It’s Finally Getting Easier to See the Super Isolated Louvre of the Desert
Art lovers used to commute 17 hours from Tashkent just to see its beloved museum. But the town is becoming a worthy destination in its own right.
I arrived in Nukus by leaping from a moving train.
My trip from the former Silk Road trading town of Bukhara in southern Uzbekistan to there was supposed to be the apotheosis of my two-week journey through the country. But I’d spent the previous night talking painstakingly via Google Translate with an avuncular Russian professor and two soldiers in my compartment. Some time after midnight, I jammed my earplugs into my ears and laid down, assuming I’d be woken up by the conductor when we neared our destination.
Instead, my neighbor violently shook me awake. “Nukus! Nukus!” he growled urgently, half-asleep himself, jabbing his finger at the window. I looked blearily out at the whitish-pink sky. The train wasn’t moving.
But, by the time I managed to sling my backpack over my shoulders, it was. The conductor was idly smoking a cigarette out the window as I gestured wildly at the station—the one I could see slipping away. “I have to get off here!” I wailed, now learning that Nukus was not, in fact, the train’s terminus. The conductor frantically hit the latch and swung open the door.
Uzbekistan is known for its Silk Road towns: the dusty, mud-baked fortresses and sky-blue tiled minarets of Bukhara and Khiva. I’d come to see those sights, of course, but what really drew me to the country was an improbable museum in the desert, one that’s been called “the Louvre of the Steppe” for its astonishingly rich collection of Uzbek and Russian art. Over the course of the past two years, paintings from its collection had been exhibited in Florence, Venice, and Paris, waking up the wider art world to the treasures stored in an unassuming building in an overlooked country, hours and hours away from its capital.
Wanting to see how the museum’s growing cultural influence abroad was changing its home city, I stood on the edge of the train, which was picking up speed, and jumped.
The story of the State Museum of Arts of the Republic of Karakalpakstan in Nukus has been told so many times it’s now legend. But I’ll give the quick synopsis anyway:
Igor Savitsky, an electrician-turned-archaeologist who was born in Kyiv, visited the autonomous state of Karakalpakstan in 1950 as a painter hired to document archaeological missions in the region. While there, he became fascinated by the Karakalpak culture—distinct then and even now from Uzbek culture—as well as its local art and craftsmanship. To save the region’s folk art, which was dying out due to modernization, he decided to found a museum dedicated to preserving it, which opened in 1966.
Savitsky also traveled around the Soviet Union to secretly buy paintings from the widows of artists who had been sent to prison for their dissident, avant-garde art. (His collecting fervor put him in massive debt, which the museum continued to pay off after his death in 1984.) He smuggled these works back to his museum in Karakalpakstan, where they were displayed in plain sight. He wasn’t overly worried about being punished by the authorities.
After all, no one really came to Karakalpakstan.
“Everyone considers Nukus a hole-in-the-wall, a place in the middle of nowhere. However, it is not so, because, for one, only in Nukus was it possible to create such an improbable museum, the one impossible to build elsewhere,” Savitsky wrote.
But things are changing these days.
“I think people would often come to Uzbekistan and miss out on Nukus entirely,” said Askar Zhumagulov, a travel consultant at Nukus-based tour agency Ayimtour, who grew up in the city. “But fortunately, that’s changing.” In 2018, the Uzbek government abolished visas for tourists from nine countries, including Israel, Japan, South Korea and France; the following year, it granted all EU citizens visa-free travel. The relaxing of rules led to a tourism surge: In Karakalpakstan alone, there was a 120% increase in the number of foreign visitors between 2022 and 2024.
This newfound cosmopolitan influence was palpable. For the first time on my trip, I wasn’t seeing the same cheap Silk Road merchandise everywhere. Gone were the felt cardigans and scarves with pomegranate patterns glued on, supposedly hand-painted ceramics featuring identical designs whether they came from a market in Samarkand or in Khiva, and the ubiquitous camel-shaped fridge magnets. Instead of visiting dozens of madrassas and eating Uzbekistan’s national dish of beef and rice plov, I was able to frequent restaurants serving pizza and French-style patisseries while people-watching for university students sporting fashionable camel winter coats that wouldn’t look out of place in Milan. Restaurants were garlanded with the same fake plastic flowers draped over the awnings of London bars and Parisian bistros. Although it’s surrounded by three different deserts and is 700 miles by car from the capital, it felt like a living, rapidly modernizing city—not one that was artificially stuck in the past, catering to tourists’ expectations.
