Alisher Navoi: the poet behind every Navoi street, and where to find him in Uzbekistan

Spend a week in Uzbekistan and you will meet the same name a dozen times: a street in Tashkent, a metro station, an opera house, a national park, a library, a whole city and its region. Every town has its Navoi street. The man behind the name died more than five hundred years ago in Herat, and he never lived in most of the places that honour him.

Here is who Alisher Navoi was, why Uzbekistan treats him as its national poet, and where you can feel his presence on a trip, from the Navoi Theatre in Tashkent to the city that carries his name.

A poet of the Timurid court

Nizamiddin Alisher was born on 9 February 1441 in Herat, a capital of the Timurid world, today in Afghanistan. He went to school with Husayn Bayqara, a Timurid prince. In the late 1460s Alisher lived and studied in Samarkand, and in 1469, when Husayn Bayqara took power in Herat, he returned to serve him.

He served for the rest of his life: from 1472 he sat on the sultan’s supreme council, and he remained the ruler’s adviser. Under Husayn Bayqara Herat became one of the great cultural courts of the age, a city of poets, historians, musicians and painters, and Navoi was at its centre. He died there on 3 January 1501 and is buried in Herat.

Two pen names, two languages

Like every educated man of his time, Navoi knew Persian, the language of high literature, and he wrote Persian verse under the pen name Fani. But his life’s work was in Turkic, in the literary language now called Chagatai, and for those poems he chose the pen name Navoi, from navo, “melody”. He is considered the greatest poet of Chagatai literature, and modern Uzbek grew out of that literary language.

In 1499, near the end of his life, he wrote Muhakamat al-Lughatayn, “The Judgement of Two Languages”. In it he argued that Turkic was in no way poorer than Persian as a language of poetry, and pointed to its richness and precision. Coming from a man who wrote fine Persian verse himself, it was a statement about what his own language could do.

The Khamsa and the four divans

His best-known work is the Khamsa, five long poems written in 1483–1485 as an answer to the Khamsa of the Persian poet Nizami: Hayrat al-Abrar, “The Wonder of the Righteous”; Farhad and Shirin; Layli and Majnun; Sab’ai Sayyor, “The Seven Planets”; and Saddi Iskandari, “The Wall of Alexander”. In his Farhad and Shirin of 1484 the hero Farhad is a Chinese prince, and the story of the stonecutter who cuts through a mountain for love is still told in Uzbekistan today.

He gathered his lyric poems into four divans, finished in 1498 and arranged by the ages of a life: the wonders of childhood, the rarities of youth, the marvels of middle age and the benefits of old age. He also wrote Majalis al-Nafais, short portraits of the poets of his time, and Lisan al-Tayr, “The Language of the Birds”, a reply to the Persian poem of Attar.

Patron and builder

Navoi spent his wealth on the city. He is credited with founding or restoring about 370 mosques, madrasahs, libraries, hospitals and caravanserais in Khorasan, and in Herat alone with caravanserais, bathhouses, bridges and pools. He supported his friend, the poet Jami, the historians Mirkhond and Khondamir, and the painter Kamoliddin Behzad, who headed the royal book workshop from 1486. The Herat school of painting that grew around them shaped book art in Bukhara and beyond; more on that in Uzbek crafts in wood, metal and gold and in the Timurid heritage of Uzbekistan.

Why every city has a Navoi street

In Uzbekistan Navoi is the classic with whom the national literature begins, the poet who showed what the language could do. Every year on his birthday, 9 February, flowers are laid at his monuments, and actors and students read his ghazals aloud.

His name was given to the country’s main stage, the National Library, the old Panorama cinema in Tashkent, renamed in 1991, a metro station, an airport, a region and its capital. Big anniversaries left their mark too: an exhibition prepared in 1939 for his 500th anniversary grew into the Museum of Literature, and the 550th in 1991 gave Tashkent its national park.

Navoi in Tashkent: the theatre, the park and the metro

The Alisher Navoi Theatre. Designed by Alexey Shchusev, the opera and ballet house opened in November 1947 and was named after the poet in 1948. It seats about 1,400. Its six side halls are each decorated in the style of one region: Tashkent, Fergana, Bukhara, Samarkand, Khiva and Termez. In the Bukhara hall carved ganch is laid over mirrors, the Khiva hall is carved in wood, the stage curtain was embroidered in gold by Bukhara masters, and paintings in the foyer take their subjects from Navoi’s poems. The best way in is a performance; see Tashkent in the evening.

The Alisher Navoi National Park. In 1991 the old central park was enlarged and renamed for the 550th anniversary. On a hill in the middle stands the poet’s statue under an open pavilion with a blue ribbed dome on eight columns, and from it runs the Alley of Writers, created in 2017, with monuments to more than 20 Uzbek poets and scholars. The park reopened in 2022 after renewal, with a restored lake.

The metro station. Alisher Navoi station on the Uzbekistan line, opened in 1984, has domes on tapered columns and ceramic panels with scenes from the Khamsa. It is on our list of the best stations in the Tashkent metro.

The Museum of Literature, named after Navoi, keeps manuscripts of his works, among them a copy of the Khamsa made in Kokand in 1842. In 2026 it is temporarily closed while it prepares to move to a new building; other museums of the city are in Tashkent museums.

Samarkand and the city of Navoi

In Samarkand, Navoi was a student in the late 1460s, in the city of Ulugh Beg’s madrasah and observatory, a generation after the astronomer’s death. Walking the Registan with a guide is the closest you can come to the Samarkand he knew.

The city of Navoi, between Samarkand and Bukhara, was founded in 1958 next to the old town of Karmana and named after the poet. It is a modern industrial city, and for travellers it is the base for the brick mausoleums of Karmana, the Rabat-i Malik caravanserai on the Bukhara road and the rock carvings of Sarmysh: see Sarmysh and the Navoi region.

To follow Navoi through the whole country, our 9-day Turkic Heritage of the Silk Road tour starts in Navoi’s Tashkent and continues to Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva, with the guide in your language included.

In short

• Alisher Navoi (1441–1501) was a poet and statesman of the Timurid court in Herat and the greatest poet of Chagatai Turkic literature.
• He wrote in Turkic as Navoi and in Persian as Fani; his Khamsa of 1483–1485 answers Nizami’s five poems.
• In 1499 he argued that Turkic was fully fit for poetry; modern Uzbek grew out of his literary language.
• In Tashkent, see the Navoi Theatre with its six regional halls, the monument in the national park and Alisher Navoi metro station.
• His birthday, 9 February, is marked every year with flowers at his monuments and readings of his ghazals.