The surprising detour of the Silk Road, the world’s original superhighway

I arrived one morning last winter at the great blue-domed Chorsu Bazaar with the bleary disorientation of a man who’d just flown 11 hours into a strange city. Tashkent, Uzbekistan’s boisterous capital, was my entry point for a whistle-stop tour of a country I had dreamed about since my first dreary winter days growing up in Leningrad. Uzbekistan! As a child, I had pored over books about Central Asia. The combination of warm sun on desert sands and food that wasn’t boiled to death, as it was in my hometown, inspired an aching reverie. The cities in the photos bristled with turquoise minarets, architectural remnants of the 1,500-ish years that Central Asia spent as the world’s sunny crossroads, the hub of the fabled Silk Road network, carrying textiles, spices, technologies, and ideas between China and the Mediterranean.

Back then, during my childhood, Uzbekistan was part of the Soviet Union—a republic in the very country I lived in—but it might as well have existed on another planet. And for most of my adult life, it hasn’t felt much more accessible. After its independence, in 1991, the country spent the better part of 30 years nursing a post-Soviet hangover, rampant with surveillance and bureaucracy and largely unwelcoming to foreigners. Only in the past decade has it really begun to open up—which is maybe why it felt so surreal to sit through an Uzbekistan Airways safety video, watching a grinning, camel-mounted caravanner showing me how to tighten my seat belt and a rug merchant at an oasis bazaar demonstrating the proper fit of an oxygen mask.

Today Uzbekistan is in the middle of an aggressive tourism push, and to woo visitors, it’s leaning hard on the strongest brand it has: the Silk Road, that mutable, time-honored signifier of exotic adventure and cultural connection. The country is also undergoing a building boom—conspicuous, as I taxied around Tashkent, from the clutter of cranes and gleaming new high-rises. All across Uzbekistan, sprawling tourism developments are popping up that use Silk Road iconography as something like theme park fodder: Silk Road–themed hotels and restaurants and water parks set among showy replicas of tiled madrassas and brickwork caravansaries. Plenty of Central Asian countries could use the dollars, euros, and yuan that tourists bring, but no place is leveraging its Silk Road heritage as effectively as Uzbekistan, which suddenly boasts one of the world’s fastest growing tourism economies, receiving some 12 million international travelers last year, up from scarcely two million a decade ago. And the government of reformer president Shavkat Mirziyoyev wants 20 million by 2030—putting Uzbekistan on par with, say, the Netherlands, Morocco, or Vietnam.

Earlier this year, the Uzbek government stopped requiring U.S. citizens to obtain entry visas, formerly some of the most cumbersome and expensive to get in the post-Soviet states. The government has also subsidized a flurry of hotel construction and invested heavily in high-speed rail. Fast trains now link Tashkent to the triple crown of Uzbekistan’s Silk Road oasis cities: Samarkand, the jewel of the East, once an intellectual seat of the Islamic world and today full of preserved mosques and madrassas; Bukhara, in central Uzbekistan, a quieter mercantile hub with a labyrinthine old town and a burgeoning arts scene; and Khiva, to the arid west, where khans ruled a desert kingdom, now billed as a “living museum” for its UNESCO-protected walled fortress of Itchan Kala.

Each city is a few hours’ train ride from the next—journeys that once took merchant caravans days or weeks. And each is in a moment of flux, with ancient monuments to humanity’s first cosmopolitan ideals rubbing up against the modern trappings of commodity leisure.

One perverse yet positive effect of the Soviet Union’s economic stasis was that it preserved many cities, including my native Leningrad turned St. Petersburg, from intense modernization and overbuilding. With the Soviet era now a fading generational memory, I wanted to travel the route of those classic oasis cities to see whether the country I dreamed of as a child still existed in genuine form.

I chose Tashkent’s Chorsu Bazaar for my first stop, figuring few places could better capture, and perhaps demythologize, the spirit of the Silk Road. Its Soviet-era pavilion covers a site that’s been a market for perhaps 2,000 years, still delivering today what the Silk Road was always all about: trade. The silk and spices once trafficked along the route can still be found there—fragrant piles of saffron, turmeric, and the wild cumin called zira—but so can just about everything else. The food hall was awash in many kinds of creamy cheese, glistening livers, and kazi, an absolutely delicious horse sausage. Women of Koryo-saram heritage—descendants of Koreans that Stalin deported to Uzbekistan for the usual paranoid Stalinist reasons—hawked tubs of morkovcha, a garlicky Korean-style carrot salad that qualifies as the best use of carrots in culinary history. On a more Silk Road-y note, I found carpets and daggers for sale, right alongside Winnie the Pooh–branded local honey and many, possibly too many, roach-killing products.

