Environment & Transitions · International · Youth & Education · Portrait

Aral Sea: youth changes course

14 October 2025Photos and text: Julie Gleyze31 images

01 / 31 · 14 October 2025Julie Gleyze / Collectif DR

The desert stretches where boats once docked. Moynak, once a thriving fishing port in Karakalpakstan (Uzbekistan), long symbolized the ecological disaster caused by the Soviet diversion of the rivers feeding the Aral Sea. Between 1960 and today, the sea’s surface area and water volume have shrunk by 90%. After the collapse of the USSR, the region went through a long decline, marked by unemployment, isolation and loss of bearings. Yet a new generation is emerging: connected, ambitious young people, torn between dreams of elsewhere and the desire to breathe new life into their hometown. They grew up near the hulks of ships, between the stories of their grandparents, the last generation to have seen the sea, and the sudden arrival of social media, helped in particular by improved digital infrastructure during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Koke composes electro sets inspired by local traditions, Sabrina dreams of a career in New York and Mansur guides the tourists who come to see the scars of the vanished sea. All of them embody a pivotal generation. The last heirs of a Soviet past in ruins and of a maritime memory fading into oblivion, they are also the first to grow up in an Uzbekistan opening up to the world, shaped by the arrival of the internet and social media, the development of tourism and the first major cultural events such as the Stihia festival, in the heart of the Aralkum Desert.

Through them, Moynak is no longer just a forgotten disaster but becomes the quiet stage of a turnaround: that of a community which, between memory and change, is trying to imagine a future where there was no longer any horizon.by Julie Gleyze – Full story (text and photos) on request

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