On October 23, Uzbekistan’s Foreign Ministry summoned the Iranian ambassador in Tashkent in order to hand over a note of protest related to a recent slate of social media postings made by several Iranian diplomatic missions. The posts sniped at U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, using his recent visit to Samarkand as a touchstone.

“It’s great that you’re learning history! The place where you are standing is part of the Persian civilization and architecture. The same civilization you were babbling nonsense about last week at the Acropolis!” read a since-removed post on X from the Iranian embassy in Armenia. 

In early October, Rubio delivered remarks during a visit to Greece that set off a history-based social media war that has now spilled over to Uzbekistan. With the ancient Acropolis as his backdrop, he mused on the meaning of Western civilization. Early in the speech he recounted the destruction of the Acropolis in 480 BCE by a Persian army. 

“The Persians plundered the temples, burned the shrines, and razed the Acropolis to the ground but when the Athenians returned, they gathered the broken remains of the old Acropolis and buried them in the hill where it had stood. And decades later, under Pericles, they raised the Parthenon,” Rubio said before jumping ahead a 25 centuries to the modern era and the American obsession with antiquity. 

Later in the speech, Rubio got the point: a rhetorical attack to match the physical war ongoing between the U.S. and Iran.

“It is from the Greeks that the West inherited its sense of duty – an unbreakable loyalty to one’s code, one’s cause, one’s country… This is wholly different from what we see, even now, for example from fanatics like the radical mullahs of Iran, whose cult of death hails child suicide bombers as national heroes, and portrays martyrdom as an end to itself.”

When Rubio landed in Uzbekistan two weeks later, Iran’s keyboard warriors were ready. 

“At the Acropolis, you invoked civilizations. Samarkand invites you to a deeper conversation with history, in a city whose heritage is deeply interwoven with Iranian civilization,” the Iranian Permanent Mission to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) stated in its post, which remains available as of publication. 

On October 24, the Uzbek Foreign Ministry reported that it had summoned the Iranian ambassador,  Mohammad Ali Eskandari, to complain about the posts, which it said in its own social media post, “interpret the historical and cultural heritage of the city of Samarkand for unilateral political purposes.”

“During the meeting,” the ministry said, “it was noted that the heritage of Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva, and other historical cities of Uzbekistan is an integral part of the rich and multifaceted historical and cultural development formed over many centuries.”  The ministry demanded that the offending posts be taken down, and those posted the Iranian embassies in Armenia, China, and Zimbabwe have been.

“Uzbekistan values ​​relations with Iran based on mutual respect and trust,” the Foreign Ministry stated. “At the same time, it maintains its principled position against one-sided interpretation of the historical and cultural heritage of our country.”

Of note: While a post regarding Tashkent’s summoning of the Iranian ambassador remains available on Instagram as of publication, there’s no trace of an earlier post on the Foreign Ministry’s website regarding the meeting – although a relic remains on Facebook.

Without recounting the entire history of Samarkand, it’s fair to say that the city’s history and culture is multilayered, with many empires having risen and fallen across (and from within) its territory. It has existed, in some form, since the 8th century BCE. In 329 BCE, Marakanda – as it was then known – was captured by Alexander the Great. It had been one of the most important cities for the Sogdian civilization; by the time of Alexander, Sogdiana was part of the greater Achaemenid Persian Empire.

The importance of Persian civilization to Central Asia is indisputable. What Tashkent took umbrage over, however, is the operationalization of the past into a weapon (albeit an online one) in a very modern, and very difficult, conflict.

To put it bluntly: Uzbekistan does not want to be invoked in the Iran-U.S. conflict, certainly not while it has tried to deepen relations with Washington while also maintaining ties with Iran.