Central Asia
Discover the Heart of the Silk Road
Two thousand years of caravans, astronomers, poets and blue-domed cities — and a country writing its next chapter right now.
What this is
A country at the centre of everything
For most of recorded history, the roads between China and the Mediterranean ran straight through here.
Uzbekistan is where Silk Road caravans unloaded, where algebra got its name, where Timur built an empire out of Samarkand, and where an entire generation of reformers tried to remake a society with printing presses and schools. This site is an open invitation to all of it — written for travellers, students, researchers, and for Uzbeks living far from home who want their country explained well.
- 14
- Regions to explore
- 7
- UNESCO World Heritage sites
- 2,750
- Years of continuous city life
- 6
- Languages on this site
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Ten ways in
Start anywhere. Each path opens onto the others.
Interactive map
Fourteen regions, one country
Select any region to zoom in and see what it is known for.
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Choose a region on the map, or pick one from the list.
List of regions
Today in Uzbekistan
Something worth knowing
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The word "algorithm" is a corruption of al-Khwarizmi — a mathematician from Khwarezm. "Algebra" comes from the title of his book.
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Uzbekistan is one of only two doubly landlocked countries on earth: every one of its neighbours is also without a coastline.
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Uzbek has no grammatical gender. The single pronoun "u" covers he, she and it — you learn who is meant from context.
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Plov is not only a dish but a listed heritage practice: UNESCO added palov culture and tradition to its Intangible Heritage list in 2016.
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Bukhara's Kalyan Minaret has stood since 1127. Tradition holds it is the one building Genghis Khan ordered left alone.
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The dried bed of the Aral Sea is now the Aralkum — the youngest desert on the planet, created within living memory.
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Photographing the Tashkent metro was banned until 2018. Its stations were built to double as civil defence shelters — and designed like halls.
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Uzbekistan holds seven UNESCO World Heritage sites. The first was Khiva's walled Itchan Kala, inscribed in 1990.
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In 2021 Nodirbek Abdusattorov became the youngest World Rapid Chess Champion in history, at seventeen.
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A teacup filled to the brim is a polite hint that it is time to leave. A third full means the host wants you to stay.
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Sumalak, cooked all night for Navruz from sprouted wheat, contains no sugar at all. The sweetness comes from the sprouting itself.
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Samarkand has been continuously inhabited for around 2,750 years, which makes it roughly a contemporary of Rome.
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Your guide
Meet BEK
BEK answers questions about Uzbekistan in whichever of the six languages you are reading — history, food, where to go, what a word means, why a building looks the way it does.