On 25 April 1966, Tashkent was flattened by an earthquake. The city that stands today is largely the creation of the Soviets, who rebuilt the Uzbek capital as a model socialist metropolis; this meant plenty of concrete, but also verdant parks, canalside paths and wide roads designed for ostentatious military

If you’ve only ever heard of one place in Central Asia, it’s probably Samarkand. This ancient city, one of the most important stops on the old Silk Road, once shared the same near-mythical status as Timbuktu and Shangri-La, and became renowned for its fantastical architecture during the reign

The Kyzylkum Desert is the Central Asia you imagine when you look at a map: vast, inhospitable, empty. Yet a lot of history fills the barren land between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers (better known in the west as the Oxus and the Jaxartes), and crossing the Kyzylkum

I’m not usually superstitious, but I’m pretty sure that the ghost of a tenth century Persian emir cured me of diarrhoea. My stomach had been suffering for a couple of days, the most likely culprit theplov I’d eaten for dinner on our last night in Khiva [https: