The English overview now exposes the real city and landmark pages directly in HTML, so every card opens a page that exists.
Five centuries ago, under these domes, people changed gold, sold skullcaps and sharpened knives. Today they do the same — and it's a rare bazaar built not for tourists but simply never closed since the 16th century.
The biggest thing to appear on Tashkent's map in 2026. Not a mosque and not a local-history museum, but an attempt to gather the whole intellectual history of the region — from the golden age of science to the Uthman Quran — into one building under a sixty-metre dome.
It's the only museum in the world that carries you from hall to hall for the price of a single ride. For forty-one years photographing it was forbidden — and now it's the first thing visitors point a camera at.
Samarkand's blue domes are younger than they look. The real city is nearly three thousand years old, and it lies right next door — under grassy mounds where the capital of Sogdiana once stood, until the Mongols arrived in 1220.
Amir Timur had already filled Samarkand with the greatest buildings of his age — and then wanted to surpass them in his own home city. So Ak-Saray was born, a palace conceived to eclipse everything built before. All that remains are two piers of the entrance portal, but even these ruins make you tip your head back.
The city's main avenues fan out from this square. Different monuments from different eras have stood on this spot — and who stands at the center today tells you more about the country than any guidebook. Right now it's Tamerlane on horseback.
From this city, a boy named Babur set out to conquer India and founded the Mughal Empire — and then spent his whole life longing for Andijan in verse. Almost no ancient monuments remain here, but the story itself — "this is the home of the man who changed history" — makes the city special.
The Friday mosque was meant to be the grandest building in the Islamic world — a monument to a conqueror's might. And it was. Then it began to fall almost as soon as it was finished.
Uzbekistan is usually seen as a country of blue domes and madrasas. But a thousand years before Islam, in the south, on the banks of the Amu Darya, monks in red robes prayed to the Buddha. Termez was a major Buddhist center of the Silk Road — and its monasteries still lie in the sand by the Afghan border.
It isn't on any of the great squares — it's tucked into the residential lanes behind Lyabi-Hauz. And yet these four mismatched towers are, more than anything, the "postcard" of Bukhara. A tiny building that out-argued every monument in the city.
Tashkent's main bazaar trades at the same crossroads it did a thousand years ago — but under a giant dome that became a monument in its own right. Here you buy spices and plov, and along with them the frozen spirit of two eras.
All city guides on Kvazar: Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva, Tashkent, Ferghana, Margilan, Kokand, Andijan, Nukus, Shakhrisabz and Termez.
Having lost his beloved son, Amir Timur built a memorial in his home city and prepared a crypt for himself beside it — he wanted to be buried here, in Shakhrisabz. But fate decided otherwise: the great conqueror came to rest in Samarkand, and the prepared crypt remained empty.
Beside the bulk of Ak-Saray hides a place of a completely different mood — a quiet courtyard where a mosque stands under a blue dome, and in the tombs rest Timur's mentor and his kin. If the palace spoke of might, this ensemble speaks of memory and reflection.
The youngest of Uzbekistan's recognizable cities: it's less than 150 years old, and you won't find antiquities here. But Ferghana is a convenient, green base from which roads radiate to everything of interest in the valley: to the silk of Margilan, the ceramics of Rishtan and the palaces of Kokand.
Among the ancient cities of Uzbekistan, Ferghana is the odd one out: it's less than 150 years old, with straight avenues instead of narrow Eastern lanes and buildings in the colonial style. But it's from here that it's most convenient to set out into the heart of the country's most fertile and populous valley.
Beneath a ribbed turquoise dome that became a template for the Taj Mahal, under a slab of black jade, lies a man who redrew the map of Asia. And above him, an inscription that someone dared to disturb in 1941.
Deep in old Tashkent, among the mud-brick houses that survived the earthquake, stands an ensemble built around a book almost fourteen centuries old. By tradition its pages bear the blood of a murdered caliph, and the manuscript's road ran through five countries.
This isn't a cozy park for strolling but the ceremonial square of a state. Here everything is a statement: a globe instead of a leader, an arch of storks at the entrance, an alley of memory for the war dead. The country's main square, as Uzbekistan wants to see itself.
