Kokand

Kokand was the seat of its own khanate for a century and a half and carries the best set of monuments in the Fergana valley, starting with the palace Khudayar Khan built for himself in the eighteen sixties. Soviet demolition left nineteen of its hundred and fourteen rooms, and those nineteen now hold the regional museum behind a long tiled front. The Juma mosque nearby stands on ninety-eight carved wooden columns. Around them the Narbutabey madrasah and the royal necropolis carry the tombs of the khans and the poet Nodira. Nothing else in the whole Fergana valley comes anywhere close to this concentration of buildings.