Samarkand’s Silk Road university renews its partnership with UN Tourism

As evening light leaves Samarkand’s Registan, the news on the ground is institutional rather than scenic: the city’s “Silk Road” International University of Tourism and Cultural Heritage has renewed its partnership with UN Tourism, the body formerly known as the World Tourism Organization, after first working with it in 2023. The school trains specialists in tourism and in cultural heritage from a campus in the city center, treating those fields as one problem rather than two separate tracks.

Professor Muhsinjon Kholmukhamedov, the university’s rector, told UN News that the school is the first partner university of that organization. The same report says the campus is translating courses from the organization’s online academy for residents and preparing to open an INSTO tourism observatory, the first in Central Asia on that account, to follow visitor numbers together with tourism’s effects on jobs, the urban environment, and residents’ daily lives.

Heritage work runs beside that tourism strand through a UNESCO Chair. The rector described research on restoration choices that once relied on gypsum, concrete, and rebar, with recommendations toward modern composite materials meant to spare the historic fabric, and with laser scanning used to build three-dimensional models that can show dangerous deformations early enough to support a structure when a critical tilt appears.

The square that frames the work is the usual Registan scene: tiled madrasahs and a turquoise dome under a clear sky, last light across the mosaics, dusk on ground where trade routes have crossed for centuries, tourists at the stalls as the lights come on, and at night a historic Samarkand monument in green and red against a deep blue sky. The Registan belongs to historic Samarkand, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and the reporting places schools, shops, workshops, and old neighborhoods beside new districts around the monuments. In that account the rector cast the city as a crossroads for ideas, crafts, and cultures, flourishing in the eighth and ninth centuries and again in the Timurid era as a center of science, culture, and the arts.

The design is simple: keep tourism training and heritage training on one campus, then bind the curriculum to an international tourism body that already writes guidance for destinations under pressure. The file ends with the university’s account to UN News.