Less than a square kilometre of clay streets, minarets and madrasahs — and yet the first UNESCO site in Central Asia. Behind these walls a khan once ruled, scholars prayed, and slaves were sold.
The turquoise giant by Khiva's western gate was designed to outshine everything in the Islamic world. The khan died, the work stopped — and the unfinished tower became the city's most recognisable landmark.
While Samarkand and Bukhara lived on their antiquity, the Ferghana Valley as late as the 19th century saw its own state flourish — the Kokand Khanate. Its capital left behind a palace meant to rival Khiva and Bukhara. This is a different, later chapter of Uzbek history.
Tashkent's largest madrasah is named after the court title of a powerful vizier. Over four and a half centuries it has been a school, a caravanserai and a fortress — and, by a dark legend, a scaffold too.
Behind the walls of Itchan Kala hid another wall — and behind it, a whole state in miniature: the khan's palace, a mint, an arsenal, a harem and a prison. From here Khiva was ruled — and from here people were sent to be executed.
After centuries, minarets and domes, you come out to water in the shade of old mulberry trees — and Bukhara suddenly slows down. People still drink tea here, argue, laugh. And here, on a donkey, sits the wittiest man in the East.
That "silk" in the phrase "Silk Road" comes, in large part, from here. For more than a thousand years Margilan has woven khan-atlas — a shimmering fabric whose pattern is set by dyeing the threads before they're ever woven. People come to this city not for monuments, but to see how fabric is born.
On three hills near Nukus lies one of the oldest cemeteries in Central Asia. Here, by legend, the first man on earth is buried, and a half-ruined mausoleum is called the "Clock of the World": it's believed that one brick falls from its wall every year — and when the last one falls, the end of the world will come.
People come here not for minarets and not for tilework. Nukus is about something else: about the man who carried thousands of canvases into the Karakalpak desert — canvases that in Moscow would have gone under the knife — and so saved a whole layer of 20th-century art.
He was never crowned and never ruled. A simple leather-worker who became famous as an unbeatable wrestler, a healer, and the author of philosophical quatrains. Centuries later, a mausoleum with the largest dome in Khiva rose over his grave — and the city made him its patron.
A tower the condemned were thrown from, spared by the conqueror who leveled the rest of the city. Beside it, a mosque for twelve thousand, and a madrasa that never stopped teaching — not even under Soviet rule.
Complete list of Uzbekistan's administrative units with administrative centers and exact links to available English city guides.
A narrow corridor climbing uphill between tombs, where turquoise closes in from both sides. Here lie Tamerlane's relatives — and here too, by legend, a beheaded king still lives.
Samarkand became the capital of an empire. Shakhrisabz was the homeland. Timur built a palace here taller than those of Samarkand and prepared his own tomb — but in the end he wasn't buried here. That gap between intention and fate is what makes Shakhrisabz so special.
For six centuries in a row, one noble family buried its dead here — and each generation added a new mausoleum to the ensemble. So Sultan-Saodat grew up in Termez: a long row of tombs along which you can read the history of local architecture like the rings of a tree.
The Khiva khans had two palaces. Kunya-Ark — the old fortress-residence by the western gate. And Tash-Hauli — the new, ceremonial one by the eastern gate, built deliberately tangled: a stranger could never find his way to the ruler.
Uzbekistan's capital is over two thousand years old — yet you can barely see that age: the 1966 earthquake erased the old town, and Tashkent was rebuilt from scratch. In return it holds the world's oldest Quran, and its metro runs like an underground museum.
In the far south of the country, right on the border with Afghanistan, lies a city that breaks the familiar picture. Before the minarets and madrasas, there were Buddhist monasteries and stupas here. Termez remembers an Uzbekistan almost no one knows.
Travelers are often surprised: why is the capital of an ancient country so Soviet and so wide? The answer lies in one morning in 1966, when the city center collapsed in minutes. What you see today was built afterward. To understand the face of Tashkent, you have to know about those 5 hours and 23 minutes.
