STEP CHANGE

Somewhere on the steppes of Central Asia, midway between Europe and China, is the city of Tashkent. Invaded by successive waves of Arabs and Persians, sacked by Genghis Khan in 1219, and colonised by the Russian Empire in 1865, the Silk Road hub has been home to Kazakhs, Tajiks, Turkmen, both Bukharan and Ashkenazi Jews, Koreans, Ukrainians, Poles, Tatars, ethnic Germans and Japanese prisoners of war, finally becoming the capital of an independent Uzbekistan after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

A country’s identity is usually shaped by the same fundamentals that more or less endure: language, heroes and myths, architecture, food, dress and religion. But in the case of Uzbekistan, the ingredients have demanded constant recalibration through the centuries. In Tashkent, now a city of 2.5 million, this is most apparent in the built environment: here you can find traces of at least five different cities and five different architectural cultures, the oldest being an ancient Islamic walled settlement, followed by an adjacent Imperial Russian colonial city, with a later Stalinist overlay. Today’s Tashkent is busy erasing the traces of a second wave of Soviet architecture with gleaming white marble buildings that make it look like one of the more conservative Gulf states. Its sadly lifeless attempts to evoke the domes, colonnades and embellishments of Uzbekistan’s Islamic heritage camouflage everything from overwrought supermarkets to dull convention