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Senate
The shiny white edifice on the west side of the square is the brand new Senate building. Its ample size and appearance suggest that it was built to outdo Americas Senate building. The presidents office and most ministries take up the southern portion around Gagarin maydoni.
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Bazaar
Fergana’s most appealing attraction is the bazaar, filled with good-natured Uzbek traders, leavened with Korean and Russian vendors selling homemade specialities. It sprawls over several blocks north of the centre, and is a pleasant place to explore and to soak up local colour.
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Kulkedash Medressa
The grand Kulkedash medressa sits beside Tashkent’s principal Juma (Friday) Mosque on a hill overlooking Chorsu Bazaar. The mosque was built in the 1990s on the site of a 16th-century mosque destroyed by the Soviets. On warm Friday mornings the plaza in front overflows with worship
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Beached Ships
The beached ships are a five-minute walk from the Oybek Hotel, across the main road and beyond the collection of homes. Once difficult to find, most ships have now been moved to a centralised location beneath the Aral Sea memorial, which occupies a bluff that was once the Aral Sea’
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Museum of Art
The Museum of Art has a worthy collection of mostly 20th-century paintings by Bukharan artists. It’s in the former headquarters of the Russian Central Asian Bank (1912). Look out for works by Zelim Saidjuddin, the Bukharan artist featured in Colin Thubron’s Lost Heart of Asia and S
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Fayoz
Today archaeologists are busy trying to reverse some of the damage at Fayoz-Tepe, a 3rd-century-AD Buddhist monastery complex 9km west of the bus station. Discovered only in 1968, in recent years it has been restored and a teapot dome put over the monastery’s original stupa, visibl
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Railway Museum
The magnificent collection of 1930s to 1950s Soviet locomotives at the open-air Railway Museum will thrill train buffs and is worth visiting even if you aren’t one. You have license to clamber all over any train with an open door. Guided tours are in Russian only, but kids will lov
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Jahon Bazaar
Andijon’s Jahon Bazaar is the biggest bazaar on the Uzbek side of the Fergana Valley. Sunday and Thursday are its busiest days, and there are also silk stalls here, in case you miss Kumtepa Bazaar in Margilon. From Kolkhoz Bazaar, it’s 4km northeast on marshrutka 6, 10 or anything
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Narbutabey Mosque & Medressa
The Bolsheviks closed the 1799 Narbutabey Medressa, but it opened after independence only to have Karimov shut it down again in 2008. Its now open again and tourists are welcome to visit the medressa (now named the Mir Medressa) and adjacent mosque, which Stalin reopened to win war
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Water Tower
Beside Bolo-Hauz Mosque (opposite the Ark) is a now-disused 33m water tower , built by the Russians in 1927. If you are going to climb this, you best not be afraid of heights or rickety-looking Soviet structures. The views of the Ark and beyond are worth the sum1000 demanded by the
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Regional Studies Museum
The Regional Studies Museum occupies an old Jewish merchant’s house, and has a lavish wing devoted to Jewish history, with old photos of Samarkand’s once-prominent population of both European and Bukhara Jews. The rest of the museum contains the standard line-up of old ceramics, st
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Chashma Ayub Mausoleum
The peculiar Chashma Ayub mausoleum was built from the 12th to 16th centuries over a spring. The name means ‘Spring of Job’; legend has it the spring appeared after Job struck his staff on the ground here. Inside is a small water museum where you can drink from the spring. Next doo
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Hovrenko Wine Factory
Wine tasting tours that take in a range of ten locally produced wines, balzams and cognacs are possible at the Hovrenko Wine Factory, in a converted 19th-century Jewish industrialist’s house. The small attached museum has no signage in English, but youre welcome to look around even
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Jome Mosque & Medressa
Across from Eski Bazaar (on Oltinkul) is the handsome 19th-century Jome Mosque & Medressa, said to be the only building to survive the 1902 earthquake. It reopened as a working medressa in the 1990s but was turned into a museum of local ethnography after a police crackdown on s
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Crying Mother Monument
North of Mustaqillik maydoni is the Crying Mother Monument. Fronted by an eternal flame, it was constructed in 1999 to honour the 400,000 Uzbek soldiers who died in WWII. The niches along its two corridors house their names. Karimov has built a nearly identical monument near the ce
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Art Gallery of Uzbekistan
One of the more recent additions to Tashkents museum scene is this impressive building, within the vast halls of which rotating exhibits of Uzbekistans top contemporary artists are rolled out. With both temporary exhibits and a permanent collection, its an interesting survey of the
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Sahib Mian Hazrat Medressa
Walk five minutes down Muqimi kochasi from Khamza kochasi to the truncated remnants of the large 19th-century Sahib Mian Hazrat Medressa, where the great Uzbek poet and ‘democrat’ Mohammedamin Muqimi (1850–1903) lived and studied for the last 33 years of his life. There is a small
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Nadir Divanbegi Medressa
The Nadir Divanbegi Medressa was built as a caravanserai, but the khan thought it was a medressa and it dutifully became one in 1622. Its notable for its stunning exterior tilework, which depicts a pair of peacocks holding lambs either side of a sun with a human face, in direct con
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Ishratkhana Mausoleum
If you prefer your ruins really ruined, it’s worth the slog out to the Tomb Raider –style, 15th-century Ishratkhana Mausoleum, newly topped by a tin roof. With a preponderance of pigeons and an eerie crypt in the basement, this is the place to film your horror movie. Its an easy wa
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TV Tower
The TV Tower, a 375m three-legged monster, the epitome of Soviet design, stands north of the city centre but can be seen from all over town. The price of admission gets you up to the 100m viewing platform and you’ll need your passport to buy a ticket. To go up to the next level (ab
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