On the high bank of the Amu Darya, right by the border, stand the blue domes of the tomb of a Sufi sage whom people here respectfully call Termez-ota — "father of Termez." It's one of the chief shrines of southern Uzbekistan, grown from the modest cell of a hermit, and a place where the Buddhist past gave way to the Islamic.
Muynak was once a fishing port on the shore of the planet's fourth-largest lake. Today the water is dozens of kilometers of desert away, and rusty ships stand on the sand where the sea once lapped. It's a monument to one of the largest ecological catastrophes of the 20th century — and one of the most powerful places in Uzbekistan.
Clay walls on a twenty-meter mound, where Bukhara began. Behind them emirs were crowned, the treasury and the prison were kept — until one morning in 1920, aircraft appeared over the fortress.
Babur was born in Andijan and died thousands of kilometers away — in India, having founded the Mughal Empire. He never managed to return home. So earth from his grave was brought here, to the hill where he loved to walk and from which he once left his native city forever.
In 1902 a terrible earthquake almost wiped Andijan off the map — thousands died, whole quarters collapsed. But the Jami congregational mosque, with its 32-meter minaret, the tallest in the entire Ferghana Valley, stood firm. Today it's the city's main architectural monument.
Kokand's main mosque was built by khans who dreamed of making their capital no worse than Samarkand and Bukhara. Its huge canopy is held up by dozens of carved wooden columns, and over the courtyard rises a slender brick minaret from which, by tradition, people were summoned not only to prayer.
Everyone expects a mosque to have a dome, an arch and a blaze of tilework. The Juma Mosque in Khiva gives you none of that. From outside, a blank clay box. Inside, half-light and 213 wooden columns — and no two are the same.
The last ruler of the Kokand Khanate built himself a palace the Ferghana Valley had never seen: a hundred rooms, four minarets, a facade covered entirely in colored majolica. He had only a few years to enjoy it — and then Russian troops entered Kokand, and the khanate vanished from the map.
Three madrasas, two centuries between them, and one tiger that was never supposed to be there. Here's how to see Uzbekistan's most famous square as a design — not just a backdrop.
No tiles, no gilding — just fired clay, laid so the wall changes its face through the day. Bukhara's oldest building survived the Mongols because it was buried in sand in time.
In a far-off city on the edge of a dried-up sea is kept the world's second-largest collection of Russian avant-garde. It was assembled by one man — an artist who drove around the villages, bought up forbidden paintings and hid them where Moscow wouldn't look. Today people travel across half a continent for this collection.
In Margilan, silk isn't made on a conveyor belt but by hand — almost exactly as it was a thousand years ago. At the Yodgorlik factory you can trace the whole path: from the silkworm cocoon to finished khan-atlas, whose fiery patterns are recognized the world over. This isn't a museum behind glass but a living production.
If Samarkand is grand squares and imperial scale, Bukhara is an entire medieval city that survived almost whole. Here it isn't monuments scattered through a town — it's the town itself that became the monument.
Samarkand is squares, Bukhara is streets — and Khiva is an entire walled city under open sky. Here you can climb the wall and take in everything at once: a thousand years of history in one frame.
This is where Ulugh Beg measured the stars and Silk Road caravans unloaded both silk and ideas. Samarkand isn't an open-air museum. It's a living city that still remembers exactly who it used to be.
One was built by Tamerlane's grandson, a scholar and stargazer — austere as a formula. The other, directly opposite, went up two hundred years later — opulent, excessive, indifferent to the canon. Between them lies a narrow lane and a whole change of eras.
Two centuries before Galileo, Tamerlane's grandson built an instrument as tall as a three-story house in Samarkand — and calculated the length of the year to within a minute. Then he paid for it with his head.
Every translated landmark page currently available in the English structure.
Samarkand's blue domes are younger than they look. The real city is nearly three thousand years old, and it lies right next door — under grassy mounds where the capital of Sogdiana once stood, until the Mongols arrived in 1220.
The Friday mosque was meant to be the grandest building in the Islamic world — a monument to a conqueror's might. And it was. Then it began to fall almost as soon as it was finished.