What made the khanates of medieval Uzbekistan great and their cultural and architectural legacy in need of our protection? The inability of any one nation to create a full range of products, the need for roach-killing potions and garlic-carrot salads to traverse the wide steppe and make life more livable for everyone along the way. Today, for under a dollar, you can buy a cup of coffee and a delicious meat pastry at the Chorsu—travelers take note, the food in Uzbekistan might as well be free—and get jostled by men running around with cow heads on their shoulders, who will put a hand to their heart in apology after they almost knock you over.

The word chorsu, by the way, comes from a Persian term for “crossroads”—a name given to the site back when crossroads were fewer and farther between, before a bullet train could rocket you in hours to another oasis waiting around the bend.

The next morning, I got on the Afrosiyob high-speed train, named for an ancient settlement of early Silk Road merchants, and rode beyond the suburbs of Tashkent. Outside, an occasional cow puttered in a daze around the bleak postindustrial landscape the Uzbeks inherited from Soviet rule. Inside, I was plied with strawberries and ice cream and free Wi-Fi.

The rail corridor was once a small part of the vast, shifting lattice of routes that we now call the Silk Road, which branched and rejoined one another for thousands of miles between China and Europe. From the second century B.C. until the late 15th century A.D. and the dawn of the age of sail, caravans navigated these corridors, adjusting their itineraries as politics, weather, and business needs demanded. Empires like the Hans and the Romans anchored either end, but trade goods moved through intermediaries and middlemen all across Eurasia—and with them, of course, philosophies, arts, myths, and religions. The interconnected planet we now live on, where countless strands of commerce and culture connect Topeka to Taipei? The Silk Road was its prototype.

For a millennium and a half, the Uzbeks had visitors from much of the world wandering through their cities, and I got the sense from their warmth and eagerness that a lot are delighted to have a slew of new visitors to chat up. I was glad to speak fluent Russian, a language still much in use in Uzbekistan (much less so English), and to meet so many Uzbeks who’ve worked in St. Petersburg or who have family in New York, where I’ve lived since 1979. When I arrived in Samarkand, a city of about 600,000, my taxi driver politely asked if I earned more than $5,000 a month in New York and was genuinely happy for me when I answered in the affirmative. “Very good,” he said, before asking whether the sheep in my part of the world had, as he had heard, curly tails.

Walking the streets of Samarkand’s old town, I began to suspect that every building I passed, no matter how humble, dreamed of growing up to become a boutique hotel. They were everywhere. The one I stayed in was exceptionally tasteful, its rooftop affording a great view of Samarkand’s most famous landmark, the Registan. If you have seen photos of Uzbekistan, you have probably seen the mighty blue-green-yellow portals of the three madrassas that flank this famed public square, impossibly ornate gateways into the academies that once made Samarkand the Oxford of the East. The oldest was built in the 15th century by the scholar-king Ulugh Beg, a mathematician and astronomer who ushered in an era of flourishing Islamic art and science (his restored observatory, across town, attracted scholars from all over Asia). The others went up in the 17th century to complement it.

Today all three are preserved exhibit spaces, and I spent hours ogling the geometric patterns of their glazed ceramic tiles. First they drew in the eye, and then the intellect followed: Were these stars or fractals or other kinds of geometries? The buildings rippled with three-dimensionality, with nooks and alcoves everywhere. There is no Islamic architecture, or any other architecture, quite like this, and even a jaded traveler like myself felt blessed to be there in the depth of winter, sharing the space with only a few forlorn tour guides and a handful of Japanese visitors who’d braved the cold and were now alone with their sense of wonder.

The main sights of Samarkand are spread out, so that one walks between them through quieter parts of the city, full of Soviet-era buildings. Outside restaurants, men stand at sizzling cauldrons called kazans, mixing the afternoon plov—a rice dish of such aromatic intensity that I have swooned at its rich currents of onion, garlic, carrot, and mutton steaming off of a plate.

Perhaps the most beautiful site in Samarkand is the Gur-e-Amir, a cascading complex of mausoleums where Ulugh Beg is buried, along with his less nerdy and more bloodthirsty grandfather, Timur. An Uzbek national hero (better known as Tamerlane in the West), Timur conquered and ruled a territory that extended across Central Asia and modern-day Afghanistan and Iran, and he built Samarkand into his splendid capital. The mausoleums’ ceilings and domes, covered in tessellated tiles that form polygon patterns of mind-boggling intricacy, show how science and architectural know-how and a sublime set of aesthetics went hand in hand in the Timurid era. I left with a crick in my neck and a phone full of images I’ll never erase.

