48 Fun Facts About Uzbekistan

Besides Uzbekistan, which is the only other doubly landlocked country, with every neighbour landlocked too?

Liechtenstein, wedged between Switzerland and Austria, is the only other doubly landlocked country: both of its neighbours are themselves landlocked, just as all five of Uzbekistan's are.

Which country is Uzbekistan's only neighbour that was never a Soviet republic?

Afghanistan faces Uzbekistan across a short stretch of the Amu Darya; the last Soviet troops of the Afghan war marched home over its Friendship Bridge in February 1989.

Which Uzbek city's walled inner town, Itchan Kala, was Uzbekistan's first UNESCO World Heritage Site?

Khiva's Itchan Kala, the mud-walled inner town, housed a notorious slave market from the 17th to the 19th century; it later became Uzbekistan's first UNESCO World Heritage Site.

What is Uzbekistan's signature rice, meat, carrot and onion dish?

Plov, also called palov or osh, is so central to hospitality that a saying holds guests may leave only once it has been served; UNESCO listed Uzbek palov culture in 2016.

Which hot drink do Uzbeks pour for every guest, making it Uzbekistan's national beverage?

Green tea is poured for guests all day in chaikhana teahouses, usually without milk or sugar; Tashkent is the exception, preferring black tea.

In Uzbek cuisine, manti, chuchvara and somsa are all what?

Stuffed pockets of dough, all three: manti are steamed, chuchvara are small boiled dumplings, and somsa are baked in a clay tandoor rather than fried like Indian samosas.

Which physician, born around 980 in what is now Uzbekistan, wrote The Canon of Medicine?

Avicenna, known in the East as Ibn Sina, finished The Canon of Medicine in 1025, and it went on to serve as a standard textbook in European universities for centuries.

Timur's birthplace Kesh, 80 km south of his later capital, is which modern town?

Shahrisabz, 'green city', is the old Kesh; Timur planned to be buried there and a crypt inscribed for him survives, yet he was laid to rest in his capital instead.

At the Battle of Ankara in 1402, Timur captured which Ottoman sultan?

Bayezid I, 'the Thunderbolt', was taken prisoner at Ankara and died in Timur's captivity in 1403; his sons then fought an eleven-year civil war, the Ottoman Interregnum, until 1413.

Timur died in February 1405 while marching to invade which empire?

Timur was leading his army against Ming China when he fell ill at Otrar (Farab) on the Syr Darya in February 1405; his body was carried back to his capital for burial.

Days after Soviet scientists opened Timur's tomb in June 1941, what happened?

Nazi Germany invaded the USSR on 22 June 1941; legend holds that an inscription in the tomb warned that whoever disturbed it would unleash an invader more terrible than Timur, and Timur was reburied in November 1942.

How did the reign of astronomer-ruler Ulugh Beg, Timur's grandson, end in 1449?

His son had him killed: Abd al-Latif rebelled, let his deposed father set out on a pilgrimage to Mecca, then had him murdered on the road.

The Registan, a square framed by three tiled madrasas, is the centrepiece of which city?

Samarkand's Registan was where crowds gathered for royal proclamations and public executions; its oldest madrasa, Ulugh Beg's of 1417–20, predates the other two by two centuries.

In which city does the 12th-century Kalyan Minaret, nicknamed the 'Tower of Death', stand?

The Kalyan Minaret has stood in Bukhara since 1127; Genghis Khan is said to have spared it while razing the city in 1220, and condemned criminals were thrown from its top.

Why is Uzbekistan's turquoise-tiled Kalta Minor, whose name means 'short minaret', so squat?

It was left unfinished: Muhammad Amin Khan began the Kalta Minor in 1852 as the tallest minaret in the Muslim world, but he was killed in battle in 1855 and work stopped.

Which country shares what remains of the Aral Sea with Uzbekistan?

Kazakhstan holds the northern Aral, where a dam finished in 2005 has raised the water and brought fish back, while the southern basin on the Uzbek side has largely dried out.

Soviet irrigation schemes for which thirsty crop are blamed for draining the Aral Sea?

