Author: Oli

Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, is a large, modern city of imposing buildings and vast public squares. To our relief, the grid layout of roads were frequented by proper city buses that made it easy to get around by public transport. For once, we felt like we’d won Public Transport Roulette on the route between the train station and our hotel.

Tashkent’s closest thing to a city centre is Amir Timur Square, a circular park at the intersection of the ancient Silk Roads connecting Asia to Europe. Over the years, statues of various historical figures have occupied the plinth in the centre of the park, including Joseph Stalin and Karl Marx. Today, the park’s focal point is a 48m statue of Timur (Tamerlane), with the conqueror shown riding a horse with his hand raised and cloak blowing out behind him. As impressive as the statue is, the horse turned out to be missing an important body part, the whereabouts of which is apparently one of Tashkent’s great mysteries. When recounting this anecdote in a family group chat, we got the response: “People are the same wherever you go, aren’t they?” So true!

We spent some time exploring Tashkent’s monuments and memorials the evening after we arrived, starting at the Senate building (below left) and Independence Square (below right). The latter’s Independence Monument replaced a statue of Lenin following the fall of the Soviet Union.

Later, we came across the incredibly moving Crying Mother Monument, which depicts a seated woman facing an eternal flame (below left), flanked on either side by plaques containing the names of approximately 400,000 Uzbeks who lost their lives during the Second World War. To try to put this into perspective, I counted 240 names on a single plaque (below centre), then stepped back to take in the full magnitude of the row of 28 books, each containing 52 plaques (below right).

We also learnt about the earthquake of 1966, which destroyed most of the buildings in the city. Following the earthquake, men and women travelled to Tashkent from many surrounding Soviet republics to assist in the massive rebuilding effort. This provided an explanation for the modern Soviet appearance of this ancient “stone city” (a literal translation of Tashkent). These men and women are honoured in the statue below, standing atop a pile of rubble, and connected to a clock by a fissure recording the precise date and time of the earthquake.

After this crash-course in Tashkent’s history, we were keen to experience some of the city’s present day life, and for this we headed to the Chorsu Bazaar. Now, Sara sees herself as a bit of a market connoisseur, and yet this was still the largest bazaar we’ve visited to date. With its colossal turquoise domes, it certainly gave Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar a run for its money in beauty, then blew it out of the water for authenticity.

We found ourselves squeezing through alleys of clothing and shoes one minute, and dodging past trays of raw meat and huge piles of vegetables, cheeses, prepared salads, nuts and spices the next. If you wanted a medical uniform, a birthday cake, gardening supplies or a new sink or toilet, you could find these here too. Exploring the market was thirsty work, so we took advantage of one of the stalls selling fresh pomegranate juice. And to top it all off, we discovered a huge multi-restaurant conglomeration, where we happily sampled some shashlik through the thick barbecue smoke blowing across every table.

Old Tashkent was most visible at the Hazroti Imom complex, a collection of medressas, mosques and mausoleums surrounding yet another vast and largely empty square. The small Moyie Mubarek Library Museum, which holds what is said to be the world’s oldest Quran, lies stranded towards the centre of the square. Despite the considerable size of some of these buildings, they were still somehow overshadowed by the Centre for Islamic Civilisation, currently under construction. While hugely impressive (it must be one of the largest buildings I’ve ever seen by volume), we couldn’t help wondering what had to be cleared to make way for its massive footprint.

We were delighted to find that Tashkent’s metro not only provided an efficient and comfortable means of transport, but its stations were also an attraction in themselves, with each station boasting a unique theme. We entered the Metro at Chorsu, but hopped off at Kosmonavtlar station to marvel at the astronaut-themed decoration, before jumping back on the next train seven minutes later. We’d read that photography in the metro stations had been strictly forbidden since the 1999 terrorist attack, although we’ve since learnt that these rules have been relaxed in recent years. Still, this BBC Article covers the artwork way better than we ever could.

The metro ride however was merely a warm up for what was to follow – a visit to Tashkent’s open-air railway museum. While information on the exhibits was light, the experience itself was very much hands-on. We happily clambered onto, into and around many of the locomotives, with their splendid exterior paint-jobs contrasting heavily with their rusted and rotten interiors. I’ve since read that the museum contains steam locomotives from the Russian Empire, the USA, and even Nazi Germany!

At this point, the rain set in and didn’t stop for a couple of days. We eventually ventured out with two goals: to explore the Soviet architecture of Navoi Park and to complete a bit of clothes shopping to prepare us for the fast-approaching winter. However, when we hopped off the bus, we were confronted instead by a rather unexpected slice of Disneyland. It featured little recreations of London’s Houses of Parliament and Samarkand’s Registan, which was a nice summary of our journey to date. In the end, this slightly surreal corner of the park overshadowed the architecture and statues we’d come to see in the first place, while also providing a handful of much-needed clothing shops.

With our time in Uzbekistan almost over, we managed to squeeze in one last trip to Margilan, the source of the silk that gives its name to the ancient trade route we’d followed since leaving central Europe.

