A ministerial meeting in Tashkent may not sound like holiday news, but the details coming out of it are genuinely useful for anyone eyeing Central Asia's most intriguing city-break destination. Türkiye's Culture and Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy met his Uzbek counterpart Ozodbek Nazarbekov in the Uzbek capital to flesh out the 2026-2027 Culture Cooperation Plan, timed to Uzbekistan's 35th independence anniversary.
The headline item for travellers is museums. Türkiye's night museum program — late openings that pulled in over a million visitors in 2025 and run at 22 museums and archaeological sites this year — is now on the table for Uzbekistan. If Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara adopt similar after-dark opening hours, that changes how you'd plan a sightseeing day in a country where summer afternoons are brutal and days out are packed.
Heritage is the other big thread. The two countries want to swap expertise in restoration and conservation, with Turkish specialists sharing know-how and Uzbek experts getting practical training. Ersoy also floated deeper archaeological ties: Uzbek researchers have already joined the summer school run under Türkiye's Taş Tepeler Project — the umbrella effort covering Göbeklitepe-era sites — and the idea is to get more Turkish archaeologists working on digs inside Uzbekistan. For visitors, that usually means better-presented, better-interpreted sites over time.
The talks also touched on preservation of waqf-related works, joint folk dance projects, and a memorandūм between Türkiye's General Directorate of Fine Arts and the Uzbekistan Philharmonic covering music and performing arts. Cinema is in the mix too: filming has begun on a joint production, "Heroes of Turkestan," and the two governments want a formal Audiovisual Co-production Agreement to give their film industries a permanent framework.
Ersoy also toured the Center for Islamic Civilization in Tashkent, a flagship new cultural complex that's fast becoming one of the city's key sights, and capped the visit at a gala concert for independence day at the International Forums Palace.
Why care? Uzbekistan is riding a real tourism upswing — visa-free access for dozens of nationalities, a modernised Tashkent, and the Silk Road cities drawing record numbers. Closer cultural cooperation with Türkiye, a country with serious experience in heritage restoration and museum programming, tends to trickle down into exactly the things travellers notice: longer opening hours, restored monuments, better exhibitions and more live performance. If you've been waiting for a signal that Uzbekistan's cultural infrastructure is maturing, this is it — and the 2026-2027 plan gives you a window to visit before the crowds fully catch on. Reported by Daily Sabah Travel.
