Main Info
Tour to Nukus
The tour is available every day, except Tuedays.
This is a one-day tour, perfect for filling up an extra day with a visit to the Savitsky Museum. Nukus is surrounded by three deserts (Karakum, Kyzylkum, and the Ustyurt Plateau), yet this small museum has one of the world’s leading collections of Soviet avant-garde art, plus an excellent ethnographic collection detailing the artistry and creativity of the people of Central Asia. This is due in large part to the work of the museum’s founder, Igor Savitsky, who arrived in Karakalpakstan as part of an archaeological expedition, and stayed to found the museum and fill its halls with exhibits and paintings. Take a short trip outside of Nukus to the Mizdakhan Necropolis and the fortress of Gyaur-Kala, both famous landmarks of a more historical character.
Tour to Nukus descriptions
| Price Discount | 1 person – no discount 2 persons – 10% discount 3 persons – 20% discount 4 persons and up – 30% discount |
| Price Currency | USD |
| Destinations | Nukus |
| Departure | Every day ( The tour is subject to availability of flights) |
| Deadline | Get confirmation 3 days before the departure date |
| Included | All transfers; Entrance ticket and guided tour at Savitsky Art Museum. |
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Excluded
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Round-trip ticket for flight Tashkent-Nukus-Tashkent; Meals; Accommodation; Tips are not included, but would be appreciated; Travel insurance. |
| Accommodation | Not required |
Must visit on your Tour to Nukus
The Karakalpak State Museum, on the corner of Karakalpakstan and Dosliq/ Presidencia Streets, offers many wide-ranging insights into the region. The first hall concentrates on the region’s dying or dead natural history, with satellite maps of the Aral Sea taken from 1957-1988 and stuffed examples of extinct species that once inhabited the reedy marshes of the Oxus delta and the stony desert of the Ust’urt plateau.
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.
Like a ruby in the dust, the Igor Savitsky Museum (also known simply as Nukus Museum) holds the worlds second-largest collection of Russian avant-garde paintings after the Russian Museum in St Petersburg. It also has one of the largest exhibitions of archaeological finds and folk art anywhere in central Asia. Today the museum holds some 80,000 exhibits ranging from the Khorezmian art of Toprak Kala to Karakalpak cubism.
The museum is divided into five galleries. Uzbek Art of the 1920s and 1930s is a comprehensive survey of schools from realism to avant-garde, and the gallery includes the work of both Uzbek artists and foreign artists painting in Uzbekistan.
The works show the important interplay of influences from East and West: architecture and decorative arts are drawn from Uzbekistan’s Islamic traditions; artists such as Benkov, Koravay and Kashina depict the region’s ancient cities; Nikolayev imaginatively blends the techniques of Italian masters and Russian iconography. There are also works of Impressionism, post-Impressionism and Futurism.
The most famous gallery is 20th century Russian Avant-Garde, a smorgasbord of post-revolutionary works that narrowly survived Stalin’s curtailment of creative freedom and prescription of ‘Social Realism’ as the only acceptable form of Soviet art in 1932. Art that did not conform with Stalin’s ideal was repressed and its artists persecuted.
Savitsky acquired works by persecuted artists (including M Sokolov, the murdered V Komarovskiy, and the Amaraveila group) and also paintings by then unknown artists. The works of artists such as R Mazel, P Sokolov, A Sofronova, E Ermilova-Platova and K Red’ko were not recognised, let alone appreciated, by anyone else until the late 1960s.
Itinerary
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Transfer to local airport for a morning flight to Nukus (1255 km, 2 h 45 min). Arrive in Nukus* and visit the Savitsky Karakalpakstan Art Museum (Monday is a day off). The museum hosts the world's second largest collection of Russian avant-garde art and exposition of Karakalpak applied arts items. Have a short drive around center of Nukus: see statue of Karakalpak poet Berdakh, Nukus City Hall, and Drama Theatre*.
In the afternoon visit Mizdakhan Necropolis – an ancient cemetery and one of the oldest and most visited pilgrimage sites of Karakalpakstan. Continue to the remains of the Gyaur-Kala Fortress. Return to Nukus. Transfer to the airport for flight to Tashkent. Upon arrival transfer to hotel/private residence. End of services.
Duration of sightseeing tour: 5 hours
*Guide for sightseeing tour in Nukus is not included and is available upon request.
