In 1983, as a recent graduate in Russian studies, I worked for an American company that organized continuing-education junkets in the former Soviet Union. Frequently, the job brought me to Uzbekistan. The train from Moscow to the capital city of Tashkent took almost three days. Usually, I flew Aeroflot, the national airline then known for its decrepit aircraft, only some of whose seats had seat belts.
Today, Uzbekistan Airways has a fleet of new Boeing Dreamliners that fly direct from New York. The country is not as remote as it may seem, and as a destination, it delivers in multiples. It’s ideal for those who crave the original and the sublime in their explorations, and who prefer adventure served alongside exquisite hotels, rare historical sites, and bolts of vivid silk ikat fabric from the bazaars.
In Soviet times, Uzbekistan was where the cotton industry fulfilled its five-year production plans, eventually requiring such vast quantities of water that the Aral Sea, which had been Earth’s fourth-largest inland body of water, was nearly drained dry. (Next door, the barren steppes of Kazakhstan held the nerve center of the U.S.S.R.’s nuclear arsenal.) When I was there in 1984, Konstantin Chernenko was the general secretary of the Communist Party, and from over 2,000 miles away, his politburo held sway over these historically Muslim republics.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in 1991, Uzbekistan became independent, but oppression continued under Islam Karamov’s authoritarian rule. In 2016, Shavkat Mirziyoyev was elected president, and he brought in liberal reforms. With its young population, Uzbekistan has leapt into the modern world.
In November, French president Emmanuel Macron toured the country and declared, “Uzbekistan is transforming. We must be there.” Meaning, one assumes, not merely to support the country’s representative democracy, where women are constitutionally granted equal rights, but also for the riches that stir beneath its 175,000-square-mile landlocked surface: uranium, oil, natural gas, and gold.
Until the mid-1400s, when sea routes began to supplant the arduous overland ones, Bukhara, Samarkand, Tashkent, and Khiva were major trade stops on the Great Silk Road. Spices, carpets, precious stones, and metals, as well as religions, ideologies, scientific thought, and, sadly, enslaved people were transported from Beijing to Rome and back. Traders rested at caravansaries, the roadside hotels around the marketplaces.
Today, the New Silk Road—China’s strategic partnering with resource-dense Central Asia—is driving the region’s economic boom. At Tashkent’s Hyatt Regency, which was illuminated with wattage bright enough for Dubai or Beverly Hills, expensively suited men emerged from chauffeur-driven Maybachs. The ancient ties with Moscow, too, remain strong: Russia is still the country’s largest trading partner.
Eager to return, I called the Seattle-based MIR Corporation, which has pioneered custom tourism to Central Asia since 1986. Back in the 80s, I rarely saw a Westerner, apart from my adult charges; in 2022, Uzbekistan had almost six million tourists.
“You get 2,500 years of world history in just one country,” said Kamila, one of several MIR guides who accompanied me over the course of a week. Greeks, Mongols, Arabs, Persians, and Bolsheviks all conquered this land, as did Alexander II, who gathered it into his Russian Empire in 1868. All left distinct cultural and architectural legacies, in particular the madrassas (schools for Islamic studies), mosques, and monuments that are better preserved than almost anywhere else on earth.
“What we have is real, not Photoshop,” said another guide, Dilya, in Bukhara. “You have the atmosphere of a fairy tale, but in the 21st century.” Scheherazade unfurled her folktales in One Thousand and One Nights from Samarkand, and the city’s beauty was celebrated by writers from the 14th-century Moroccan explorer Ibn Battuta to Edgar Allen Poe.
I flew to Urgench and traveled by car to the walled city of Khiva. My eyes took in the unfinished Kalta Minor Minaret, decorated with oceanic-blue tiles, and nearby, the towering, 170-foot Islam Khoja. Arabs brought Islam to present-day Uzbekistan in the eighth century A.D.; 1,200 years later, all religious institutions closed during Soviet times. The Bolsheviks destroyed 83 of the city’s 96 minarets and used the remaining 13 for radio towers before grasping their cultural significance.
Uzbekistan today is a secular country, 82 percent Muslim, where some women wear headscarves but, at least in the cities, most do not. Alongside Uzbek and Tajik, Russian is the most commonly spoken language, but the familiar greeting countrywide is the Arabic As-salaam-alaikum: “Peace be with you.”
“You get 2,500 years of world history in just one country.”
Some sections of Juma Mosque date from the 10th century, and its elmwood pillars give the feeling of standing in a sacred forest. My guide, Timur, was a soft-spoken expert in Khiva’s history, and we drifted along the alleys and open spaces on the way to the Kunya-Ark fortress. There, my fingers brushed the cool turquoise, cobalt, and black tiles as he described the complex physics behind their installation. Once, Khiva was a center of scientific thought; among many illustrious natives was al-Khwarizmi, the father of algebra.
