Private Daytrip to Muynak and Nukus

The age of this Zoroastrian ancient monument - dakhma Chilpyk (Shylpyk, Chilpak Kala) is more than 2200 years. Chilpyk is a round roofless tower, 15 meters high and 65 meters in diameter, built at the top of the rounded natural hill, 43 km away from Nukus. The Zoroastrians used it for burial of the dead. The remains of the deceased were thrown in the tower to the birds of prey. Later the bones were collected in earthenware vessels-ossuaries and dug into the ground. This way of disposal was connected with the Zoroastrian philosophy, which prohibited defiling the land with corrupted bodies.

Originally the tower had a 20-meter stair with steps cut right in the hill. From the base of the tower there was a passage leading to the river. Around the tower and inside it there were found ossuaries of clay and stone, some of them are displayed today in the museums of Nukus and Tashkent.

Savitsky Art Museum in Nukus, capital of Uzbekistan’s semiautonomous Karakalpakstan Region, is one of the most extraordinary tourist destinations in the world. The museum’s formation is inextricably linked with the activities of the Khorezm Archaeological - Ethnographic Expedition, which in the 20th century excavated swathes of land in neighboring Turkmenistan and in Uzbekistan’s ancient Khorezm and Karakalpakstan regions. The head of the expedition, world-renowned scientist Sergei Tolstov, referred to the region’s majestic fortresses and monuments as "Central Asia’s Egypt." Savitsky was a member of this expedition. He began conducting independent studies, during which he collected applied folk art created by local artists.

The Muynak Regional Studies Museum also known as Ecological Museum of Muynak can be called one of the most unique museums in Uzbekistan. This museum, modest by metropolitan standards, with less than two hundred exhibits, tells the visitors a tragic story of the bygone era, when things were humming in this region and the Aral Sea was so large and affluent that it was called as sea. The museum of the Aral Sea has collected paintings of Soviet artists, old photographs, specimens of flora and fauna, canned goods, produced by the local cannery, household items and articles of arts and crafts of the peoples who lived on the Aral Sea shores, and other artifacts to form a single picture of the past and present of the Aral Sea as a whole.

Hidden in one of the most obscure corners of the former Soviet Union lies one of its darkest secrets; the disappearance, in a single lifetime, of the Aral Sea (Orol Dengizi), once the fourth largest inland sea in the world. Moynaq (population 12,000), 210km north of Nukus, encapsulates more visibly than anywhere the absurd tragedy of the Aral Sea. Once one of the sea’s two major fishing ports, it now stands some 180km from the water. What remains of Moynaq’s fishing fleet lies rusting on the sand in the former seabed.

Muynak (Moynoq, in Uzbek Latin, Mojnak in Karakalpak) was once the largest port on the Aral, a finger of coast where a significant part of the Aral catch was processed and canned. In 1921 as the Volga region suffered a terrible famine, Lenin appealed to the Aral fleet for help and within days 21,000 tonnes of fish had been dispatched, saving thousands of Russian lives.