Tashkent's museums: Soviet history, Islamic art and ancient civilisations

Tashkent’s Museum of Memory of Victims of Repression occupies a building that until 1991 was, literally, a barracks of the NKVD — the Soviet secret police precursor to the KGB — where political prisoners were tortured. The geographical irony is part of the message: the museum exists in the same space where what it documents occurred. The panels about the deportation of Kazakhs, Koreans and Crimean Tatars to Uzbekistan in the 1940s, the files from those tried in the Tashkent show trials of the 1930s, the execution counts: all of it exhibited in a former building of repression that the post-Soviet Uzbek state decided to convert into a memorial.

That a country of Soviet heritage has that museum says something about the historical review process Uzbekistan has undertaken at varying pace and depth since independence. It is not the only Tashkent museum worth attention, but it is the most unusual.

The State History Museum of Uzbekistan

The most comprehensive museum in the capital in terms of collection is the State History Museum, with a collection spanning the Bronze Age to the twentieth century. Its strengths are the Greco-Bactrian objects — coins, sculptures, jewellery from the period when northern India and Central Asia were under Greek influence after Alexander — and the Sogdian treasures, including high-quality reproductions of the Afrasiab frescoes whose reproductions allow the iconography to be seen with a clarity that the smaller, less well-lit Afrasiab museum does not always achieve.

The section that most surprises visitors who are not prepared for it is that of early Islam: the ceramics of the eighth to twelfth centuries, when Central Asia was the intellectual centre of the Islamic world, display a sophistication that disproves the cliché of a peripheral region. The mathematicians Al-Khwarizmi (from whose name the word “algorithm” derives) and Al-Biruni, the philosopher Ibn Sina (Avicenna): all of them were born in the territory that is today Uzbekistan or worked at the courts of its cities. The museum has objects from that period that make this intellectual history tangible.

The Applied Arts Museum

Installed in the former residence that Russian diplomat Alexander Polovtsev had built at the beginning of the twentieth century in pseudo-Islamic style — with a carved wooden iwan in the central courtyard that is one of Tashkent’s most beautiful spaces — the Applied Arts Museum has a collection of Uzbek craftsmanship that is the best introduction to the country’s visual vocabulary: suzani (silk embroideries), Rishtan and Gijduvan ceramics, musical instruments, metalwork, textiles.

The museum’s particular quality is the building itself: the carved wooden iwan, the interior rooms with their niches and tiles, the domestic scale of the Russian-Oriental architecture that Polovtsev commissioned from local craftspeople, creates a context for the exhibited objects that no conventional museum case can offer. Seeing a nineteenth-century suzani on the wall of a room that has the same carved woodwork that framed that textile in its original home is a considerable difference from seeing it in a glass box.

The Hazrat Imam complex

Technically, Hazrat Imam — or Khast Imom — is not a museum but an active religious complex: the Barak Khan madrasa, the Friday mosque and several tombs of religious figures. But within it is preserved one of the most extraordinary objects that can be seen in Uzbekistan: the Quran of Caliph Uthman, Islam’s third caliph, which according to tradition was the first standardised copy of the Quranic text, written in Kufic script on animal skin in the seventh century, and bearing stains that tradition attributes to Uthman’s own blood — he was murdered while reading it.

The manuscript — or more precisely, the pages that survive; the original complete copy dispersed in the fourteenth century with fragments in several countries — is displayed in a special room. The scale of the text, written in monumental vowelless Kufic Arabic, has a physical presence that facsimiles and photographs do not convey. There is something about seeing a book that is fourteen hundred years old and has been the object of pilgrimage by believers throughout that entire time that shifts one’s frame of reference.

How to organise the museum visit

Tashkent’s museums can be comfortably visited in a day and a half. The most practical sequence is to begin at the History Museum (two hours, first morning), continue to the Applied Arts Museum (one hour, for its architectural interest as much as the collection), visit Hazrat Imam at the end of the morning when the mosque is less active, and reserve the Repression Museum for the afternoon, when the daylight entering through the windows creates a backlit quality over the documents that seems somehow appropriate to the subject.

Entry prices are low — between three and eight dollars per museum — and several allow photography for an additional charge. Tashkent’s museums are not, as a group, the most spectacular in Central Asia: that distinction belongs to Samarkand. But they are the best intellectual preparation for understanding what you will see in the rest of the journey.

The complete Far Guides Uzbekistan guide includes detailed Silk Road routes, interactive maps and all the practical information you need to plan your independent trip.