Cotton was the crop: Soviet planners diverted the Amu Darya and Syr Darya to irrigate it, and Uzbekistan's harvest relied on forced labour until reforms that the ILO said in 2022 had ended it.

The former Aral Sea fishing port of Moynaq became known for what?

Moynaq is known for its ship graveyard on dry land: rusting trawlers lie on the sand of the Aralkum Desert, the seabed exposed as the shore retreated more than 100 kilometres from the town.

Which autonomous republic occupies the north-west of Uzbekistan beside the shrunken Aral Sea?

Karakalpakstan, the autonomous republic of the north-west, takes in the dried Aral seabed, so its people bear the worst of the salt and dust storms that blow off it.

Which metal is mined at Muruntau, one of the world's largest open-pit mines?

Gold: Muruntau, in the desert near Zarafshan, is among the largest open-pit gold mines on Earth; in 2006 Uzbekistan forced the US firm Newmont out of its joint venture there.

Which desert covers much of Uzbekistan between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers?

The Kyzylkum, 'red sand', fills the land between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya; the Karakum, 'black sand', lies across the border in Turkmenistan.

The Amu Darya, on Uzbekistan's southern border, was known to the ancient Greeks as what?

The land between it and the Syr Darya (the Jaxartes) is Transoxiana, 'beyond the Oxus', the historic heart of the country.

Which neighbouring republic began in 1924 as an autonomous part of the Uzbek SSR, before splitting off in 1929?

Tajikistan was created inside the Uzbek SSR as an autonomous republic and won equal status only in 1929, taking the Khujand region from Uzbekistan as it left.

Which conqueror spent 329–327 BC subduing what is now Uzbekistan, then married the noblewoman Roxana?

Alexander the Great fought two years of revolts north of the Hindu Kush before marrying Roxana, daughter of the Bactrian noble Oxyartes, in 327 BC; she later bore his son and heir, Alexander IV.

Which Iranian people from the oases of today's Uzbekistan were the leading merchant middlemen of Asia's caravan trade?

The Sogdians, an Eastern Iranian people of Central Asia's oasis cities, dominated the caravan trade between China and the West, and their language served as its lingua franca for centuries.

Legend says the Islamic world's first paper mill used Chinese prisoners captured at which battle of 751?

At Talas in 751 an Abbasid army defeated Tang China; legend says captured Chinese papermakers then brought their craft west, though historians doubt it, since paper was already in use in the region decades earlier.

The word 'algorithm' comes from the Latinised name of which 9th-century mathematician?

Al-Khwarizmi's name means 'the man from Khwarazm', the oasis region now split between Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan; medieval translators made it 'Algoritmi', and the title of his treatise gave us 'algebra'.

Babur, a descendant of Timur born in the Fergana Valley, founded which South Asian empire?

Babur founded the Mughal Empire only after the Uzbeks drove him from his Central Asian lands: he took Kabul in 1504, then beat the Sultan of Delhi at Panipat in 1526.

The fertile, densely populated Fergana Valley is divided between Uzbekistan and which two neighbours?

Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan share the Fergana Valley with Uzbekistan; Soviet-drawn borders left a tangle of enclaves such as Sokh, a pocket of Uzbek territory entirely surrounded by Kyrgyzstan.

What name is given to the 19th-century Anglo-Russian rivalry for influence over Central Asia?

The Great Game got its name from Arthur Conolly, a British officer whom a Central Asian emir beheaded as a spy in 1842; Kipling's novel Kim later made the phrase famous.

On what basis were the Uzbek SSR's 1924 borders drawn?

Ethnic groups were the basis: Moscow dissolved the region's existing republics in 1924 and drew a territory for each major nationality, and those lines became international borders in 1991.

Much of Tashkent's old city was destroyed on 26 April 1966 by what?

A shallow earthquake centred beneath the city struck early on 26 April 1966, levelling much of the old town; Tashkent was then rebuilt as a showpiece Soviet capital of wide boulevards and concrete.

Leaders of which two countries signed a 1966 peace agreement in Tashkent, mediated by Soviet premier Kosygin?

