Uzbekistan tours from Poland: the Warsaw flight, visa-free entry and Ulugh Beg in Hevelius’s Gdańsk

LOT Polish Airlines has flown nonstop between Warsaw Chopin and Tashkent since March 2024. In the winter timetable 2026/27, flight LO 189 leaves Warsaw on Wednesdays and Fridays at 15:50 and lands in Tashkent at 01:55 local time, after 6 h 5 min; from the end of March 2027 the afternoon flight also runs on Saturdays. On some dates LOT adds a late flight, LO 191, which leaves Warsaw at 23:00 and lands in the morning. The way back, LO 190, leaves Tashkent in the small hours and is in Warsaw by about 06:15; on some dates a morning flight, LO 192, lands in Warsaw in the early afternoon. Check the days for your dates before you plan.

From Kraków, Gdańsk, Wrocław or Poznań you connect in Warsaw, or fly through Istanbul, from where Turkish Airlines goes to Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara and Urgench, the airport for Khiva. More routes are in our guide to flights to Uzbekistan.

The afternoon flight lands after midnight, so book your first hotel night from the night you arrive and sleep before the first walk. We also arrange fast-track passport control and a car to your hotel. Tashkent is on UTC+5 all year, with no summer time: four hours ahead of Warsaw in winter, three hours in summer.

Hevelius, born in Gdańsk in 1611, spent his life mapping the sky from the roofs of his own houses, and his catalogue of fixed stars lists 1,564 of them. It was published in 1690, after his death, in the Prodromus astronomiae, prepared by his wife Elisabeth. The book did something unusual: it set Hevelius’s catalogue next to the great catalogues before it, including the one made in Samarkand. The frontispiece shows their authors at one table under the title of a “council of astronomers”: Ptolemy, Tycho Brahe, Hevelius himself and, among them, Ulugh Beg.

His observatory stood on a hill outside Samarkand. What remains is the lower part of the great meridian arc, cut into the rock, and a museum beside it: see our guide to the Ulugh Beg Observatory. For a whole trip built around the sky, our Stars of Uzbekistan astronomy tour goes from the observatory to a night under the desert sky by Aydarkul, and Heritage of Great Scholars follows the astronomers, physicians and scholars of Bukhara, Samarkand and Khiva.

The thread continues. In June 2022 a team from the Lublin University of Technology spent a week in Bukhara with 3D scanners, working at temperatures above 40 °C: the mosque and the throne room of the Ark, the Samanid Mausoleum, the square of the Kalyan minaret, Chor Minor and the Ulugh Beg madrasah, for the project “3D Digital Silk Road”, with Samarkand State University and the National University of Uzbekistan as partners. The same buildings are in our guides to the Ark, the Samanid Mausoleum and Poi Kalyan.

You book the flight, and we arrange everything on the ground: hotels, train tickets, guides and transfers. With the LOT flights in winter you land in the night from Wednesday to Thursday or from Friday to Saturday, so we keep the first morning easy and start the sightseeing after lunch.

The classic route, 8 or 11 days. Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva on the 8-day classic tour, or at an easier pace on the 11-day classic tour. How we lay out such trips is in Uzbekistan in 7 days and Uzbekistan in 10 days.

By train. The high-speed lines link the four cities, and our Uzbekistan by train tour uses them all the way; the trains themselves are in trains in Uzbekistan.

A long weekend. For four or five days, Samarkand and Bukhara in 5 days takes in the two cities and nothing else.

Mountains and desert. Day hikes from Chimgan to the villages of Nuratau on our walking tour, and near Bukhara a day with the potters of Gijduvan: a ceramics workshop and lunch.

Your guide speaks Polish, and that is included in the price of our tours: tell us when you book, the earlier the better. What applies to all of Europe is in our general guide to Uzbekistan tours from Europe; not sure which route fits, try our tour finder.

Winter break. In 2027 the ferie run in three rounds: 18–31 January, 1–14 February (Masovia, Pomerania, Świętokrzyskie and Lublin) and 15–28 February, depending on your voivodeship. It is the quiet season here: a January afternoon in Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara averages about 7 °C, Khiva is colder, and the monuments are almost empty. From December to March there is snow at Amirsoy, an hour and a half from Tashkent; our ski weekend or a day of Amirsoy and Chinorkent with lunch and a cable car fits a city trip.

Easter and the spring break. Easter falls on 28 March 2027, and the school spring break runs from 25 to 30 March, a week after Navruz, the spring new year, which Uzbekistan celebrates on 21 March: see Navruz in Uzbekistan. The average March afternoon in Tashkent is 16 °C, in April 22 °C.

The May weekend and Corpus Christi. In 2027, 1 May is a Saturday and 3 May a Monday: take four days of leave from 4 to 7 May, and you have nine days, from 1 to 9 May. Corpus Christi, 27 May, is a Thursday, so one day off on Friday gives a four-day weekend. In May the average afternoon is 27–28 °C.

Summer. The school holidays run from 26 June to 31 August. From June to August afternoons reach 34–36 °C, so we plan the sightseeing for mornings and evenings and add the mountains near Tashkent.

Autumn. September and October are among the best months: about 29 °C in the afternoon in Tashkent in September, 22 °C in October. Then come two long weekends: All Saints’ Day, 1 November, is a Monday, and 11 November is a Thursday, so one day off on Friday 12 November gives four days. November is cooler, about 14 °C in the afternoon. Month by month: April, May, October and when to go.

Uzbek food is built around meat, mostly mutton, and around rice and bread. Plov, the national dish, is rice cooked in a cauldron with meat, carrots and onions, and it is a midday dish: by evening the best cauldrons are empty. Non, the round bread from the clay tandir oven, comes with every meal, and green tea is poured all day. Our guides to Uzbek cuisine, plov and tea and the chaikhana explain what is on the table.

Tell us about allergies, diets and what you would rather not eat, and we take it into account when we plan your meals. For an evening in Bukhara, we arrange dinner as guests of a local family.