Roots and Return

Tashkent means Stone City, and it is older than most capitals of Europe. Today you stand before the Uthman Quran, written in the first decades of Islam — one full minute, no phones, just looking. At the Centre of Islamic Civilisation you meet three names you may already carry without knowing they were from here: al-Bukhari, at-Termiziy, and al-Khorazmiy, whose name became the word algorithm. The afternoon is Chorsu bazaar; the evening is plov at Beshqozon, where osh is not dinner but a ceremony of welcome.

Temur built an empire with the sword; his grandson Ulugbek measured the stars — hold both this week, because both belong to this story. The Timurid museum kept short and story-led, the metro that is secretly one of the country's finest art galleries, and lunch with Tashkent university students your own age: not guides, simply young people living the life you might one day live here. Then rest through the heat, and Magic City in the evening, because Uzbekistan is also this.

Alexander said everything he had heard of Samarkand was true, except it was more beautiful than he had imagined; the morning high-speed train would have amazed him. Jumma prayer at Hazrati Khizr, its terrace open over the whole old city. Gur-Emir and the tomb-opening legend of 1941 for after dark. The Registan as the tiles turn from blue to fire. And one hot loaf each at Siab bazaar — Samarkand bread that famously will not go stale, because the secret, they say, is the air and water of the city itself.

A king who measured the stars, and paper made by your own hands beside a stream. Shahi Zinda at opening time, before the crowds and the heat — go slowly, read the names. Then Konigil, where you beat, press and dry your own sheet of Samarkand silk paper to carry home. Late afternoon at Ulugbek's observatory, where the marble arc of his great sextant is still aimed at the sky he mapped more accurately than anyone would for a hundred and fifty years.

Bukhara does not perform for visitors. It simply carries on being seven hundred years old. Uzbeks call it Bukhoroi Sharif, Noble Bukhara; for a thousand years it was one of the great centres of Islamic learning, and al-Bukhari, whose name you met on Day 1, was born here. The train crosses the steppe in ninety minutes; the afternoon is for wandering the domed toqs and the alleys where children play football against medieval walls; sunset belongs to Poi Kalon.

Today you make something with your own hands and carry it home. The Ark fortress, older than Islam itself, and beside the Samanid mausoleum the spring of the prophet Ayub, whose staff the story says struck this ground and brought sweet water to a thirsty city. Then the puppet workshop, where you paint and dress a Bukharan puppet to keep. Some learning is done with the head. The best is done with the hands.

Legend says Khiva began when Shem, son of Noah, dug a well in the desert, and travellers who tasted it cried khey vakh — what sweet water — and a city grew around the word. The desert train arrives by early afternoon; as the heat eases you enter Ichan Qala: the Kalta Minor, the cool dim forest of the Juma Mosque's 213 carved pillars, some a thousand years old, and the Islom Xoja minaret for those with the legs and the nerve.

You end where Bobur was born — a boy who became a king at twelve, won and lost Samarkand twice, and built the Mughal Empire, yet wept in all his Indian palaces remembering the melons of this valley. He travelled away from this land and never came home. You are travelling the other way. A dawn circuit of Khiva's walls in the only cool hour, the flight east into the greenest corner of Uzbekistan, the Bobur house museum, and a farewell dinner where the journey is read back and the certificates are given. They were earned.