Muynak Ship Cemetery and Aral Sea Museum

Until the 1960s Muynak stood on a peninsula in the Aral Sea, then the fourth-largest lake on Earth. It was a prosperous port with a fish cannery, a fleet of trawlers and tens of thousands of people; fish from the Aral fed much of the Soviet Union. Then the waters of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya were diverted on a vast scale to irrigate cotton. The sea began to shrink, its salinity rose and the fish died. The shoreline retreated year after year, leaving Muynak’s boats stranded on a plain of sand and salt. Today the water is well over 100 kilometres away.

The ship cemetery

Below the old shore, where a memorial now stands on the bluff, a line of hulks has been gathered on the former seabed: fishing trawlers and smaller vessels, their paint long gone, slowly rusting in a landscape of saxaul shrubs. You can walk among them and look out from the bluff over what was open water within living memory. It is a quiet, unsettling place, and it is the image of the Aral disaster known around the world.

The museum

The Aral Sea museum (local history museum) in the town tells the story through photographs, paintings and objects from Muynak’s fishing days, including scenes of the harbour and cannery in their prime, and documents the sea’s retreat decade by decade. A short visit adds the human dimension to what you see outside.

Muynak today

The town is far smaller than in its fishing days, but it has a new airport and a growing number of visitors. Since 2018 it has hosted Stihia, an electronic music festival held among the ships. Muynak is also the starting point for the off-road drive to the present shore of the Aral Sea.