Hamid Olimjon Metro Station

The station was named after Hamid Alimjan, whom a 1982 magazine calls the founder of Soviet Uzbek poetry. The poet died in a car crash in 1944 at the age of thirty-five; his widow was Zulfiya, also a poet. The station stands at the intersection of Pushkin Street and 50 Years of the Uzbek SSR Avenue, on the site of a square that was then planned to be built here and named after him. The main feature created here stands right on the platform: nine sculptural floor lamp fixtures. Each is carved from a solid block of white Koelga marble, which is Ural stone, the very same used for facing Moscow stations, and complemented by cast glass, bronze, and glass smalt. The author is the artist I. Lipene. Nine glowing pillars along the platform: the magazine writes that they give the station a festive look, and that is perhaps an exact word. On the first section of the line, light was hidden - in the ribs of slabs, in cornices, in crossbar-arches; here, on the contrary, it was placed in the hall like a sculpture. The lobbies are decorated with white marble art panels, and on one of them is a high relief of Hamid Alimjan himself. The sculptor is I. Jabbarov. A separate story here is the stone. The walls of the platform and lobbies are faced with Kibik-Kardon marble, and it was chosen for its range: the magazine explicitly states that the facing demonstrates the palette of this marble from white and pink shades to red ones, with a rich natural pattern. That is, the wall works as an exhibition of a single breed. In addition, marbles and granites from local deposits were used at the station - Gazgan, Seva-Say, and Aktau. The station is built single-vaulted. The vault is emphasized by eight arches that alternate every twelve meters and are covered with volumetric floral ornamentation inlaid with turquoise and purple glass smalt. The end walls are designed in the same spirit. The western lobby is connected to the platform by three escalator belts, the eastern one by a staircase; both are combined with pedestrian crossings.

By 1978, the first section of the Tashkent metro had already been operating for a year: twelve kilometers, nine stations. In April of that year, Pravda Vostoka published a conversation about what would come next, and the answer was this: a second section 4.2 kilometers long, three stations - the closest one from October Revolution Square being Hamid Olimjon, followed by Pushkinskaya and Maksim Gorkiy. Construction was harder than the first. In January 1979, the newspaper wrote about 593 underground meters covered and dreamed aloud: the day will come when after October Revolution station the radio will announce -Next is Hamid Olimjon-, then -Pushkinskaya- and -Maksim Gorkiy-. In June 1979, the tunneling of the left tunnel between Pushkin Square and Maksim Gorkiy Square was completed - the longest route of the section, 997 meters. They were covered by Boris Mukhin's brigade from the third administration of Tashmetrostroy, and it took a whole year: to excavate, line the tunnel with concrete, connect seismic fastenings with a monolithic structure, and inject cement mortar into the voids behind the wall. Decoration is a separate figure: in the three halls of the second section, nearly 14,200 square meters were faced. There was a slight confusion with the launch date, which can be seen from the newspaper itself. On August 8, 1980, it wrote that the first passenger trains would run along the second section on August 10, Builder's Day, and that the staff of the stations named after Hamid Olimjon, Pushkinskaya, and named after Gorkiy were at their workplaces in these pre-launch days. And the ceremonial rally on the occasion of the launch took place on August 18 - and right at this station. Opening the rally was V. A. Kazimov, chairman of the executive committee of the Tashkent City Council. Speakers included U. Umarov, first secretary of the Tashkent City Party Committee; P. V. Semyonov, manager of the Tashkentmetrostroy trust; L. K. Nizametdinov, head of the Hamid Olimjon station; N. Mavlyanov, a fitter-assembler at the Tashkent Aviation Production Association; and the first secretary of the board of the Writers' Union. The lineup of speakers itself speaks volumes about what the metro was considered: city authorities, the party, builders, a factory worker - and writers, because the station is named after a poet. From that day on, the line became a twelve-station one, with a total length of 16.5 kilometers. The platforms of the second section were made like the first ones - island platforms, ten meters wide, but 102 meters long.