Uzbekistan travel guide

Official name

O‘zbekiston Respublikasi (Republic of Uzbekistan)

Total land area of Uzbekiston

447,400 square km

Population

27 625 500 (2009)

Ethnic mix

80% Uzbek, 5% Russian, 5% Tajik, 3% Kazakh, 2% Tatar, 2% Karakalpak, 1% Kyrgyz, 1% Korean, and 1% others.

Capital of Uzbekiston

Tashkent

Uzbekistan is a doubly landlocked country in Central Asia, formerly part of the Soviet Union. It shares borders with Kazakhstan to the west and to the north, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to the east, and Afghanistan and Turkmenistan to the south.

Once part of the Persian Samanid and later Timurid empires, the region was conquered in the early 16th century by Uzbek nomads, who spoke an Eastern Turkic language. Most of Uzbekistan’s population today belong to the Uzbek ethnic group and speak the Uzbek language, one of the family of Turkic languages.

Uzbekistan was incorporated into the Russian Empire in the 19th century and in 1924 became a constituent republic of the Soviet Union, known as the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic (Uzbek SSR). It has been an independent republic since December 1991.