Tashkent keeps its culture behind concrete: avant-garde paintings collected by an exiled Grand Duke, a merchant mansion carved by Bukharan ganch masters, and an opera house raised by Japanese POWs. Three days of galleries, ateliers and stage seats.
Four floors and roughly 12,000 works: Sogdian wall fragments, 19th-century suzani embroidery, Russian avant-garde canvases from Grand Duke Romanov's confiscated collection, and Soviet-era Uzbek painting. Labels in Uzbek and Russian.
Set in the 1890s mansion of Russian diplomat Alexander Polovtsev, whose ganch plaster fretwork and painted ceilings were cut by masters from Rishtan and Bukhara. Some 7,000 pieces: ceramics, carved doors, jewellery, silk ikat.
The country's main contemporary exhibition hall, a marble-clad block behind Amir Temur Square, showing rotating shows of living Uzbek painters, graphic artists and photographers alongside a permanent national collection.
A slow loop past the 1974 Hotel Uzbekistan and its honeycomb sun-screen facade, the concrete relief panels of the Panoramic Cinema House, and the ministry blocks rebuilt after the 1966 earthquake flattened the centre.
Central Asia's deepest archaeology collection: the Fayaz-Tepa Buddha triad in Gandharan stone, Zoroastrian ossuaries, Sogdian coins and Khorezmian bronzes, laid out across three floors of a late-Soviet Lenin Museum building.
A domed rotunda modelled on Timurid mausolea, ringed by a blue-and-gold coffered ceiling and vast murals of Amir Temur's campaigns. Cases hold 15th-century manuscripts, firmans, armour and replicas of Ulugbek's instruments.
Nine halls tracing Chagatai and Uzbek letters through illuminated Navoi manuscripts, miniature paintings, calligraphy panels and reconstructed 15th-century Herat book workshops, with a room on repressed 1930s Jadid writers.
Alexey Shchusev's 1947 theatre, finished by Japanese POWs, with six foyers each carved in the style of a different Uzbek region. The company runs opera and ballet most evenings from September through June, in a 1,400-seat hall.
Three generations of the Rakhimov family reviving lost Afrosiab and Rishtan glazes in a working Old City courtyard. The house museum shows excavated shards beside modern pieces; the kiln and wheel room sits out the back.
A 19th-century madrasah beside the Oliy Majlis whose student cells now house miniature painters, woodcarvers, silk-ikat weavers and jewellers who work in the doorways. Prices are fixed on the cells, not haggled like the bazaars.
Tashkent's longest-running independent art space, part gallery, part crafts shop, part courtyard café. Shows lean toward young Uzbek painters and photographers; the shop stocks Ferghana ceramics and hand-blocked textiles.
The Soviet Union's first independent theatre, founded in a basement in 1976 by Mark Weil and still staging sharp, Russian-language experimental work with an in-house ensemble and a small jazz and film programme upstairs.