My first impression of Tashkent came as a taste – the metallic tang of smog in a city undergoing yet another transformation. The ancient capital, which has been levelled and rebuilt countless times across millennia, is currently obscured by the dust of its latest reincarnation. Twinkling towers sprout from the earth at remarkable pace, while the midday air hangs heavy with the price of this progress.
Uzbekistan is in the midst of an extraordinary pivot towards tourism, putting billions into the national effort while pitching itself as the cultural heart of Central Asia. The nation, once sealed off to foreigners by Stalin, and largely inaccessible to tourists only a decade ago, is now opening itself to the future by reaching into its turbulent past.
I checked into the Wyndham Garden for my first night, a slick base just a short cab ride from Tashkent North station, my launch pad for catching the high-speed Afrosiyob train through the heart of the Timurid empire. Before leaving the capital, I managed entry to Gravity Bar at Sapiens Hotel, a members-only rooftop sanctuary where Tashkent’s new elite convene at the end of the day. From here, you watch the new Uzbekistan take shape in real time – construction cranes pirouetting against the sunset and minarets competing with LED billboard screens.
The following morning, I visited the Centre for Islamic Civilisation at Hazrati Imam complex, a gilded show of strength for the new regime. Its centrepiece is the 8th century Uthman Quran, one of the world’s oldest, looted from Damascus 600 years later by Amir Timur, better known to English-speakers as Tamerlane. I would chase this man’s ghost for the next week. Tamerlane is omnipresent here – the national idol who displaced Karl Marx from the podiums after independence. His statues form the spine of Uzbek identity. In Tashkent, he is on horseback, roving and conquering. Yet it is in Samarkand where his ghost feels most alive, for here, at the heart of his empire, he sits enthroned.
I came off the Afrosiyob train with one clear priority: plov, the national dish of lamb and rice. Not just any plov, but Samarkand plov, which arrives as architectural layers you are explicitly forbidden from mixing. The oil catches light in ways that seem deliberately theatrical; chickpeas and garlic act as structural support and chillies are positioned like warning flags. Of all the plov I had, Samarkand’s stood above the rest.
After lunch, a visit to Tamerlane’s mausoleum, the Gur-e-Amir, stopped me cold. Step inside and you find his tomb positioned deliberately at his Sufi teacher’s feet, alongside his children, rather than above them. The conqueror, who sacked Damascus, chose humility in death, a contradiction that fascinated me as much as any tale of his military victories. In the evening, I headed to Registan for an ambitious light show. The projections could easily have descended into kitsch, yet there’s a certain gravitas to how many eras have shaped this 2,000-year-old city. Uzbek history is splashed across earthquake-tilted madrasas in patterns that complement, rather than compete with the architecture. The square leans noticeably, imperial perfection interrupted by tectonic reality.
The city’s grand necropolis, Shah-i-Zinda, struck a different chord. Crypts climb upwards in aggressive blue, their tiles fired at three alternating temperatures for durability. They now sit beside Soviet restoration attempts that look superficially similar, but lack the indefinable quality separating craft from replication. But, really, it is about the steps. Pilgrims count them ascending, make a wish and count them descending. Matching numbers means your wish is granted; a discrepancy ensures your return.
If Samarkand is marked by the preservation of its glories, Bukhara is marked by their persistence and their absence. The Ark fortress was the most astonishing site of the trip. Once a self-contained citadel built for the pleasures of the Emir of Bukhara, it now exists in semi-dilapidation, half-preserved and half-annihilated by a brutal Russian aerial assault in 1920. Brits like myself weren’t always so welcome here. During the Great Game, Colonel Charles Stoddart arrived in 1838 to forge an alliance, but made the fatal error of approaching the Emir’s gates on horseback, a catastrophic breach of protocol. He was imprisoned and when Captain Arthur Conolly (under the playful pseudonym “Khan Ali”) arrived in 1841 to negotiate his release, he too was captured. Both men were thrown into the infamous Bug Pit, a dungeon filled with vermin and rotting flesh. After months of torture, both were publicly beheaded in June 1842.
Beyond the Ark looms Bukhara’s famous Kalon minaret, another tool of the Emir’s brutal rule, where miscreants were forced to climb step by step before being thrown from the top. It overlooks a market square showcasing brilliant Islamic architectural acoustics, with ceiling domes calibrated to amplify the sound of falling coins, ensuring no transaction went unnoticed. Further out, the last Emir’s summer palace, the Sitorai Mohi-Hosa, offers a rare glimpse into 19th-century Russian opulence. Peacocks are still kept on site; one can easily imagine them strutting through the courtyards, their turquoise plumage echoing the pearly blue of the region’s mosques.
The history here runs beyond Islam. Structures such as Samani Mausoleum display intricate Zoroastrian brickwork that, after days of similarly sculpted mosques and minarets, comes as genuinely refreshing. And in Bukhara, where the land is flat and timber scarce, the use of wood becomes a display of extreme wealth. This is evidenced in the spindly wooden pillars holding up Bolo-Hauz Mosque facing the Ark, where courtiers would once pave the streets with carpets, so the Emir could walk to his Friday prayers without his feet touching the dust.
The seven-and-a-half-hour coach journey to Khiva tested my patience. I am delighted to report you will not suffer this, as the high-speed train finally reaches this transcendent old city next year. Upon arrival at 11pm, dehydrated and dusty, I checked into Darvaza Hotel, a newly opened luxury property directly opposite the old town. There were drinks and snacks waiting, for which I was grateful. The walled old city, Itchan Kala, glowed under pitch-black skies, its stubby blue towers illuminated like something from a fever dream.
Dinner at nearby Ayvon that night was a break from the plov hegemony, consisting of manti dumplings filled with lamb and pumpkin, a Khorezm speciality. The next day, exploring Itchan Kala, I heard tales of craftsmen killed by jealous emirs to prevent them from replicating their architectural magic elsewhere. I visited the mausoleum of Pahlavan Mahmoud, Khiva’s beloved patron saint, an undefeated wrestler – a Timurid Hulk Hogan – with perhaps the grandest monument in the entire district. Currently, Khiva feels like the end of the line, a final outpost before the vast emptiness of the Karakum desert swallows everything whole. But this isolation is temporary. Once the Afrosiyob reaches Khiva, the four great cities will be threaded together, transforming what was once an arduous odyssey into a seamless journey.
Returning to Tashkent days later, I found myself back at Gravity Bar. With a week of Uzbekistan behind me, the tombs, the madrasas and the brutal history of emirs and conquerors, I watched the construction cranes continue their patient work against the evening sky. The contradiction struck me fully then: a nation building its future by excavating its history, where Tamerlane’s statues guard shopping districts and ancient trade routes are being reborn as high-speed rail corridors. The dust will settle eventually. The towers will stop rising. But Uzbekistan’s story has always been one of metamorphosis. Six centuries after Tamerlane, the country is still becoming itself.
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