Why everyone keeps saying “third Renaissance”

President Shavkat Mirziyoyev first used the phrase at Uzbekistan's Independence Day address in 2020, telling the country it stood “on the threshold of a new era, the Third Renaissance.” He returned to it weeks later at Teachers and Mentors Day, called it “a national idea,” and has repeated it consistently since: at the 31st independence anniversary in 2022, and again this year at Navruz, telling the country's students they are “the future builders of the Third Renaissance.” This is not a phrase coined for a museum opening. It is a framework the President has personally maintained and returned to for five years running - which raises an obvious question for anyone encountering it for the first time in the Centre's exhibition halls: a third Renaissance implies two that came before it. What were they?

The First Renaissance: a scientific golden age

This is the era of the Samanid dynasty, roughly the ninth to twelfth centuries, when Central Asian scholars working in and around Bukhara and Khwarezm produced some of the foundational texts of mathematics, astronomy and medicine. Al-Khwarizmi's work gave the world the term algorithm; Ibn Sina's Canon of Medicine shaped medical teaching for centuries; Al-Fergani's astronomical calculations were still being used by European scholars long after his death. The Centre represents this period through its “Tolerance” Square, built around scale models of Samanid-era monuments including the Samanid Mausoleum and the Rabati Malik complex.

The Second Renaissance: an empire's court culture

This covers the Timurid era, from Amir Temur's conquests in the late fourteenth century through to the court of Sultan Husayn Bayqara in Herat a century later. It includes Ulugh Beg, Temur's grandson, who built one of the medieval world's most advanced astronomical observatories in Samarkand, and Alisher Navoi, the poet and statesman whose work helped establish Chagatai as a literary language in its own right rather than a dialect written in the shadow of Persian. The Centre gives this period its own dedicated sector, built around Navoi's literary and philosophical legacy.

The Third Renaissance: still being written, by design

Here the framework changes character. The first two Renaissances are retrospective labels, applied by later historians to periods that had already closed. The Third is not: it is Mirziyoyev's own name for the present he is actively building, tied to the broader “New Uzbekistan” reform agenda he has pursued since 2017. In a 2020 speech to teachers, he described education, science and culture as “four interconnected links” in building it, and asked parents to serve as a fifth. The Centre represents the period with a modern glass stele at the heart of the exhibition rather than a historical reconstruction, for the simple reason that there is no historical distance yet to reconstruct.

The idea has escaped the government's own messaging

What makes the framework worth a Dispatch piece rather than a footnote is that it hasn't stayed contained to presidential speeches and the Centre's own exhibition text. An op-ed in Eurasia Review has analysed it directly, tracing Mirziyoyev's repeated invocations of Ulugh Beg as a model statesman-scholar. A paper in an Indonesian social-science journal treats “the Third Renaissance movement” as a subject worth academic study in its own right, cataloguing the speeches in which the President has used the phrase. Visitors to the Centre have started echoing it back in the guestbook: Sultan Raev of TURKSOY writes of Uzbekistan “continuing along this path” from two earlier Renaissance periods, and Poland's Minister of Agriculture, Stefan Krajewski, described the exhibition as presenting “the three renaissances” and the legacy of the individuals who built them. None of that adoption was guaranteed. A president can name an era; whether the name sticks is a separate and much less certain question, and on the evidence so far, this one has.

Why the framework matters for reading the rest of the site

Once the three periods are in view, a lot of the Centre's other material reads differently. The scientists in Echo of Enlightenment - Al-Khwarizmi, Al-Fergani, Ibn Sina - belong to the First Renaissance. Navoi and the Timurid halls belong to the Second. And the language used to describe nearly everything built or launched since 2017, from the Centre itself to the media Forum that opened it to international press, is deliberately placed inside the Third. The numbering isn't decoration. It's the argument the whole institution is making: that what's happening in Uzbekistan now belongs in the same category as the two golden ages that came before it, an argument the President has been personally repeating since 2020, and one independent commentators have now started taking seriously enough to analyse rather than simply repeat.