India and Pakistan signed the Tashkent Declaration on 10 January 1966, ending their 1965 war; Indian prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri died in the city that same night.

Why did the Tashkent Metro, Central Asia's first, ban photography until 2018?

The metro doubled as a nuclear bomb shelter, so its ornate stations were classed as military installations; it opened in 1977 as the seventh metro in the USSR.

Who was Uzbekistan's first president, in power from independence in 1991 until his death in 2016?

Islam Karimov, the Uzbek SSR's last Communist Party chief, ruled independent Uzbekistan until his death in 2016; a year later his once-powerful daughter Gulnara was sentenced for fraud and money laundering.

Which long-serving prime minister became Uzbekistan's second president in 2016?

Shavkat Mirziyoyev, prime minister from 2003, took over on the death of the first president in 2016; he made the currency freely convertible in 2017, mended fences with the neighbours and even lifted the metro photography ban.

In which Fergana Valley city did troops fire on protesters in May 2005, killing at least 187?

Andijan, 13 May 2005: the official toll was 187, witnesses put it in the hundreds, and the fallout led Uzbekistan to evict the United States from its Karshi-Khanabad airbase.

In 1993 Uzbekistan adopted which alphabet, replacing the Cyrillic imposed in 1940?

Latin was actually a return: a Latin alphabet had been used from the late 1920s until the Soviet switch to Cyrillic in 1940, and Cyrillic stayed in everyday use for decades after the 1993 decree.

What is the currency of Uzbekistan?

The som inherited its name from the Soviet rouble, which Uzbek speakers called the som and which carried that word on its banknotes; the current som dates from 1994.

In 2025 Uzbekistan's footballers became Central Asia's first team to qualify for which tournament?

The World Cup: a goalless draw with the UAE sealed a place at the 2026 finals, two decades after FIFA voided a 2005 play-off win over Bahrain for a refereeing error and Uzbekistan went out in the replayed tie.

Uzbekistan's team won gold at the 2022 Olympiad in Chennai in which game?

Chess: Uzbekistan's young squad trailed Armenia until beating it head-to-head in round nine of the 2022 Olympiad in Chennai, then held on to finish first with the two teams level on match points.

At the 2024 Paris Olympics, Uzbekistan won five gold medals in which sport, topping its medal table?

Boxing brought five of Uzbekistan's eight Olympic titles in Paris, its best Games yet; head coach Tulkin Kilichev suffered a cardiac arrest while celebrating one win and was revived by Britain's team doctor.

Oksana Chusovitina, who has competed at eight Olympic Games, represents Uzbekistan in which sport?

Artistic gymnastics: after a team title with the Unified Team in 1992 she competed for Germany, where her son was treated for leukaemia, then returned to Uzbekistan and was still vaulting at 46 in Tokyo.

Kurash, an Uzbek sport contested at the Asian Games since 2018, is a form of what?

Kurash is traditional wrestling fought on the feet: grabbing the legs is banned, and a single clean throw onto the back, called a halal, wins the bout outright.

What prompted Uzbekistan to declare independence in August 1991?

A failed coup in Moscow collapsed on 21 August 1991 and Uzbekistan declared independence ten days later, though it had not sought to leave: that March its voters had overwhelmingly backed keeping the Soviet Union.

The Savitsky Museum, famed for its hoard of banned Soviet avant-garde art, is in which city?

Nukus holds the Savitsky Museum, founded in 1966, where Igor Savitsky amassed thousands of banned Soviet avant-garde works far from Moscow's eye.

Which variety of Persian is the everyday language of many people in Uzbekistan's ancient oasis cities?

Tajik, the Central Asian form of Persian, is widely spoken in the old caravan cities; official figures count ethnic Tajiks at about 5% of Uzbekistan, while unofficial estimates run far higher.

Since 2008 Uzbekistan's Asaka car plant has built which American brand?

Chevrolet: the Asaka plant began in the 1990s as a venture with Korea's Daewoo, and when Daewoo went bankrupt and General Motors took it over, the Uzbek factory switched to GM's badge.