Skip to content

Moynaq Aral Sea Museum

The local museum of Moynaq, a former Aral Sea port, telling the story of its fishing past, with paintings of the old coast.

MuseumsFounded 1984

About the place

The Moynaq museum of local history tells the story of the Aral Sea and the town that once lived from it. Moynaq was a fishing port with a large cannery on the shore; as the sea shrank, the water retreated about 150 kilometres. The museum was founded in 1984 in Uchsoy, moved to Moynaq in 1998 and reopened in 2013.

Its displays cover the town's fishing and canning past, and the collection includes paintings of the Aral coast by the artists R. Matevosyan and F. Madgazin, made when the sea was still there. The museum makes a natural stop before the nearby ship graveyard, where rusting trawlers lie on the dry former seabed.

Why go

  • Paintings of the vanished Aral coast
  • Fishing and cannery history
  • Close to the ship graveyard

Sources (1)

  1. 1.en.wikipedia.org

Nearby

  • Moynaq and the ship cemeteryNature

    Under 1 km away

    Moynaq and the ship cemetery

    A former fishing port on the Aral Sea, now far from the water, where rusting boats lie on the old seabed and a local museum tells the town's story.

  • Sudochye LakeNature

    57 km away

    Sudochye Lake

    A system of shallow lakes and reed beds in the delta of the Amu Darya, near the former Aral shore, important as a stopover for migrating birds.

  • Ustyurt Plateau and the Aral shoreNature

    116 km away

    Ustyurt Plateau and the Aral shore

    A flat desert plateau that ends in tall pale cliffs above the remaining waters of the Aral Sea, reached on multi-day trips by four-wheel drive.

  • Aral SeaNature

    121 km away

    Aral Sea

    Once the world's fourth-largest lake, the Aral has shrunk to a fraction of its size since the 1960s, leaving the Aralkum desert behind.