Silk Mirage: Through the Looking Glass in Uzbekistan
An online Reading Room discussion with author Joanna Lillis, hosted by Sophie Ibbotson. 2 December 2025, 17.30 GMT
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Underground Counterculture in Tashkent: The First Independent Theatre in the Soviet Union
Lucas Fraser-Taliente It’s a Wednesday night in the centre of Tashkent, Uzbekistan. The darkness of the small wooden stage in front of me is disturbed only by the faint blue glow of the supertitle screens. A soft white gleam emerges to illuminate the entrance of our young protagonist, Makhzum. His father, a stiff and bespectacled…
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The Return of the Prodigal: A Turk visits Central Asia
Nagihan Haliloglu is an assistant professor at the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations and a resident of Istanbul. In his introduction to Mehmet Emin Efendi’s 1877 travelogue on Turkestan, Ahmet Mithat Efendi says that anyone interested in Ottoman history and culture ought to visit Central Asia ‘to appreciate how much a tribe that is originally…
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Postcard from Uzbekistan: RSAA Uzbekistan Tour
Sophie Ibbotson, who sits on the RSAA Council, writes from the RSAA Uzbekistan Tour which visited the country last month. Â There is no benefit in my writing to you of the wonders of Khiva, Bukhara or Samarkand. These are well enough known that each of us already has in our own mind a picture…
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Sufism and the State: Saints’ Shrines in Central Asia
Fitzroy Morrissey is an Oriental Studies Graduate of Oxford University. He has travelled extensively in the Islamic world, and is the author of A Sufi for a week. He is currently studying Persian as a graduate student. Here, he discusses the relationship between Sufism in Central Asia and the post-Soviet states. For over half a…
