Tours

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.

The highlight of Nukus is the recently relocated Igor Savitsky Museum, home to one of the finest collections of Soviet avant-garde art from the 1920s and 30s; an age of relative artistic freedom before the demands from the 'centre' changed in the mid-1930s and Stalinist socialist realism became the only acceptable form of Soviet art. Nukus's backwater obscurity enabled Savitsky to collect a wide spread of artistic life, from local folk art to Russian icons, at a time when the more celebrated museums in Moscow and St Petersburg had their wrists ideologically tied.