Kokand

Introducing Kokand

As the valley’s first significant town on the road from Tashkent, Kokand is a gateway to the region and stopping point for many travellers. With an architecturally interesting palace and several medressas and mosques, it makes for a worthwhile half-day visit before heading in or out of the region.

This was the capital of the Kokand khanate in the 18th and 19th centuries and the valley’s true ‘hotbed’ in those days – second only to Bukhara as a religious centre in Central Asia, with at least 35 medressas and hundreds of mosques. But if you walk the streets today, you will find only a polite, subdued Uzbek town, its old centre hedged by colonial avenues, bearing little resemblance to Bukhara.

Nationalists fed up with empty revolutionary promises met here in January 1918 and declared a rival administration, the ‘Muslim Provincial Government of Autonomous Turkestan’ led by Mustafa Chokayev. Jenghiz Khan would have admired the response by the Tashkent Soviet, who immediately had the town sacked, most of its holy buildings desecrated or destroyed and 14, 000 Kokandis slaughtered. What little physical evidence of Kokand’s former stature was either left to decay, or mummified as ‘architectural monuments’. A handful of these wonders have been brought back to life as working mosques and medressas.

Last updated: Mar 24, 2009