You need a permit to visit Termez — a border zone registration from the authorities in Tashkent that takes a few days to process and reminds you before you arrive that this is not an ordinary tourist itinerary. The city sits directly on the Amu Darya, the ancient Oxus River, which forms the border with Afghanistan. On clear days from the riverbank you can see the Afghan shore. The permit process is worth the bureaucratic friction. Almost nobody comes here, and almost everything here is old in a way that the Silk Road cities, heavily restored and well-promoted, have difficulty fully conveying.
Fayaz-Tepe and the Buddhist North
Buddhist monasteries in Uzbekistan are not something most travelers expect to exist. They do, because Termez was a major center of Greco-Bactrian and Kushan civilization from the third century BCE through the seventh century CE, when Islam arrived and the monasteries were abandoned. Fayaz-Tepe, about twelve kilometers from the city, is the most intact of these — a complex of monks’ cells, a stupa, and a main shrine hall, excavated from the desert and partially reconstructed to show their original arrangement.
Walking through the cells — each just large enough for one person to sleep lying down — with the temperature above 40 degrees and the desert absolute in every direction, I tried to place the mental life that happened here: monks studying Sanskrit manuscripts in these rooms, painting the murals of which fragments remain in the site’s small museum. The aesthetic tradition is unmistakably Gandharan — Hellenistic forms absorbed into Buddhist iconography, the Buddha carved with curled hair and a toga-like robe. It is one of the more improbable artistic syntheses in history and it happened in this desert.
The Zurmala Tower and Deep Time
The Zurmala stupa, a few kilometers away, has not been reconstructed. It is a crumbling cylinder of ancient fired brick, perhaps twenty meters tall, standing alone in an empty field. There’s no fence. No signage in a language I could read. A woman was grazing two goats at its base.
The stupa dates to the first or second century CE, which means it has been standing in this field for nearly two thousand years. That arithmetic resists absorption. I walked around it twice and both times felt the particular vertigo of encountering a thing so much older than everything I normally use as a reference.
The City and the River
Termez itself is a Soviet city with a broad central boulevard, whitewashed administrative buildings, and a relaxed, unhurried population who seemed genuinely surprised to see a foreign traveler walking around the market. The bazaar sells the dried fruits of the south — especially figs and pomegranate molasses — and a variety of things I couldn’t identify that the vendors communicated by making eating gestures.
The river embankment in the evening is where the city comes out to walk: families, teenagers on motorcycles, old men on benches. The Amu Darya runs wide and brown here, fast in the center, and on the far bank the Afghan hills begin immediately, the same color and texture as the Uzbek side, the border visible only by implication.
I stood at the embankment until it was too dark to see the far shore and then walked back through the market to find somewhere to eat.
When to go: October through April — spring and autumn are ideal. Termez is one of the hottest cities in Uzbekistan; summer temperatures regularly reach 45°C and the archaeological sites, exposed in the desert, become genuinely dangerous to visit in the middle of the day. November to March is cool, dry, and comfortable, with clear light that suits the honey-colored stonework of the ruins.