In Nukus, you feel closer to the sky.
The city only became the regional capital in 1932, and as a result is laid out in a modern grid-like structure. (If you look at it on a map, you’ll see that it’s stretched out into a long, slightly oval shape like the pupil in a cat’s eye.) Nukus sits flatly in the middle of a plain, and doesn’t have the towers or grand hotels of Tashkent and Samarkand, making it feels more open and airier than the country’s Silk Road towns with their medieval town planning. Its city center is made up of long boulevards lined with trees, and vast empty squares in which young couples walk hand-in-hand. In the neighborhood where I was staying, squat houses were organized into neat plots with front gardens, where children were playing on plastic push-along bikes—a sort of grittier, Uzbek Wisteria Lane.
The Savitsky museum, as it’s known, is slap-bang in the middle of town, near government offices and two giant flagpoles flying the Karakalpak and Uzbek flags. It’s the star attraction of a city on the rise, drawing travelers off the Silk Road tourist trail and out into the desert. “Nukus is very far from all of the tourist places in Uzbekistan, but the museum has changed the city’s image,” Tigran Konstantinovich Mkrtychev, the museum’s director, told me. “It is the pride of the city. You would never find a collection like this anywhere else in Uzbekistan.”
The museum has been on tourists’ radars for a while. But it has become more popular in the last couple of years, thanks to the private, government-affiliated Uzbekistan Art and Culture Foundation spearheading cultural outreach. Uzbekistan inaugurated its first ever country pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2021, and its flagship exhibition ‘Uzbekistan: The Avant-garde in the Desert’ was curated by Italian guest curators from Venice’s Ca’ Foscari university, in collaboration with the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. Uzbekistan has also loaned important historical artifacts and artworks to museums in London, Paris, and Berlin over the last two years, including for a major show about the Silk Road that’s on now at the British Museum.
Basically, Uzbekistan’s government is on a soft power drive, trying to attract tourists through art and culture—and Nukus is reaping the benefits because of its museum.
Karakalpakstan is one of the poorest regions in Uzbekistan. A disastrous Soviet water diversion project in the 1960s dried up the Aral Sea, turning the area into desert and decimating the local economy, which relied predominantly on its fisheries. The environmental damage drove up unemployment and health problems in the Karakalpak population. But locals say that a new focus on tourism could be a way to turn around the region’s fortunes—and many businesses are eager to adapt to a new clientele.
“Is it unusual to see foreigners in Nukus? If you’d asked me seven or eight years ago, then yes. But now, not at all,” said Miyribek Koshkarov, a manager at Sofram, an upmarket restaurant popular with tourists. “We’re trying to teach the waiters how to serve foreigners, how to describe the food and take orders in English. Karakalpaks already know several languages: Russian, Uzbek, Karakalpak, and Kazakh. What’s one more?”
Tazabay Uteuliev is the founder of Besqala Tours, one of the longest-established and most popular tour agencies and hostels in Nukus. He says that the tourism business is completely different to what it was when he entered it in 2005. “I started with nothing— all I had was a tent and a bicycle,” he said. Now his tour company has a fleet of cars and drivers, and they run a yurt camp in the desert near the Aral Sea. Business is booming, with a diverse clientele. “Before the pandemic, we had mostly French tourists,” he said. “Then after the pandemic, we had a lot of Spanish people. This year, it’s been Italians.”
In 2022, the government promised infrastructure projects to boost tourism in the region, like extending high-speed rail between Nukus and Tashkent, which would reduce the travel time from 17 to seven hours. Uteuliev says that the government has also offered tourism companies perks, such as paying less customs tax on foreign cars for leading off-road desert tours, and having easier access to credit in order to build hostels and guesthouses.
A few days later, I left Nukus by car, driving through the scrub desert that unfurls for miles across the country’s Khorezm region, where ancient settlements have been wind-blasted into abstract sculptural forms and villages punctuate a checkerboard of agricultural land. I rejoined the Silk Road tourist trail in Khiva, a compact town encircled by mudbrick fortifications and straining to welcome as many tourists as it can. Exploring sand-colored streets winding like shoelaces around 19th-century palaces, or eating dill noodles overlooking the illuminated Kalta Minor minaret on a startlingly cold night, it was easy to feel transported back in time. But it was Nukus and its improbable museum that I kept thinking about—a town not stuck in the past, but hurtling into the future.