Day 10 - Tashkent

Our first point of call is the Khast Imom religious centre, where the main museum holds an original of the last ancient Quran in the world, the Osman Quran, dating back to the 7^th century. It’s an impressive tome, about  1 ½ metres wide when open and written in beautiful Arabic calligraphy (I couldn’t help but think whether in some strange way kufic script was derived from hieroglyphs!). The museum also houses other ancient and beautifully decorated hand-written Qurans, graced with colourful red, gold and blue motifs along the margins, and dating back to the 12^th-13^th centuries.

We meander through the lanes of the old town and revisit the bustling Chorsu Bazaar, before heading for the more modern part of town, to the Amir Timur and Mustaquillik Maydoni, an area characterised by President Kharimov’s wide avenues, squares and giant, white-washed, palatial buildings, standing next to exemplars of Russian architecture sometimes good (the beginning of the 19^th century Romanov Palace), sometimes really bad (the Soviet architecture of the Hotel Uzbekistan).

For the rest of the day we enjoy the company of a very bright and interesting young Uzbek man, a friend of a friend in London, who takes us to the city’s newest mosque, financed in part by the Uzbek Russian oligarch Usmanov, to the modern version of an Uzbek bazaar (where a startled fruit seller says ‘seriozna?’ - seriously? in Russian – when my friend Sejal says she’s from ‘Anglia’ – England , followed by all of us bursting into laughter as it is obvious that he also thinks she’s a Bollywood movie star) and end the day in a Chaykhaneh for a snack and pot of green tea and later in a Kyrgiz restaurant called Manas for dinner in a ‘yurt’ (a nomad tent). We really enjoy talking to him and he helps us fill in some of the ‘blanks’ we had in better understanding his country.

It has been a really special holiday. Following my visits to Iran and Georgia, the Uzbek adventure has yet again confirmed that Central Asia is a region of the world I want to learn more about. Watch this space…;-) I’ll be back.