Tuva
One of Tuva’s ‘must sees’, the National Museum’s huge modern home contains the usual arrangements of stuffed animals, WWII artefacts and dusty minerals,…
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Tuva
Nominally independent before WWII, fascinating Tuva (Тува in Russian, Тыва in Tuvan) is culturally similar to neighbouring Mongolia but with an international cult following all its own. Philatelists remember Tannu Tuva’s curiously shaped 1930s postage stamps. World-music aficionados are mesmerised by Tuvan throat singers. And millions of armchair travellers read Ralph Leighton’s Tuva or Bust!, a nontravel book telling how irrepressible Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman failed to reach Soviet-era Kyzyl despite years of trying. With forests, mountains, lakes and vast undulating waves of beautiful, barely populated steppe, Tuva’s a place you’ll long remember.
Attractions
Must-see attractions
Tuva
The attractive two-storey timber building of the Centre for Tuvan Culture was founded in 2012 by legendary Tuvan musician Kongar-ol Ondar, who was its…
Tuva
This broad grassy vale begins a few kilometres beyond a turning off the M54 highway north of Turan. It’s famous in archaeological circles for its pancake…
Tuva
If you take a map of the world, cut out Asia and balance the continent on a pin, the centre of gravity would be Kyzyl. Well, only if you’ve used the…
Tuva
This Tibetan-styled white building with oriental wooden flourishes is the city’s most architecturally distinctive structure.
Tuva
Brightly coloured prayer flags flutter in the breeze outside this white pagoda-style Buddhist temple, but it’s disappointingly plain inside. There's a…
Tuva
Delicately etched ancient stonework is the star attraction at this museum in Kyzyl-Mazhalyk, alongside an independence-era newspaper printed in the Tuvan…
Tuva
The tiny and obviously underfunded Museum of Oppression has touching dog-eared photographs of those who disappeared in the Stalin years. Across the grass…
Guidebooks
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