The Haunted Place

Once the cradle of ancient civilisations, Central Asia was also home to several bustling trade cities. Today, travelling through them reawakens a distant, though not forgotten, past — and reveals a land still coming to terms with its own dazzling history.

- Aatish Taseer

It was october in Tashkent. The broad Soviet-style avenues of Uzbekistan’s capital were lined with chestnut and Oriental plane, their leaves turning russet in the crisp autumn air. This city of 2.5 million had, in Soviet days, which lasted from the 1920s until the country’s independence in 1991, been the premier capital of Central Asia. It is home to more than half of Uzbekistan’s 116 universities, and on that first golden morning in Tashkent, there was something of the glazed perfection of a Soviet propaganda poster in the sight of students in twos and threes strolling down the runway-size avenues. They were dwarfed by the giant buildings that lined the roads — banks, museums and ministries — “Babylonian blocks,” as the English writer Philip Glazebrook, who had been in Tashkent at the end of Soviet rule, described them in “Journey to Khiva” in the early ’90s: “Since the days of Nineveh this has been the architecture of dictatorship and persecution.” And so it was, but after my late arrival on the Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul, I found myself oddly in sympathy with the ideal, if not the reality, of Soviet life.

Four great creeds — Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Islam and Communism — had come via the trans-Asian caravan routes, or the Silk Road, to the land encapsulated by what is modern Uzbekistan. Each had made the people of this doubly landlocked country — one of only two, the other being Liechtenstein — of 34 million part of a greater world, a cosmopolis, a comity of nations. This was a land whose culture had been created on the frontier of contact with China, India, Iran and Russia, each of which fertilised the culture of the steppe. Communism was the last ideology to come to Uzbekistan along these routes, and I could not help but admire the scale and ambition of its artifacts.