Although we didn’t manage to get tickets for the high speed train from Khiva to Bukhara, I was still pretty happy with our spacious seats and table on our seven-and-a-half-hour journey on the slower train. Apparently tour groups often block book tickets, which meant that the first two carriages of our train were full, while ours was half empty.

Fully embracing travelling slowly, we happily spent the journey napping, writing, eating, and crucially not planning how to get between the train station and our B&B.

We pulled into Bukhara train station and ran the normal gauntlet past the crowd of taxi drivers. One particularly persistent driver followed me across the station forecourt (he only ever spoke to me, not Sara), until Sara told him in no uncertain terms that we didn’t need a taxi. I’m guessing this broke a few social norms, but it certainly did the trick.

The next step was to find our way onto the right bus/marshrutka, but we couldn’t find the bus we thought we wanted, and explaining our route through hand gestures was proving difficult. Eventually, a local teenager took pity on us and showed us onto the right bus (he was also going the same way). He introduced us to another English speaking friend, and en route to the old town we covered topics from the UK’s energy crisis to Arsenal’s position in the Premier League.

Bukhara’s Lyab-i Hauz is a plaza in the centre of the old town containing one of the few remaining communal pools, which used to provide water for drinking and bathing to the city’s inhabitants. The plaza was surrounded on nearly every side by beautiful medressas, sparkling in the sunshine in all their restored beauty, and is still frequented by wizened old men (known locally as aksakal, or white beards) sipping tea while putting the world to rights.

Beyond these grand buildings, the old town extends out to what’s left of the original mud-and-brick city walls via a maze of alleyways. We spent some time meandering through these tiny streets on our way to the Chor Minor, a stunning Indian-style building with four towers, each uniquely patterned and topped with vivid turquoise tiling. Although we’d seen the building referred to as a medressa and the towers as minarets, apparently it was actually a gatehouse to a since destroyed medressa, but today only houses a small souvenir shop.

While the handful of bazaars in the old town were mostly dedicated to souvenirs and clothing, the real action seemed to take place at the central market, confusingly located just beyond the city walls. Even in the late afternoon, this market was still bustling with stalls selling fresh produce, spices, textiles, and seemingly anything else you could possibly need. We particularly liked the freeloading birds to which the seed sellers seemed to have turned a blind eye (below right).

On the way back to the old town we popped into the Ark of Bukhara, a huge fortress barely within the city walls where the Khan would have lived and received visitors. Just inside the Ark’s entrance was the Juma (Friday) Mosque, fronted by a row of intricately carved wooden pillars (below left). A few minutes down the road from the Ark was the Zindan (city jail). Back in the days of Queen Victoria, this jail held two English diplomats in its notorious bug pit (below right), along with a handful of rats, scorpions and goodness knows what else. These two unfortunate souls were sent on separate missions from England, but had both managed to offend the Khan upon arrival in Bukhara, and were promptly thrown into jail. A few years later they were each marched from the jail in front of huge crowds, forced to dig their own graves, and beheaded. Needless to say, our levels of politeness and respect skyrocketed prior to leaving the jail.

It felt like Bukhara had a seemingly endless number of blue-tiled, sand-coloured Islamic buildings extending north-west from the Lyab-i Hauz. Our highlights were the Kalan mosque with its 47m minaret, and the Mir-i-Arab Medressa opposite featuring twin turquoise domes either side of its colossal facade. And just when we thought we’d seen and photographed everything, the light would change, and we’d take another lap.

While Bukhara isn’t internationally renowned for its cuisine, we were keen to try some local dishes while in town. First up was MANTUXONA P.M.K, a manti (dumpling) restaurant located just beyond the central market. Our table was set inside an arched compartment, but some other tables were even more private, with a curtain shielding them from the rest of the restaurant. I’d tried and failed to translate the Uzbek menu using my phone, so we took a partially-informed guess and fortunately it worked out (with a bit of help from the waiter). The manti themselves consisted of minced beef, onion and fat inside a thin, pasta-like parcel, and topped with butter. While I’m glad we tried them (and they were really tasty when eaten alongside the fresh herbs from our salad), they didn’t quite fill the place in our hearts reserved for khinkali.

Another popular lunchtime dish is Plov, an oily and slightly sweet rice and vegetable dish, topped with pulled meat. And where better to eat it than The Plov, a large restaurant located just outside the old town, where we snagged a table just as it became vacant. I think this is the first time either of us have tried horse meat, and despite our initial reservations, this meal was by far our favourite in Bukhara. Judging by the restaurant’s huge popularity with locals and tourists alike, we weren’t the only ones.

Taking the bus back to the train station might sound like a straightforward task given that we’d already done it once in the opposite direction. Still, we couldn’t find our bus number listed at the bus station where we were hoping it would stop, and only once we had begun to walk further down the road did we see one sail past us. It wasn’t far to the next stop though, and when the next bus pulled up, we were greeted once again by the English speaking teenager from 4 days ago – what are the chances?! We covered more world events on our way to the train station, before wishing him luck in his upcoming English exam.

The next stop on our journey will be Samarkand, a city almost synonymous with the ancient Silk Road, and we couldn’t wait to see it with our own eyes.