The Tashkent metro: an underground museum, station by station

On 26 April 1966 an earthquake destroyed much of old Tashkent. The rebuilt city got new avenues, a modernist centre and a metro. The decree to design and build it was signed on 26 September 1967, when Tashkent had just passed one million people.

It took persistence. Sharof Rashidov, then the head of the Uzbek republic, travelled to Moscow eighteen times to win permission, and Moscow asked for studies of the region’s earthquakes, groundwater and soil first. Work began in 1972 in Chilonzor, the most crowded district.

The earthquake is built into the walls. The structures are designed for shaking of up to 9 points on the MSK-64 intensity scale, in thick reinforced concrete. Most stations lie only about 8 metres down and were dug as open pits, because of the groundwater. Nearly all the materials came from Uzbekistan, from the white Nurata marble of the columns to local granite underfoot.

In November 1977 the first line opened with nine stations. It was the first metro in Central Asia and the seventh in the Soviet Union, and every station was given its own theme and its own artists.

Today the metro has four lines and 50 stations.

The three older lines run underground and hold the art. The Circle Line runs above the streets on a viaduct; it opened in 2020 and has grown in stages, most recently in 2025. Its stations are bright and modern; for chandeliers, stay underground.

In 2025 the metro carried 286.8 million passengers, about 785,000 a day. On 16 December 2024 it carried a million people in a single day for the first time.

Opened on 8 December 1984, this is the station many call the most beautiful in the city. The architect was Sergo Sutyagin. The walls shift from turquoise at the floor to deep blue at the ceiling, like the sky seen on the way to orbit, the round columns are clad in glass, and glass stars run along the ceiling like the Milky Way.

Along the walls hang ceramic medallions: Ulugh Beg, the 15th-century astronomer-king of Samarkand, Icarus, Yuri Gagarin, Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, and the cosmonauts Vladislav Volkov and Vladimir Dzhanibekov. The murals are by the monumental artist Arnold Gan.

In April 2024 Kosmonavtlar joined Uzbekistan’s national heritage register, and in July 2026 it became part of the UNESCO World Heritage site “Tashkent Modernist Architecture”. It is the only metro station on the list. If Ulugh Beg’s medallion makes you curious, his madrasah is the first building on our Registan.

The hall is a row of domes resting on tapered columns, and it feels more like a madrasah than a station. It is named after Alisher Navoi, the 15th-century poet who founded literature in the Uzbek language.

The turquoise ceramic reliefs on the walls illustrate his Khamsa, five long poems: look for Farhod and Shirin, Layli and Majnun, and Alexander the Great building his wall. The sculptor Ahmet Shaymuradov spent four years on them, working with the artist Chingiz Akhmarov. In August 2019 twelve young musicians from the Tashkent Philharmonic played Bach on this platform, the first concert in the history of the metro.

Alisher Navoi’s twin across a short passage, Pakhtakor opened with the first line in 1977. Its name means “cotton grower”. Above the entrance a copper relief shows cotton, the “white gold” of the republic, by Vladimir Burmakin, who also made the station’s mosaic panels. The columns are pale Gazgan marble, and their aluminium capitals are lit from inside.

Cotton comes back on the blue line: at Uzbekistan station the lamps of glass and metal are shaped like open cotton bolls, under a ceiling of carved ganch plaster. To see the real thing in a field, read our cotton season guide.

One stop further, under Independence Square, is a hall built to impress. It opened in 1977 as Lenin Square and took its present name in 1991. Crystal chandeliers hang in domes along the sides and down the centre of the hall, white Nurata marble covers the columns, pale pink Gazgan marble the walls, and the granite floor carries a national pattern.

Toshkent lies under the square of the main railway station. Its ceramics are by Saparniyaz Sultanmuratov, and the stairways carry images made for the city’s 2,200th anniversary.

Chorsu, opened in 1989, was dug as an open pit right through the bazaar square while the bazaar itself was being rebuilt. It is finished in white Gazgan marble, with reliefs called “Ecology” and “Link of Times”.

The green Yunusobod line opened in October 2001, after the slow years of the 1990s. Yunus Rajabiy is the deepest station in the system, 24 metres down, with ceilings more than 7 metres high; nineteen drainage wells were drilled to keep the groundwater out. Its columns are crowned with capitals that double as lamps.

Bodomzor, “almond orchard”, is three stops north: a white vault traced with blue star patterns and dotted with painted ceramic flowers.