Beneath a ribbed turquoise dome that became a template for the Taj Mahal, under a slab of black jade, lies a man who redrew the map of Asia. And above him, an inscription that someone dared to disturb in 1941.
Three madrasas, two centuries between them, and one tiger that was never supposed to be there. Here's how to see Uzbekistan's most famous square as a design — not just a backdrop.
A narrow corridor climbing uphill between tombs, where turquoise closes in from both sides. Here lie Tamerlane's relatives — and here too, by legend, a beheaded king still lives.
One was built by Tamerlane's grandson, a scholar and stargazer — austere as a formula. The other, directly opposite, went up two hundred years later — opulent, excessive, indifferent to the canon. Between them lies a narrow lane and a whole change of eras.
Two centuries before Galileo, Tamerlane's grandson built an instrument as tall as a three-story house in Samarkand — and calculated the length of the year to within a minute. Then he paid for it with his head.
Clay walls on a twenty-meter mound, where Bukhara began. Behind them emirs were crowned, the treasury and the prison were kept — until one morning in 1920, aircraft appeared over the fortress.
It isn't on any of the great squares — it's tucked into the residential lanes behind Lyabi-Hauz. And yet these four mismatched towers are, more than anything, the "postcard" of Bukhara. A tiny building that out-argued every monument in the city.
After centuries, minarets and domes, you come out to water in the shade of old mulberry trees — and Bukhara suddenly slows down. People still drink tea here, argue, laugh. And here, on a donkey, sits the wittiest man in the East.
A tower the condemned were thrown from, spared by the conqueror who leveled the rest of the city. Beside it, a mosque for twelve thousand, and a madrasa that never stopped teaching — not even under Soviet rule.
No tiles, no gilding — just fired clay, laid so the wall changes its face through the day. Bukhara's oldest building survived the Mongols because it was buried in sand in time.
Most of Bukhara's monuments became museums long ago. These did not. Under domes raised five hundred years ago at the forks of the trade roads, people still sell carpets, knives and spices. This isn't a reconstruction of the Silk Road — it's the Silk Road...
Less than a square kilometre of clay streets, minarets and madrasahs — and yet the first UNESCO site in Central Asia. Behind these walls a khan once ruled, scholars prayed, and slaves were sold.
Everyone expects a mosque to have a dome, an arch and a blaze of tilework. The Juma Mosque in Khiva gives you none of that. From outside, a blank clay box. Inside, half-light and 213 wooden columns — and no two are the same.
The turquoise giant by Khiva's western gate was designed to outshine everything in the Islamic world. The khan died, the work stopped — and the unfinished tower became the city's most recognisable landmark.
Behind the walls of Itchan Kala hid another wall — and behind it, a whole state in miniature: the khan's palace, a mint, an arsenal, a harem and a prison. From here Khiva was ruled — and from here people were sent to be executed.
He was never crowned and never ruled. A simple leather-worker who became famous as an unbeatable wrestler, a healer, and the author of philosophical quatrains. Centuries later, a mausoleum with the largest dome in Khiva rose over his grave — and the city...
The Khiva khans had two palaces. Kunya-Ark — the old fortress-residence by the western gate. And Tash-Hauli — the new, ceremonial one by the eastern gate, built deliberately tangled: a stranger could never find his way to the ruler.
The city's main avenues fan out from this square. Different monuments from different eras have stood on this spot — and who stands at the center today tells you more about the country than any guidebook. Right now it's Tamerlane on horseback.
Tashkent's main bazaar trades at the same crossroads it did a thousand years ago — but under a giant dome that became a monument in its own right. Here you buy spices and plov, and along with them the frozen spirit of two eras.
Travelers are often surprised: why is the capital of an ancient country so Soviet and so wide? The answer lies in one morning in 1966, when the city center collapsed in minutes. What you see today was built afterward. To understand the face of Tashkent, you...
Deep in old Tashkent, among the mud-brick houses that survived the earthquake, stands an ensemble built around a book almost fourteen centuries old. By tradition its pages bear the blood of a murdered caliph, and the manuscript's road ran through five...
