The jumping-off point for Khiva — Khorezm's modern capital beside the ancient pearl of the Silk Road
Urgench is the modern capital of Khorezm region in western Uzbekistan, a city of 200,000 built on irrigated flatlands 35km from Khiva and serving as the main transport hub for visiting the famous Khiva UNESCO World Heritage site — the best-preserved Silk Road city in Central Asia. While Khiva gets the attention, Urgench itself sits on the historical territory of the ancient Khorezmian Empire and has its own state museum covering the region's extraordinary history from the Bronze Age through the Soviet cotton collectivisation era. The drive from Urgench to Khiva crosses a flat agricultural lan…
Modern Urgench is not the same city as medieval Urgench (Köneürgench, now in Turkmenistan) — after the Mongol destruction of the original Urgench in 1221, a new administrative centre gradually developed further east. The present city of Urgench was established as a Russian administrative centre in 1873 during the conquest of Khorezm, and the surrounding region was intensively developed for cotton production under Soviet rule. The Khorezm region's irrigation-dependent agriculture made it particularly vulnerable to the Soviet-era diversion of the Amu Darya for cotton, contributing significantly…