Uzbekistan cities

Bukhara Airport

The M37 highway connects the city to most of the major cities in Turkmenistan including Ashgabat.

Demographics

The population of the city mainly consists of Persian-speaking Tajiks. Along with Samarkand, Bukhara is one of the two major centres of Central Asia's Tajik population, even though both cities are located outside of modern Tajikistan.

Until the 20th century, Bukhara was also home to the Bukharian Jews, whose ancestors settled in the city during Roman times. Most Bukharian Jews left Bukhara between 1925 and 2000 and resettled in Israel.

Poetry and literature

Being a cultural magnet, Bukhara has long appeared in much local and Persian literature. Many examples can be sought.
ای بخارا شاد باش و دیر زی

Oh Bukhara! Be joyous and live long!

شاه زی تو میهمان آید همی

Your King comes to you in ceremony.

---Rudaki

Dehkhoda defines the name Bukhara itself as meaning "full of knowledge", referring to the fact that in antiquity, Bukhara was a scientific and scholarship powerhouse. Rumi verifies this when he praises the city as such:

آن بخارا معدن دانش بود

"Bukhara was a mine of knowledge,

پس بخاراییست هرک آنش بود

Of Bukhara is he who possesses knowledge."

In the Italian romantic epic Orlando innamorato by Matteo Maria Boiardo, Bukhara is called Albracca and described as a major city of Cathay. There, within its walled city and fortress, Angelica and the knights she has befriended make their stand when attacked by Agrican, emperor of Tartary. As described, this siege by Agrican resembles the historic siege by Genghis Khan in 1220.
Fergana
Coordinates: 40°23′11″N 71°47′11″EFergana (Uzbek: Farg'ona/Фарғона; Persian: فرغانه Farghāneh; Russian: Фергана́) is a city (population: 214,000), the capital of Fergana

Province in eastern Uzbekistan, at the southern edge of the Fergana Valley in southern Central Asia, cutting across the borders of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Fergana is about 420 km east of Tashkent, and about 75 km west of Andijan.

History

The fertile Fergana Valley was an important conduit on the Silk Roads (more precisely the North Silk Road), which connected the ancient Chinese capital of Xi'an to the west over the Wushao Ling Mountain Pass to Wuwei and emerging in Kashgar before linking to ancient Parthia, or on to the north of the Aral and Caspian Seas to ports on the Black Sea.

The ancient kingdom referred to as Dayuan (大宛, "Great Yuan", literally "Great Ionians") in the Chinese chronicles is now generally accepted as being in the Ferghana Valley. It is sometimes, though less commonly, written as Dawan (大宛) Dayuan were Greeks, the descendants of the Greek colonists that were settled by Alexander the Great in Ferghana in 329 BCE, and prospered within the Hellenistic realm of the Seleucids and Greco-Bactrians, until they were isolated by the migrations of the Yuezhi around 160 BCE. It has been suggested that the name "Yuan" was simply a transliteration of the words “Yona”, or “Yavana”, used throughout antiquity in Asia to designate Greeks (“Ionians”). Their capital was Alexandria Eschate.

The earliest Chinese visitor was the ambassador Zhang Qian, who passed through on his way to visit the Da Yuezhi or 'Great Yuezhi' c. 127/126 BCE. The Shiji, Chap. 123 says:

Dayuan lies southwest of the territory of the Xiongnu, some 10,000 li [4,158 km] directly west of China. The people are also settled on the land, plowing the fields and growing rice and wheat. They also make wine out of grapes. The region has many fine horses which sweat blood;[apparently due to skin parasites which caused sores] their forebears are supposed to have been foaled from heavenly horses. The people live in houses in fortified cities, there being some seventy or more cities of various sizes in the region.
The population numbers several hundred thousand. The people fight with bows and spears and can shoot from horseback. Dayuan is bordered on the north by Kangju, on the west by the kingdom of the Great Yuezhi, on the southwest by Daxia (Bactria), on the northeast by the land of the Wusun, and on the east by Yumi (Keriya) and Yutian (Khotan)."

Da Yuan appears as a powerful state in both the Shiji and the Hanshu. However, after Xian, king of Yarkand, conquered it about the middle of the 1st century CE, it gradually lost importance. The Hou Hanshu adds that Da Yuan sent tribute and offerings to the Chinese court in 130 CE along with Kashgar and Yarkand. After that, it is referred to as Liyi 栗弋 (preferably read Suyi 粟弋), and is specifically stated to be a dependency of Kangju.

By the time of the Weilüe (in the 3rd century CE), the old capital, Alexandria Eschate (modern Khujand), had become a separate kingdom called 'Northern Wuyi.'

