Four days in Tashkent: the Silk Road city that had to start again

Start at the middle of the modern city, which is a ring of plane trees around a statue of Timur on horseback. The plinth has carried, in order, a Russian general, then Stalin, then Marx, and since 1994 a fourteenth century Turco-Mongol conqueror rebranded as the father of the Uzbek nation. The whole of the country's twentieth century is legible in one patch of grass, and there are ice cream sellers under the trees.

On its north side is the State Museum of the Temurids, opened in 1996 for the six hundredth anniversary of Timur's reign, under a ribbed turquoise dome that looks like a Timurid mausoleum designed by somebody with an unlimited budget. Inside are manuscripts, armour, astronomical instruments, a facsimile of the letter Timur sent to the king of France, and a very large amount of national pride. It takes an hour and it is the best possible preparation for Samarkand.

In the evening, ride the metro with no destination. It opened in 1977, was built deep enough to serve as a bomb shelter, and every station is themed: cotton at Paxtakor, poets at Alisher Navoiy under blue domed vaults, and the space programme at Kosmonavtlar, where ceramic medallions of cosmonauts run down both platform walls. Photography was forbidden until 2018, which is why almost nobody outside the country had seen any of it.

Cross to the old town and give it the whole day. Chorsu is the reason: a bazaar on a site that has been trading for many centuries, now covered by an enormous ribbed dome in blue and green tile. The dome itself holds the meat and dairy floors, which are not for everyone at nine in the morning. Around it, on the open terraces, are the good parts: pyramids of ground spice, dried apricots and melon, mountains of pomegranates in autumn, women selling kurt, and bread stalls stacking round stamped loaves of non like dinner plates. Buy a loaf. Buy a melon if it is September and accept that you cannot finish it.

A few steps away is the Kukeldash madrasah, built in the 1570s by a vizier whose title meant the khan's foster brother. It has been a Quranic school, a caravanserai and, at its lowest, the place from which women accused of adultery were thrown. Plain yellow brick, a quiet courtyard, and a useful corrective after all that colour.

In the afternoon take a taxi north to Hazrati Imam, the religious centre of the country. The square of mosque, madrasa, minarets and mausoleum was largely rebuilt in 2007 in pale brick and looks its age accordingly, but two things make it worth the trip. One is the tomb of Kaffal Shashi, a tenth century scholar and poet, which is the reason the complex is here at all. The other is the library, which holds a Kufic Quran on deerskin that Uzbekistan presents as the copy Caliph Uthman was reading when he was killed in 656. Scholars date the manuscript later than that. It is still one of the oldest Qurans on earth, and the room is silent.

The Monument of Courage stands where the epicentre was: a block of black granite split by a jagged fissure, with a bronze clock face on it stopped at twenty four minutes past five, the moment on 26 April 1966 when the ground moved. Behind it a bronze family steps out of the crack. It is unsubtle and it works, and if you look at the buildings for a hundred metres in every direction you will notice that none of them is older than about 1970.

Then go north and up. The Tashkent television tower is 375 metres of tripod-legged concrete finished in the mid 1980s, still one of the tallest structures in Central Asia, and the observation deck at about 100 metres is the only place you can see how the city is actually laid out: the grid, the canal, the mountains on a clear day, and the sprawl going on for ever. There is a revolving restaurant above it that is exactly as good as you would expect and worth going to anyway.

Finish nearby at the Minor Mosque, which is younger than everything else in the city by six hundred years. Built in white marble in 2013 and 2014 in a deliberately traditional style, with a turquoise dome and slender twin minarets on the bank of the Ankhor canal, it is the mosque modern Uzbekistan built for itself. It is also open, welcoming and very often empty, and the interior in white and gold at the end of the afternoon is worth twenty minutes of anybody's time.

Keep the smallest museum for last. The Museum of Applied Arts occupies the house a Russian imperial diplomat built for himself at the end of the nineteenth century, and he had it decorated by the best craftsmen he could find in Turkestan: carved and painted ganch plaster over every surface, coloured glass, and ceilings that take a while to work out. The collection inside is suzani embroidery, ceramics from Rishtan and Gijduvan, silk ikat and metalwork, and it is the best introduction to Uzbek craft in the country. Forty minutes to an hour, and the building is at least half the reason.

Then go west. The main station is on the blue metro line and the Afrosiyob to Samarkand takes a little over two hours, which means you can spend the morning here and be looking at the Registan by late afternoon. Get to the platform forty minutes early: there is a security scanner and a passport check, and the train does not wait.