Travelers exploring Tashkent often enrich their tours of eastern madrasas and mosques with a trip to a very unusual complex called the "Sun Institute." This alien-looking landmark is located in the mountains of the Parkent district of the Tashkent region.
How to Get There
The complex is located nine kilometers from the town of Parkent. I read that travelers can reach this settlement from Tashkent by a regular bus and find a taxi there, but we took a simpler route and ordered a car directly from Tashkent’s "Buyuk Ipak Yuli" metro station (locals often call it "Maxim Gorky" or simply "Maximka").
The driver took us to the location, waited for us, and drove us back to the city. The cost of such a trip was 240,000 Uzbek soms. We paid another 55,000 for entry to the territory. Tickets for Uzbek citizens are almost three times cheaper. The tour of the complex is conducted with a guide.
Most travelers know this place as the "Sun Institute," although the official name of the complex is the Institute of Materials Science of the Physics-Sun NPO of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Uzbekistan. On Google Maps, the place is marked as "Institute of Materials Science of Uzbekistan Academy of Sciences."
Tour of the "Sun Institute"
The construction of the "Sun Institute" took place from 1981 to 1987. According to the guide, there are only a couple of similar complexes in the world. The second one is located in France.
The essence of this system is as follows: sunlight is reflected from 62 heliostats and directed to the mirrors of a huge concentrator, which in turn forms a single stream of light and directs it into a solar furnace. The temperature inside the furnace exceeds 3,000 degrees. According to the guide, they test spacecraft coatings here, produce carbon and ceramics.
The tour of the complex includes a walk through one of the administrative buildings, a visit to the heliostat field, and a climb to the concentrator's observation deck. This structure is 50 meters high. A few minutes are dedicated to a small experiment: the guide directs the light stream onto a wooden block, which almost immediately starts smoking and ignites.
The final part of the tour takes place on the concentrator's observation deck. On the way, guests can look inside this huge structure. It has 12 floors in total. You can only climb to the top on foot, but it’s definitely worth it.
After the tour with the guide, we went to the observation deck behind the heliostats, where a memorial sign is installed. A bonus for the long climb was the opportunity to eat ripe cherries straight from the tree.
For those planning to travel around Uzbekistan, I can recommend my article about a trip to So‘qoq, which is located in the same part of the Tashkent region as the "Sun Institute."
Have a nice trip!
