Tashkent: the city Moscow rebuilt from scratch

Tashkent was flattened by an earthquake in 1966, and what went up afterwards is the reason to go. This is one of the few Central Asian capitals where Soviet modernism was given room to actually finish its thought — wide boulevards, concrete sunbreakers, mosaic facades on cinema halls and institutes that were built to last centuries, not decades. Walk the centre for a day and you get a masterclass in a style most cities demolished before anyone thought to argue for it.

The metro is the reason

Tashkent’s metro opened in 1977, the first in Central Asia, and several of its stations were built as underground halls rather than transit stops — chandeliers, marble columns, ceramic panels referencing cotton, cosmonauts, or Alisher Navoi depending on the line. Photography was banned until 2018, on the grounds that the stations doubled as bomb shelters and were treated as a security matter. That ban being lifted is recent enough that a lot of the best photographs online postdate it by only a few years, which is part of the appeal — you are not retracing someone else’s well-worn shot list.

Go for Kosmonavtlar station and Mustaqillik Maydoni, but do not skip the ordinary stops either; the ornamentation is not reserved for the showpieces. Ride the whole system once with no destination in mind. It costs almost nothing and takes half a day if you get off everywhere.

Who this is for

People who like their travel with an argument attached — why this building, why here, why now — will get more out of Tashkent than people wanting an old-town postcard. If your idea of a city break is a walkable historic core with tea shops and no interruptions, Tashkent will frustrate you: it does not really have one. Amir Timur Square and the newer city centre are pleasant but not dense with the kind of incident that rewards aimless wandering the way Bukhara or Samarkand do.

The honest caveat

Because of the 1966 rebuild, Tashkent’s pre-Soviet fabric is thin. What survives — Chorsu Bazaar, a handful of madrasas — is worth an afternoon, not three days on its own. The city rewards people interested in the twentieth century specifically; if Silk Road caravanserais are what you came for, put those days in Bukhara and treat Tashkent as your arrival and departure point instead, with one full day carved out purely for the metro and the boulevards. Photography rules inside stations can still tighten around official events, so we would check locally before assuming the 2018 change is unconditional and permanent. We last checked this in the current edition.