This spring, the Uzbek government announced plans for a new Silk Road Museum a few blocks from the Gur-e-Amir, showcasing archaeological finds, traditional crafts, and more on a 22-acre campus—roughly the size of New York’s sprawling American Museum of Natural History. But it’s not the only new, gargantuan Silk Road–themed project in Samarkand, and after a couple of days exploring the city’s historic sites, I hopped a taxi to Silk Road Samarkand, a four-year-old $580 million resort development on the eastern edge of town.

I’d heard about the place weeks before from historian Svetlana Gorshenina, an Uzbek expat at France’s National Center for Scientific Research and co-founder of a preservation group called Alerte Héritage. She described, with some bemusement, what the resort bills as the Eternal City complex, a replica Silk Road oasis town made up of restaurants, boutiques, and performance spaces, all designed to look like the Timurid buildings back in the city center. “Very beautiful, but not real,” Gorshenina told me, lamenting that the funds to build it might have been used for upkeep of actual historic structures.

My taxi driver took me past Samarkand’s city limits, to a checkpoint staffed by a bored-looking guard. The Eternal City is built alongside a large rectangular canal, with several skyscraper hotels towering overhead. It was eerily quiet on my winter visit, but during the summer season, boats evidently ply the canal between the Hilton and the 18 waterslides of Silk Road Waterland.

The place was strange in a David Lynchian kind of way, dreamlike and disquieting. After seeing the Registan and the Gur-e-Amir, the patina and age and soulful wear on their ceramic tiles, it felt absurd to walk among the shiny and lifeless re-creations of the same. Who would want to come here? I wondered. But the waitress at the cavernous and entirely empty restaurant (the passing staff looked almost concerned to see me) told me the Eternal City is full of tourists during the warmer months. I walked to the silent water park, past the go-kart track and the closed Quran Museum, wondering what it would be like to stay at the top of that Hilton, so far from the sound of stray dogs and the muezzin’s call to prayer, without which I would not want to wake up in Samarkand.

All countries have their mythologies to sell: The United States has its cowboys, Spain its bullfighting, and Germany its wurst. It’s only natural that a developing country like Uzbekistan should harness its heritage by slapping the phrase “Silk Road” and the outline of trekking camels onto everything from passenger trains to shopping malls in order to entice moneyed tourists. “After the collapse of the Soviet Union, all the countries are trying to find their national identity,” Gorshenina had told me. What worries her are projects that seem so determined to exploit the Silk Road mystique, they threaten the character of their centuries-old surroundings.

One place where her organization has sounded some alarm is Bukhara, another storied oasis city, half Samarkand’s size and two hours west on the Afrosiyob. Bukhara’s compact old town is more cohesive than Samarkand’s. Fewer modern buildings interrupt its low-slung historic ones, which cluster along slim alleyways that can barely hold one-way car traffic, much less the vehicular free-for-all that nearly did me in during my first nighttime foray. Data does not roam these streets—my phone was wonderfully useless. The fifth-century Ark of Bukhara is the Platonic ideal of a fortress, its undulating walls recalling sand dunes, its interior a city-within-a-city-within-a-city, full of courtyards where emirs once received dignitaries. Nearby, the Kalon Mosque is one of Central Asia’s largest, with room for some 10,000 worshippers, and its 150-foot brick minaret is so impressive that even Genghis Khan couldn’t make himself tear it down during his plunder of the city.

And let us not forget the plov, more layered and fragrant than any I’d had so far. (“We use five types of oil and yellow and orange carrots,” one proud waiter told me.)

But Bukhara’s old town also had the feel of a place in transition. I spotted a seemingly endless array of “Building for Sale” signs, in Russian, as if all the locals are in the process of cashing out their dwellings. And along the old town’s edge was a massive construction zone for a tourism development called Eternal Bukhara. I strolled along its substantial fenced perimeter, which begins right where the UNESCO-protected old city ends—a point of contention for Gorshenina’s group, which has appealed to UNESCO and the Uzbek government to intervene. According to Uzbekistan’s state news agency, Eternal Bukhara will be a “historical and ethnographic park” with hotels, replica historic architecture, cafés, and an arcade full of folk artists around a musical fountain. According to what appeared to be AI-generated banners surrounding the site, it will be filled with sad-looking, sandy-haired men lifting small weights on exercise platforms outside glossy residential palaces.

