Uzbekistan reaches the sea only through landlocked states

Uzbekistan reaches the sea only through other states, and those states are themselves landlocked. Tashkent governs a country boxed in by countries that are also boxed in.

The neighbours are Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan. None has a coast on the open ocean. Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan touch the Caspian Sea, but that sea has no natural outlet to the ocean and does not lift the lock. Such a position is called doubly landlocked. Liechtenstein is the other well-known case. Uzbekistan is the large one.

Boxed in by boxed-in states

Uzbekistan has 37,053,428 inhabitants on 447,400 square kilometres. Tashkent, the capital, lies in the northeast, in the valley of the Chirchik, close to Kazakhstan. It is not a city of the geographic middle. It is a city of the edge, where the Tian Shan comes up and the Kazakh steppe begins. The political middle sits on the hem. Think of the country from a central oasis and you think of Samarkand. Government is from the mountain edge.

The Fergana Valley in the east shares its logic with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. The borders there are drawn so that Uzbek ground is surrounded by Kyrgyz territory. Sokh is one such exclave. The lock is therefore not only the outer ring of neighbours. In the east the map is already knotted in on itself. A state without access to the sea has, in its own east, places that do not even touch the rest of their own state directly. The position is double, and locally it is tight once more.

Uzbekistan does not lack a port through a single border. Every exit runs through a state that also has no ocean.

— TerraTally · Countries desk

Two rivers and a sea that has retreated

Two rivers organise the habitable land: the Syr Darya in the east and north, the Amu Darya in the south and west. Both once fed the Aral Sea. Large-scale irrigation for cotton, expanded in the Soviet period, took water from them. The southern Aral, on the Uzbek side, has largely retreated. A northern remnant lies in Kazakhstan. No share is stated here. The direction is visible: the rivers no longer reach a full sea, and the land they leave behind belongs to Uzbekistan.

Karakalpakstan lies on the delta of the Amu Darya, with Nukus as its seat. The constitution recognises it as a republic within Uzbekistan. The retreated sea is thus not a foreign landscape beyond the border. It is the northwest of this state. The rivers explain the fields and the empty shore at once. A doubly landlocked country did not lose its water because an ocean was missing. It turned river water onto the fields, and the lake that lived on that water retreated.

Tashkent on the edge, Samarkand on the Zeravshan

Uzbek is the state language. Russian remains widespread. In Karakalpakstan, Karakalpak is the language of the place. The state writes its unity in Uzbek and lives with the older layer of Russian. More important here than the script are the rivers and the cities that are not the capital. Samarkand and Bukhara stand on the Zeravshan, west of Tashkent, cities of the old trade routes. Samarkand was Timur's capital. Today's capital is younger in the political sense and lies closer to the border.

On 1 September 1991 Uzbekistan became its own state out of the Soviet Union. Payment is in the som. The currency and the date set the state in time. The geography under them is older: no ocean of its own, neighbours without an ocean, two rivers, a lake that has retreated, a capital on the northeastern edge and the historic cities on the Zeravshan. Look for a port and you look for it outside the borders. Inside, you find Tashkent, Samarkand and the delta at Nukus.

Look for Uzbekistan's sea and you will not find it inside the borders. You find neighbours that also have none, rivers that no longer reach a full lake, and a capital on the edge of that closed map.