the vast governorate-general that ran Russia's conquests in Central Asia, under Governor Konstantin von Kaufman. The city thus became the centre of Russian power in the region and began to change profoundly: next to the old Muslim quarter, with its alleys and mud-brick houses, the Russians built a European-style 'new city', with wide tree-lined avenues, administrative buildings, Orthodox churches and mansions. Tashkent became a double, colonial city, with two souls living side by side.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 reached Tashkent quickly, and the city's large Russian population and its railway workers played an important part in it. After years of upheaval, civil war and resistance from local movements (the so-called Basmachi), the region was brought into the Soviet Union. In 1930, the capital of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic moved from Samarkand to Tashkent, which from then on grew spectacularly.
Under Soviet rule, Tashkent turned into a major industrial and administrative metropolis, the fourth most populous city in the whole USSR, after Moscow, Leningrad (St Petersburg) and Kyiv. Factories, universities, theatres, scientific institutions and large housing districts were built. During the Second World War, the city, far from the front, took in hundreds of thousands of evacuees from European Russia —among them many Jews, scientists, artists and orphaned children— as well as entire factories moved east, which strengthened its cosmopolitan character and its industrial weight. The elegant Navoi Opera and Ballet Theatre, built partly with the labour of Japanese prisoners of war, dates from those years.
Tashkent also became a Soviet showcase for the so-called Third World, especially for Asian countries: the 1966 Tashkent Declaration, for example, was signed here, ending a war between India and Pakistan with Soviet mediation. The city was the pride of the USSR in Asia, a showcase of socialist modernisation in a land of Islamic tradition. But that same year, 1966, nature was about to change everything.
In the early hours of 26 April 1966, a strong earthquake shook Tashkent. Although its magnitude was not extreme, its shallow focus right beneath the city centre made it devastating: much of the traditional urban core, with its mud-brick houses, was destroyed or left uninhabitable, and hundreds of thousands of people were made homeless. The death toll was relatively low for the scale of the destruction, but the heart of the city was flattened.
The Soviet response was a colossal mobilisation. Brigades of workers, architects and engineers from all fifteen republics came to Tashkent from across the Soviet Union to rebuild the city, in a gigantic operation that became a symbol of Soviet 'friendship of peoples'. Within a few years, Tashkent was rebuilt almost entirely along the lines of Soviet urban planning of the time: broad avenues, wide squares, sprawling districts of prefabricated apartment blocks, monumental public buildings and plenty of green space. The old city of alleyways largely disappeared, replaced by a modern, planned metropolis.
That reconstruction also produced one of the city's points of pride: the Tashkent Metro, opened in 1977, the first in Central Asia, with stations decorated like underground palaces in the style of Moscow's. However tragic, the 1966 earthquake is the key to understanding how Tashkent looks today: if the capital surprises travellers with its Soviet modernity and its lack of an old town compared with Samarkand or Bukhara, it is largely because of that earthquake and the rebuilding that followed.
With the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, Uzbekistan became independent and Tashkent became the capital of the new country, governed for its first decades by Islam Karimov, the republic's former Communist leader, who ran the state with an iron fist until his death in 2016. The city went through the process of building a new national identity: Timur (Tamerlane) was rehabilitated as a founding father, with statues and museums, Soviet symbols were removed and Uzbek language and culture were promoted, although Russian remained widely spoken.
In the decades that followed, Tashkent transformed once again. Large mosques and national monuments were built, squares and avenues were remodelled, and in recent years a more open and modern city has emerged, with shopping centres, specialty coffee shops, glass towers such as the Tashkent City complex and a young, dynamic urban scene. After Karimov's death, the reforms driven by his successor opened the country up somewhat to tourism and investment, and the capital has become more accessible and cosmopolitan.
Today, with more than two and a half million inhabitants, Tashkent is the largest city in Central Asia and the economic, political and cultural engine of Uzbekistan. It is a city of fascinating contrasts: in a single day you can go from the age-old bustle of Chorsu Bazaar, under its turquoise dome, to the 7th-century Quran at Khast Imam, from the palace-like stations of the Soviet metro to the glass towers of the new Tashkent City, from a plov centre full of steaming pots to a trendy brunch café. It lacks the monumental splendour of the Silk Road cities, but it is the living heart of the country, the gateway through which almost every traveller arrives and leaves, and the best place to take the pulse of today's Uzbekistan, a country looking to the future without giving up its two thousand years of history.
