Sukok Kabob Festival: Dates, Tickets & Venue (Parkent)

Smoke, Skewers and Snowline

This is a festival you eat your way through. On a December day above Parkent, the main event is the grill: long rows of skewers over glowing coals, fires burning in the open, and live music playing with the first ridges of the Western Tien Shan behind it.

Uzbek kabob grilling happens on a mangal, a narrow trough of charcoal with the skewers laid across it. Meat cooks close to the heat and gets turned by hand. The festival is named for sukok kabob, and its grilling tradition is the thing everyone comes up the mountain to see.

Date, Venue and Entry

The festival takes place on December 10, 2026. It is held in the mountains above Parkent, a district town at the foot of the Chatkal range, roughly 50 km east of central Tashkent.

The facts this guide is built on don’t include the exact hillside site, a ticket price or a sales channel. Entry is run by the festival’s organiser, so those details sit with them. That is also why this page names no fee.

The Road Up from Tashkent

Parkent is an easy day trip from the capital. Driving from central Tashkent usually takes somewhere between one and one and a half hours, depending on traffic leaving the city and on road conditions in the foothills in winter.

Visitors usually come up in one of these ways:

• Ride-hailing: Yandex Go is widely used in Tashkent and is the simplest door-to-door option for the outbound leg.
• Shared taxis: these run between Tashkent and the Parkent district and leave once the car is full.
• Private driver: groups often hire a driver for the day, which also solves the return trip from a mountain site after dark.

Getting a ride back down is harder than getting one up. Day-trippers usually agree on the return with their driver before the evening.

Eating at the Mangal

Kabob here is eaten with your hands and shared. It usually comes with raw sliced onion, often dressed with vinegar, and round non bread, with green tea poured alongside. A few habits help you fit in:

• Bread is treated with respect. People tear non by hand, don’t put it face down and don’t leave it on the ground.
• Tea comes in small pours. A host fills the piala (bowl) only partway and tops it up often. A half-full bowl is hospitality, not stinginess.
• Greetings are warm. Uzbeks often greet with a hand on the chest, and assalomu alaykum is how you say hello. Rahmat means thank you.
• Cash moves faster. Outside Tashkent, Uzbek som in notes is the norm. Local Uzcard and Humo cards are common, but foreign cards are hit and miss at a temporary stall.

Ordering is mostly pointing and counting skewers on your fingers. Grill cooks are used to it.

Dressing for a December Hillside

The foothills above Parkent are colder than Tashkent, and snow is common higher up in December. Days are short, and the sun goes behind the ridges well before evening. At an outdoor festival with no walls, that cold comes on fast.

Experienced festival-goers usually wear:

• Insulated boots with grip, since paths can be frozen or muddy
• Layers they can open up by the fires and close again away from them
• A hat and gloves that still let them hold a skewer
• A headlamp or phone torch for walking to the car after dusk

Around Parkent: Sun and Mountains

Make a day of it. The best-known sight near Parkent is the Big Solar Furnace of the Physical-Technical Institute “Sun”. It was built in the 1980s on the foothills, and its huge curved mirror wall faces a field of movable heliostats. It is one of only a few installations of its kind in the world.

To the north and east, the Chatkal range runs towards the Chimgan area of Bostanliq district, Tashkent’s main winter mountain getaway. Visitors who want more than one day in the mountains usually base themselves there or back in Tashkent.