Tashkent

Tashkent's defining experience is its metro. Built in the Soviet era over notoriously difficult, earthquake-prone ground, each station was conceived as a separate architectural set piece — marble columns, carved ganch plaster, chandeliers and mosaics on themes from cosmonauts to Uzbek poets — and because the system doubled as a civil-defence structure, photography was banned until 2018, which is partly why the stations feel so pristine. Riding a few stops purely to see them, Kosmonavtlar and Alisher Navoi among the finest, is one of the best-value hours in the city. Above ground, the metro tells the wider story of Tashkent: the 1966 earthquake that destroyed much of the old low-rise town, the sweeping Soviet reconstruction of wide avenues and parks that followed, and the glassy new districts of the independence era layered on top.

For all its modernity, Tashkent keeps a working old quarter around the Chorsu bazaar, the city's oldest and liveliest market, sheltered under a vast turquoise-tiled dome and spilling into the surrounding lanes. Inside and around it, farmers and traders sell mounded spices, dried fruit and nuts, the stamped non bread of the capital, and everything from butchered meat to household goods, and it is the best place to feel the ordinary life of the city. The streets nearby, part of the surviving old town of mahalla neighbourhoods and low courtyard houses, give a glimpse of the pre-earthquake Tashkent that the wide Soviet boulevards elsewhere replaced.

The spiritual heart of Tashkent is the Khast-Imam complex, a square of madrasas, mosques and a mausoleum on the north-western edge of the old town, and its treasure is one of the most important objects in the country: an early Quran traditionally attributed to the seventh-century Caliph Uthman and held to be among the oldest in the world, kept in a small library on the site. Alongside it stand the Barak-Khan Madrasa and the Hazrati Imam Friday Mosque, whose tall minarets and blue domes make the complex the closest Tashkent comes to the monumental skylines of Samarkand and Bukhara. It is a calm, active religious precinct rather than a museum, and worth an unhurried visit.

The modern centre rewards a wander: the ceremonial Amir Timur Square, ringed by grand public buildings and centred on a statue of Uzbekistan's national figurehead; the excellent Museum of Applied Arts, set in a beautifully decorated former mansion and showing the country's ceramics, suzani and woodwork under one roof; and the State Museum of History for a broader sweep from the Bactrian past onward. Beyond sightseeing, Tashkent's real role is as the country's front door — home to the main international airport and the hub from which the Afrosiyob fast trains fan out to Samarkand, Bukhara and beyond — so the city bookends most itineraries, with the logistics of arrival and onward travel handled in the getting-around guide.