Stalls sold creamy cashmere shawls for $15 and black karakul caps, and an old woman baked patir flatbread in an upright clay oven. “This is the oldest pizza in the world,” Timur said, breaking off a steaming hunk of the bread, which tasted of spring onions and dill. Fine particles from an ajina shamol—devil’s wind—churned the air and sanded my cheeks.
“The Silk Road is now a superhighway,” driver Sukhrob said with a laugh as we made the seven-hour trip through the Kyzylkum Desert, skirting the Amu Darya River and the Turkmenistan border. No camels, just Chevrolet sedans—thousands of them, and the occasional candy-colored Zil pickup, Brezhnev-era relics. Here, General Motors has long enjoyed a monopoly on automobile production, and today, 94 percent of the cars are Chevys, and all are white.
Edging into Bukhara, I remembered the broken-down, official Intourist hotel on the edge of town, where I stayed on prior trips. This time, my stylish boutique hotel was in the old part of the city. Here, a walk wakes the spirits, especially when I recall how Genghis Khan burned Bukhara in 1220 and killed or enslaved all its citizens.
It was pomegranate season, and I bought tumblers of tangy, fresh-pressed juice. Dilya imparted two millennia of Bukhara’s history, of its emirs and khans, of its intellectual richness as a crossroads of Islamic thought, and of its position on the Great Silk Road. “In the 10th century, it was the center of learning, of religion, education, architecture, design, everything,” she said.
It rose again in the 16th century, when the blue-domed Kalyan Mosque, with its impressive dimensions and dizzying mosaics, was erected. A mulberry tree offered shade in the courtyard, and a reminder that fine silk was once exchanged under the trading domes and is still used in the region’s famous embroidery.
Few families remain in Bukhara’s once thriving Jewish quarter; most moved to Brooklyn or Israel when the Soviet Union dissolved. Dilya brought me to her favorite café for fragrant saffron tea and gingery halvah that fizzed on my tongue. My sinuses were still irritated from Khiva’s desert wind, and she led me into the 16th-century hammam that had the earthen, rusty scent of, well, a 16th-century hammam.
An Uzbek woman in unmatched red lingerie doused me with warm water, smeared me with a tincture of turmeric, ginger, and honey, and then performed something resembling deep-tissue massage while I lay prone on an ancient granite slab. Regenerated, and possibly bruised, I slipped out into the twilight.
A high-speed Spanish-built train zipped me to Samarkand, which is also undergoing a renaissance. Silk Road Samarkand, the $580 million complex that recently opened on the outskirts of the city, includes hotels along with restaurants, medical clinics, and cultural centers. Some are describing it as a new Dubai.
I stayed at a small hotel called Kosh Havuz, and its rooftop provided a panoramic view of what must be among civilization’s most noble sights: Registan Square and Bibi Khanym Mosque, the pièces de résistance of the Timurid dynasty, which lasted from 1370 to 1507.
One hundred years after Genghis Khan destroyed Samarkand, Tamerlane, now known as Timur, rose to power. The city was near his birthplace, and he rebuilt it on a stupendous scale, making it the shining capital of his empire, about which he said, “If you want to understand our power, look upon our buildings.” His conquests would span the territory of 33 modern countries, from today’s Istanbul to Agra, India. He was said to have slaughtered 5 percent of the global population in his campaigns.
Forty years ago, men wore traditional coats known as khalats and boxy black embroidered caps. Today, those items are found mostly in souvenir shops. But plov, a dish made of rice, meat, and vegetables, and crackling, crispy lamb chops cooked in some thousand-year-old way, are as delicious as ever.
Finally, it was back to Tashkent and the gleaming Hyatt. In 1983, with religion all but erased in Soviet life, I had not known that the oldest Koran resided in the capital. It’s a remarkable document, brought to Samarkand by Timur after he conquered modern-day Iraq, and in 1868, moved to the Imperial Library in St. Petersburg. With Lenin’s directive, it was delivered to Tashkent in 1924.
I filed into the Hast Imam library with other pilgrims and tourists. It seemed appropriate to be in the presence of one of Islam’s most sacred relics in a modern country that is rising from the bleak Soviet era into an ambitious regional power.
“A lot of things are moving very fast in Uzbekistan,” one of my guides said—not as a cautionary tale but as a statement of reality. The khanates, camels, and trading domes full of carpets, silk, and porcelain have given way to mining conglomerates and nonstop flights to Dubai. Who knows? Uzbekistan may once again become a center of the world.
Marcia DeSanctis is a contributing writer at Travel + Leisure and writes essays and stories for Vogue, Town & Country, Departures, and BBC Travel. Her new book, a collection of travel essays called A Hard Place to Leave: Stories from a Restless Life, is out now