And yet, Bukhara—for the moment and perhaps only for the moment—felt like my childhood dream of Uzbekistan fulfilled. In one old-town square, I found a statue of a character from a Soviet-era novel I’d loved as a kid: Hodja Nasreddin, with his beloved donkey. He’s a wise fool character, a Silk Road–era folk hero across the Muslim world, and in The Tale of Hodja Nasreddin: Disturber of the Peace, he’d used his wit and smarts to overcome all sorts of villains and calamities in his native city of Bukhara. I petted the ears of Nasreddin’s donkey and thought of myself as an asthmatic child in a crumbling Soviet apartment, wishing to be in exactly this spot. Then I retired to a nearby restaurant and had the juiciest lamb kebab of my life.

But not until I arrived in Khiva, some 250 miles farther west, did I genuinely feel like I’d time traveled. I rode a Soviet-era sleeper seven hours across the Qizilqum Desert (although a new high-speed electric train cuts the journey nearly in half). After pulling into Khiva’s gleaming train station, I headed almost straight to Itchan Kala, the city’s walled UNESCO World Heritage site and one of the planet’s most glorious examples of historic Islamic architecture.

Itchan Kala’s 30-foot brick walls surround 64 acres of preserved and restored monuments and dwellings, a site where caravans once rested before launching desert treks east to Bukhara or south to ancient Persia. The oldest structures date to the 14th century, but the city was built primarily in the 18th and 19th centuries by the khans of the Kungrad dynasty, a refined aristocracy of warrior kings. It’s less a bustling old-town district, in the way of Samarkand or Bukhara, and more an open-air museum. During the Soviet era, the government relocated many of the walled city’s residents to preserve Itchan Kala as a historic site. Today 300 or so remaining families live in a quiet, all but car-free zone where time seems to stand still.

In its tourist-free winter silence, Itchan Kala was perfect—sunny and arid and romantic, like Santa Fe with minarets instead of bell towers. I gazed up at the perfect, squat form of Kalta Minor, a minaret built in the 1850s but famously unfinished, known for its striking turquoise tiles. For a whole hour, I sat inside the baroquely patterned mausoleum of an ancient poet-wrestler and just let my heart sing. I ate shivit oshi, a local specialty of dill-infused noodles, topped with beef stew, that were as soft as cotton and as flavorful as hell.

Quasi museum though it may be, Itchan Kala still showed signs of life, even in the quiet of the offseason: schoolkids wandering with backpacks in the early morning light, socks set out to dry outside a lovely, tiny mosque. Later that week, I talked to Lola Mirzaeva, a tourism industry veteran who runs the fancy Farovon Khiva Hotel, outside Itchan Kala’s walls. The site occupies a gray area between a community and a historic attraction, she said. “People still live there,” Mirzaeva told me. “They make the bread. The kids are running there. It is like a staged performance, but it is real life.”

And Mirzaeva told me something else, about—you guessed it—a huge new tourism complex that opened last year on the outskirts of town. Arda Khiva, as it’s called, isn’t related to Silk Road Samarkand or Eternal Bukhara, but it is cut from the same cloth, with faux Silk Road architecture, gondola rides, 17 hotels, five movie theaters, and all the rest. The thing is, Mirzaeva said, plenty of locals seem to appreciate the place, with families visiting as if it’s a theme park.

And so, of course, I went. I passed by a replica of Kalta Minor that felt bland and off, the colors not quite right, not yet tempered by time. I saw gondolas piled woefully atop one another, awaiting the return of the tourists in the spring. But I also saw, there in the offseason, what I could only presume to be Khivans walking through the silent grounds: holding hands, scanning the closed shops, crossing fake bridges over the fake canal. Who knows what people want, I thought. Or need.

My last stop in Khiva was the Nurullaboy Palace, built by one of the region’s last khans after he’d visited St. Petersburg and come away inspired by the architecture of my birthplace. The palace is full of beautifully carved wood and elaborate plasterwork, and unlike, say, Arda Khiva, it struck me as being both over-the-top and tasteful. It was completed in 1912, at a significant cost to the khanate—which would fall to the Soviets all of eight years later, the grand palace becoming a mere government administration building.

It’s hard to know what will endure. Crossroads come and go. But Uzbekistan’s Silk Road cities—undertaking the big, messy project of welcoming the world again—are proof that a place can keep accruing beauty long past its heyday. Right now, they remain in a near perfect balance: newly accessible, still enchanting. Wise old Hodja Nasreddin could come plodding through on his donkey and still recognize them. What the future holds, not even he would know.