This isn't a cozy park for strolling but the ceremonial square of a state. Here everything is a statement: a globe instead of a leader, an arch of storks at the entrance, an alley of memory for the war dead. The country's main square, as Uzbekistan wants to...
Tashkent's largest madrasah is named after the court title of a powerful vizier. Over four and a half centuries it has been a school, a caravanserai and a fortress — and, by a dark legend, a scaffold too.
Central Asia's first metro was designed not only as transport but as a bomb shelter — which is why photographing it was banned until 2018. Now you can: space mosaics, majolica domes and marble halls, for a fifteen-cent ticket.
The youngest of Uzbekistan's recognizable cities: it's less than 150 years old, and you won't find antiquities here. But Ferghana is a convenient, green base from which roads radiate to everything of interest in the valley: to the silk of Margilan, the...
Muynak was once a fishing port on the shore of the planet's fourth-largest lake. Today the water is dozens of kilometers of desert away, and rusty ships stand on the sand where the sea once lapped. It's a monument to one of the largest ecological...
On three hills near Nukus lies one of the oldest cemeteries in Central Asia. Here, by legend, the first man on earth is buried, and a half-ruined mausoleum is called the "Clock of the World": it's believed that one brick falls from its wall every year — and...
In a far-off city on the edge of a dried-up sea is kept the world's second-largest collection of Russian avant-garde. It was assembled by one man — an artist who drove around the villages, bought up forbidden paintings and hid them where Moscow wouldn't...
In Margilan, silk isn't made on a conveyor belt but by hand — almost exactly as it was a thousand years ago. At the Yodgorlik factory you can trace the whole path: from the silkworm cocoon to finished khan-atlas, whose fiery patterns are recognized the...
Kokand's main mosque was built by khans who dreamed of making their capital no worse than Samarkand and Bukhara. Its huge canopy is held up by dozens of carved wooden columns, and over the courtyard rises a slender brick minaret from which, by tradition...
The last ruler of the Kokand Khanate built himself a palace the Ferghana Valley had never seen: a hundred rooms, four minarets, a facade covered entirely in colored majolica. He had only a few years to enjoy it — and then Russian troops entered Kokand, and...
Babur was born in Andijan and died thousands of kilometers away — in India, having founded the Mughal Empire. He never managed to return home. So earth from his grave was brought here, to the hill where he loved to walk and from which he once left his...
In 1902 a terrible earthquake almost wiped Andijan off the map — thousands died, whole quarters collapsed. But the Jami congregational mosque, with its 32-meter minaret, the tallest in the entire Ferghana Valley, stood firm. Today it's the city's main...
Amir Timur had already filled Samarkand with the greatest buildings of his age — and then wanted to surpass them in his own home city. So Ak-Saray was born, a palace conceived to eclipse everything built before. All that remains are two piers of the...
Having lost his beloved son, Amir Timur built a memorial in his home city and prepared a crypt for himself beside it — he wanted to be buried here, in Shakhrisabz. But fate decided otherwise: the great conqueror came to rest in Samarkand, and the prepared...
Beside the bulk of Ak-Saray hides a place of a completely different mood — a quiet courtyard where a mosque stands under a blue dome, and in the tombs rest Timur's mentor and his kin. If the palace spoke of might, this ensemble speaks of memory and reflection.
On the high bank of the Amu Darya, right by the border, stand the blue domes of the tomb of a Sufi sage whom people here respectfully call Termez-ota — "father of Termez." It's one of the chief shrines of southern Uzbekistan, grown from the modest cell of a...
Uzbekistan is usually seen as a country of blue domes and madrasas. But a thousand years before Islam, in the south, on the banks of the Amu Darya, monks in red robes prayed to the Buddha. Termez was a major Buddhist center of the Silk Road — and its...
For six centuries in a row, one noble family buried its dead here — and each generation added a new mausoleum to the ensemble. So Sultan-Saodat grew up in Termez: a long row of tombs along which you can read the history of local architecture like the rings...
A country is not a list of places.
It is a civilization to understand.
