Boysun

In 2001 UNESCO placed the Boysun region among the nineteen cultural spaces designated a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity — for the distinctiveness of the Surkhan oasis and the living tradition preserved here.

The Surkhan reserve lies nearby, known not only for its flora and fauna but for fossilised dinosaur tracks in the south-east of its territory, several hundred million years old. Mesolithic and Neolithic rock drawings have been found there too.

The world-famous Teshik-Tash cave is in the Boysuntau mountains. In 1938 archaeologists found an ancient burial here with the remains of a Neanderthal child. It was long thought to be a boy, but later study showed the skeleton belongs to a girl of eight to ten. Animal bones found alongside indicate this was not simply an interment but a full funerary ritual. A sculpted portrait of the child was made from the anthropologist M. A. Gerasimov's reconstruction; it is kept in the Termez museum.

Not far from the Teshik-Tash grotto is another cave, Amir Temur's. No excavation has been done there: scree gets in the way.

For a traveller Boysun means mountain routes, villages with a way of life still intact, and the sense of a place almost nobody reaches.