Nukus

Nukus is a young city on very old ground. The lower Amu Darya delta was part of ancient Khwarazm, whose fortified settlements, necropolises and Zoroastrian funerary towers still stand in the desert around the city — Mizdakhan on its hills to the west and Chilpyk on its bluff to the south are the nearest. The Karakalpaks, a Turkic people whose name means 'black hats', had settled the delta by the 18th century, living from fishing, herding and irrigated farming under the khans of Khiva.

The modern city dates from the Soviet period. A small settlement was chosen as the administrative centre of the Karakalpak autonomous region, was founded as a city in 1932 and laid out on a grid of wide avenues; it grew into the capital of the Karakalpak Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, which passed to the Uzbek republic in 1936. Its remoteness had consequences of two kinds. It made the city a place of exile and a convenient home for a chemical weapons research institute that operated nearby, and it also allowed Igor Savitsky, an artist from Moscow, to collect and store thousands of works by Soviet artists whose style was condemned in the capitals; the museum he founded in 1966 has made the city's name abroad.

From the 1960s the diversion of the Amu Darya for cotton dried the Aral Sea to the north, destroying the fishing economy of the delta and worsening health across the republic. Uzbek independence in 1991 left Karakalpakstan as an autonomous republic with its own constitution. In July 2022 protests in Nukus against proposed amendments limiting that autonomy ended in deaths and mass arrests; the amendments were withdrawn.

Nukus is the cultural capital of the Karakalpaks, and the republic's language, close to Kazakh, is taught in schools and used in newspapers, broadcasting and at Berdakh Karakalpak State University, named after the 19th-century poet Berdakh, the best known of the Karakalpak poets. Uzbek and Russian are heard everywhere alongside it, and many families move between all three.

The older culture is a steppe one: yurts put up for weddings and celebrations, felt-making, bright embroidery in reds and oranges, silver jewellery worn with headdresses, and epic poems recited by singers to the dutar and the bowed qobyz. The epic of Qırq Qız, the forty maidens who defended their land, is the best known. Much of the surviving material culture — costume, carpets, jewellery, yurt fittings — is displayed in the city's museums.

The Savitsky collection gives Nukus a second, quite different identity as a place of painting. Its rescue of works condemned under Stalin draws visitors who come for nothing else, and the museum is a source of local pride. Everyday manners are Central Asian and unhurried: a guest is fed before being asked anything, refusing tea outright is awkward, and questions about family are politeness rather than prying. Feelings about the Aral Sea and about 2022 run deep, and both are best discussed gently.

About 350,000 people live in Nukus, making it the sixth-largest city in Uzbekistan and easily the largest in Karakalpakstan and home to a large share of the republic's population. It is an administrative city: government offices, the university, hospitals, schools and the museums provide much of the salaried work, alongside trade, construction and small-scale industry. The surrounding delta still farms cotton, rice, wheat and melons, but salty soils and unreliable water have made that harder decade by decade.

Life runs on the heat. Business is done early, the bazaar is at its best soon after dawn, and the streets empty in the worst of the afternoon before filling again in the evening, when families walk the shaded avenues and children play in the courtyards between the blocks. Most people live in apartment blocks or low courtyard houses, and the mahalla organises weddings, funerals and neighbourhood matters as elsewhere in Uzbekistan.

The region's problems are serious and openly acknowledged in health statistics: dust and salt blown from the dried seabed, poor drinking water, high rates of respiratory and kidney disease and of anaemia. Work is scarce, and many young people leave for Tashkent, Kazakhstan or Russia, sending money back. There is also new building in the centre, a technology park and a slow growth in tourism built on the museum, the ancient sites and the long road north to the old fishing ports.

Karakalpak cooking sits between Uzbek and Kazakh traditions, and it is plainer and more meat-and-dairy-based than the food of the Silk Road cities. Mutton, beef and horsemeat are boiled or grilled rather than heavily spiced, and the festive dish is a large plate of boiled meat with wide sheets of pasta and onion broth, close to Kazakh beshbarmak. Plov cooked in a kazan appears at weddings and holidays as it does everywhere in Uzbekistan.

Fish once defined the delta. The Aral fishery that supplied Moynaq's canneries is gone, but carp, catfish and other river fish from the Amu Darya and the remaining delta lakes are still fried or grilled where they can be had, and fish soup is a local speciality. Milk products carry the rest of the table: sour milk, fresh cheeses, clotted cream and qurt, hard salted balls of dried yoghurt eaten as a snack.

Bread is baked in clay tandir ovens and bought fresh each day, and somsa stuffed with lamb and onion comes from the same ovens. The delta's fields and orchards supply melons, watermelons, apricots, grapes and rice, sold in heaps at the bazaar in late summer. Tea is drunk constantly — green tea most often, though black tea with milk is also common here, a habit shared with the Kazakh steppe.