Kattakurgan

Kattakurgan, written Kattaqoʻrgʻon in Uzbek, is a district-level city in the Samarqand Region of Uzbekistan, in the Zarafshon River valley on the road and railway between Bukhara and Samarkand. It had 90,600 inhabitants in 2021 and is the second largest city in the region. The name means large city-fortress in Uzbek. According to F. F. Pospelov, a fortress was built on the site in 1684 by the local saint Sufi Allahyar and his two brothers, and the town grew up around it; the oldest part, the old city, dates to the last quarter of the 17th century. It was the seat of a bek under the Bukharan Manghit dynasty, became the border town between Russian Turkestan and the Bukharan Emirate in 1868, and was incorporated into the Uzbek SSR after the Soviet regime dissolved both entities in 1924.