Zoroastrian literature identifies the area as the Zoroastrian homeland. Fergana also played a central role in the history of the Mughal dynasty of South Asia in that Omar Sheikh Mirza, chieftain of Farghana, was the father of Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur (1483–1530), founder of the Mughal dynasty in India. At Mirza's death in 1498, Babur became chief, although he was still a minor.

During the expansion of Russia in the nineteenth century the Russians invaded Turkistan, gradually taking it over between 1855 and 1884. They took the capital of the Kokand Khanate in 1873 and included it within what was named the Fergana province of the Russian empire.
Modern Fergana city was founded in 1876 as a garrison town and colonial appendage to Margelan (13.5 miles to the northwest) by the Russians. It was initially named New Margelan (Новый Маргелан), then renamed Skobelev (Скобелев) in 1910 after the first Russian military governor of Fergana Valley. In 1924, after the Bolshevik reconquest of the region in 1918–1920, the name was changed to Fergana, after the province of which it was the centre. The Fergana canal was constructed in the 1930s.

Architecture

Fergana’s wide, orderly tree-shaded avenues and attractive blue-washed 19th century tsarist colonial-style houses are said to mimic the appearance of pre-modern and pre-earthquake Tashkent. There is a high proportion of Russian, Soviet Koreans and Tatar inhabitants compared to other Fergana Valley cities. With Russian as the primary language, the city has a distinctly different feel from most Uzbek cities. It retains an air of Soviet-era, pre-independence Uzbekistan.

Main sights

Museum of Local Studies – with displays of natural history, photographs, and local handicrafts

Regional Theatre – in 1877 the house of General Mikhail “Old Bloody Eyes” Skobelev

Oil production

Fergana Airport.

Fergana has been a center for oil production in the Fergana Valley since the region's first oil refinery was built near the city in 1908. Since then, more refineries have been added, and Fergana is one of the most important centers of oil refining in Uzbekistan. Natural gas from western Uzbekistan is transported by pipeline to the valley, where it is used to manufacture fertilizer. The Great Fergana Canal, built almost entirely by hand during the 1930s, passes through the northern part of the city and completed in 1939. During its construction, the canal and the city was widely photographed by the noted photographer Max Penson. With a western loan Fergana is able to modernize its refinery and also reduce air pollution emissions.

Guliston
Guliston also spelled as Gulistan (Uzbek: Guliston / Гулистoн; Russian: Гулистан), formerly known as Mirzachul (Russian: Мирзачуль, until 1961), is the capital of Sirdarya Province in eastern Uzbekistan. It lies in the southeastern part of the Mirzachül (formerly Golodnaya) steppe, 75 miles (120 km) southwest of Tashkent. It has an approx. population of 53,745. The main industry in the area is cottonpicking.

Jizzakh

Djizak or Dzhizak (Uzbek: Jizzax / Жиззах; Russian: Джизак) is a city (population 138,400 in 2004) and the center of Jizzakh Province in Uzbekistan, northeast of Samarkand.

Jizzakh was an important Silk Road junction on the road connecting Samarkand with Fergana Valley. It is at the edge of Golodnaya Steppe, and next to the strategic Pass of Jilanuti (Timur's Gate) in the Turkestan Mountains, controlling the approach to the Zeravshan Valley, Samarkand and Bukhara.
The name Jizzakh derives from the Sogdian word for "small fort" and the present city is built of the site of the Sogdian town of Osrūshana. After the Arab conquest of Sogdiana, Jizzakh served as a market town between the nomadic raiders and settled farmers. The Arabs built a series of rabats (blockhouses) at Jizzakh, housing ghazis to protect the people. By the 19th century, these blockhouses had evolved into a major fortress for the Emirate of Bukhara. Russian General Mikhail Chernyayev, the “Lion of Tashkent” failed in his first attempt to take Jizzakh, but succeed in his second try, with a loss of 6 men, against 6000 dead for the defenders. The old town was mostly destroyed, its remaining inhabitants evicted, and Russian settlers brought in.

In 1916, Jizzakh was the center of an anti-Russian uprising, which was quickly suppressed. In 1917, Jizzakh most famous native son, Sharof Rashidov, future secretary of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan, was born.

Modern Jizzakh is quietly tree-lined European, with almost nothing remaining of the pre-Rashidov era. The city has two universities, with a total of approximately 7,000 students, and is home to a football team, Sogdiana Jizak, which plays in the Uzbek League (Oliy Liga).
Namangan
Namangan (Uzbek: Namangan / Наманган; Russian: Наманган) is the third-largest city in Uzbekistan (2006 pop. 432,456.). It is the capital of Namangan Province, in the northern edge of Fergana Valley of north-eastern Uzbekistan.