Tashkent

[7] Ilya Gershevitch (1974:55, 72) (apud Livshits, 2007:179) traces the city's old name Chach back to Old Iranian *čāiča- "area of water, lake" (cf.Against Harold Walter Bailey's and Edwin G. Pulleyblank's suggested Tocharian origin for *kaŋk-, Ünal proposes that it was instead an Iranian word and compares it to Pashto kā́ṇay "stone".[11] Tashkent was first settled between the 5th and 3rd centuries BC as an oasis on the Chirchik River, near the foothills of the West Tian Shan Mountains.[12] Some scholars believe that a "Stone Tower" mentioned by Ptolemy in his famous treatise Geography, and by other early accounts of travel on the old Silk Road, referred to this settlement (due to its etymology).The principality of Chach had a square citadel built around the 5th to 3rd centuries BC, some 8 km (5.0 mi) south of the Syr Darya River.By the 7th century AD, Chach had more than 30 towns and a network of over 50 canals, forming a trade center between the Sogdians and Turkic nomads.The Western Turkic ruler Tong Yabghu Qaghan (618-630) set up his headquarters in the Ming-bulak area to the north of Chach.[20] According to the descriptions of the authors of the 10th century, Shash was structurally divided into a citadel, an inner city (madina) and two suburbs - an inner (rabad-dahil) and an outer (rabad-harij).[21] Under the Samanid Empire, whose founder Ismail Samani was a descendant of Persian Zoroastrian convert to Islam, the city came to be known as Binkath.Under the Timurid and subsequent Shaybanid dynasties, the city's population and culture gradually revived as a prominent strategic center of scholarship, commerce and trade along the Silk Road.According to legend, Amir Timur, who was treating his wounded leg in Tashkent with the healing water of the Zem-Zem spring, ordered to build a mausoleum for the saint.[30] In 1784, Yunus Khoja, the ruler of the dakha (district) Shayhantahur, united the entire city under his rule and created an independent Tashkent state (1784-1807), which by the beginning of the 19th century seized vast lands.In May 1865, Mikhail Grigorevich Chernyayev (Cherniaev), acting against the direct orders of the Tsar and outnumbered at least 15–1, staged a daring night attack against a city with a wall 25 km (16 mi) long with 11 gates and 30,000 defenders.While a small contingent staged a diversionary attack, the main force penetrated the walls, led by a Russian Orthodox priest.Although the defense was stiff, the Russians captured the city after two days of heavy fighting and the loss of only 25 dead as opposed to several thousand of the defenders (including Alimqul, the ruler of the Kokand Khanate).He abolished taxes for a year, rode unarmed through the streets and bazaars meeting common people, and appointed himself "Military Governor of Tashkent", recommending to Tsar Alexander II that the city become an independent khanate under Russian protection.Following various speeches, Governor-General Aleksey Kuropatkin closed the events with words "Long Live a great free Russia".The government worked to relocate factories from western Russia and Ukraine to Tashkent to preserve the Soviet industrial capacity.On 10 January 1966, then Indian Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri and Pakistan President Ayub Khan signed a pact in Tashkent with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin as the mediator to resolve the terms of peace after the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965.More than 300,000 residents were left homeless, and some 78,000 poorly engineered homes were destroyed,[38] mainly in the densely populated areas of the old city where traditional adobe housing predominated.[39] The Soviet republics, and some other countries, such as Finland, sent "battalions of fraternal peoples" and urban planners to help rebuild devastated Tashkent.Tashkent was rebuilt as a model Soviet city with wide streets planted with shade trees, parks, immense plazas for parades, fountains, monuments, and acres of apartment blocks.[38] At the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Tashkent was the fourth-largest city in the USSR and a center of learning in the fields of science and engineering.Such countries of the Soviet Union as Azerbaijan and Armenia, Kazakhstan and Georgia, Belarus and Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, Latvia, Moldova, Estonia helped restore the city after the earthquake and erected many modern buildings.Boris Grabovsky's method, patented in Saratov in 1925, proposed a new model of TV imaging based on the vertical and horizontal electron beam sweeping under high voltage.Despite this fact, most modern historians disputably consider Vladimir Zworykin and Philo Farnsworth[49] as inventors of the first fully electronic TV set.[51] As a result, Tashkent experiences cold and often snowy winters not typically associated with most Mediterranean climates and long, hot and dry summers.The building had not been allowed to be used for religious purposes since the 1920s due to the anti-religious campaign conducted across the former Soviet Union by the Bolshevik (communist) government in Moscow.Former world champion and Israeli Olympic bronze medalist sprint canoer in the K-1 500 m event Michael Kolganov was also born in Tashkent.