Tashkent Metro

Click photos to enlarge.

Tashkent was almost completely destroyed by an earthquake in the 60’s so pretty much the entire city dates from the Soviet era. They added a subway system when they rebuilt the city and the original stations from that time are decorated with Soviet art. Those stations are also bomb shelters and actually it was prohibited to take pictures in them because they are technically military locations. As they’ve been trying to increase their tourism they now allow photos and luckily so because each station is really unique. Most of them have a theme. One of the ones we went to is called Alisher Navoiy. He was a poet from Samarkand during the “Islamic Renaissance” of the 1400’s, which was centered in Samarkand and we will see a lot of their architectural achievements next week. So that station is decorated with scenes from his life. Not sure what some of the other themes are. The most famous of their subway stations is Kosmonavtlar, and the theme as you can guess is the Soviet space program. The walls are decorated with medallions that have portraits of important people from the space program. Most interesting choice to me is on the very end of the station - Icarus.  ed. note - Icarus is photo #6

I’ve heard people generally dislike Soviet architecture but I have also heard about the Moscow subway system. I was looking into it a little bit and people associate Soviet architecture blocks of big square plain concrete monstrosities. Which is interesting to me because when I think of Soviet buildings that’s not what I think of. There was a lot of Soviet era mosaics and public artwork in Georgia as well and the buildings definitely weren’t all stark and bare. Here, too, many of the Soviet era buildings are decorated inspired by the local culture. I wonder if it’s a bit of anti-communism sentiment since they built a lot of ugly but functional apartment buildings instead of suburbs full of single family homes in the American way. But later they built some pretty cool looking stuff too. I’ll send some pics of some of the buildings we saw later but I wanted to send one more of the subway system, lest I made it seem like it’s always empty. I used angles and patience to make it look that way but it gets quite full at rush hour. There’s about 3 million people in Tashkent.

Photo_1	Photo_2	Photo_3
Photo_4	Photo_5	Photo_6
Photo_7	Photo_8	Photo_9