NATIONAL HISTORY MUSEUM

It is impossible to miss this huge Soviet style Building that contrasts painfully with the Registan. The museum covers the history of Samarkand and Sogdiane from antiquity to contemporary times. Exhibition of contemporary crafts and paintings, numerous archaeological discoveries and a beautiful collection of costumes. A room is devoted to the poet Alisher Navoi, native of Herat and considered the inventor of Uzbek poetry and theatre. In a ground floor room, since 2006, there has been an original Finding in Uzbekistan: a collection of Empire furniture with a sofa, office and several chairs. This furniture was brought back from France in 1814 by Tsar Alexander I after the victory of the coalition on Napoleon. He gave a gift to one of the dignitaries in the Tsarist regime. The grandson of the latter, the Academician Belinkov in prison, but after his death, his widow decided to sell the furniture to an Uzbek kolkhoz director, Aron Moissevitch, to Moscow in 1946. He was kept in the family until 2006, when furniture was assessed, restored and left to the Samarkand Museum. Note the very beautiful office struck on each side of the "N" hidden of laurels whose Russian and Uzbek experts thought, a time, that it belonged to the Emperor Napoleon himself.