Introduction
The Fergana Valley is a broad, fertile bowl in the far east of Uzbekistan, ringed by the mountains of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and reached over the Kamchik Pass from Tashkent. The most densely populated and traditional part of the country, it is Uzbekistan's craft and agricultural heartland — silk, ceramics, orchards and a conservative, deeply rooted rural culture — with the city of Fergana at its centre and the historic towns of Kokand, Margilan, Rishtan and Andijan spread across the valley floor.
Overview
The Fergana Valley is where travellers go to see a more traditional, workaday Uzbekistan away from the monument circuit, and its most famous craft — the silk and ikat weaving of Margilan — has its own page as the Margilan ikat workshops; this page is the wider valley around it. Kokand, once the seat of a powerful khanate, holds the valley's grandest monument in the restored Khan's Palace, along with old mosques and madrasas that recall its 19th-century heyday. Rishtan, a modest town between the cities, is the country's ceramic capital, its potters known for a distinctive turquoise-and-green glaze quite separate from the silk tradition. Andijan, at the eastern end, is remembered as the birthplace of Babur, the founder of the Mughal dynasty in India. Threading between them is the real texture of the valley: bazaars piled with the apricots, cherries, pomegranates and melons that make Fergana the country's fruit basket, and a rural pace and conservatism distinct from the tourist-facing Silk Road cities. It is the least-visited corner of the standard map, and the most everyday.
Discover Fergana
Kokand was, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the seat of one of Central Asia's most powerful states, the Khanate of Kokand, and it wears that history more visibly than anywhere else in the valley. Its centrepiece is the Khan's Palace, the Urda — a broad, richly tiled and painted 19th-century residence, much of it restored, that gives a sense of the wealth and ceremony of the khanate at its height. Around the town stand old mosques, madrasas and the necropolis of the khans, and a walk through the centre, quieter and less polished than the great Silk Road cities, is a step into a different chapter of Uzbek history — one that ended only with the Russian conquest. Kokand makes the natural western gateway to a tour of the valley.
Ways to Experience This Destination
The Khan's Palace and old mosques of a former Central Asian capital, the valley's grandest monuments.
The turquoise-and-green pottery tradition worked in family kilns, the valley's craft counterpart to Margilan silk.
Babur's birthplace and the fruit-basket agriculture and traditional rural life of the eastern valley.
Frequently asked questions
This overview comes from Visaja's worldwide missions database (visaja.com), checked against official government sources; for binding answers, the mission itself always has the final word.