Milliy Bog Metro Station (Komsomolskaya)

The structure here is standard for the line: a rectangular platform hall covered by ribbed slabs supported by two rows of columns. What is unusual is what was done with the place where the column meets the slab. Usually there is a crossbar - a beam connecting the columns. At Komsomolskaya, the crossbars were widened and turned into arches, and the arches were saturated with national ornament, with ganch carving. An arcade resulted: you walk along the platform and see not a row of rectangular supports, but an enfilade of openings, like in an iwan or a madrasa. The Oriental form is taken not as an overlaid pattern, but as a way to handle the structure. Next comes the technique for which it is worth looking at the ceiling. The crossbar-arches also serve as a cornice: they hide upward-facing light fixtures. The light hits the white structures of the ceiling, reflects off them and returns downward already diffused, and in the platform part there arises what a 1977 magazine called an effective soft lighting scheme. Not a single visible lamp - only the glowing ceiling and carved ganch on the arches, read in the reflected light. This is sensible from a purely practical standpoint as well. Ganch carving is a shallow and fine relief; under direct light it flattens and disappears, but under side and reflected light it comes alive. So the placement of the fixtures in the arches here is not a decoration, but a condition under which the ornament is visible at all. The walls of the passageways, vestibules, and columns are faced with light pink Gazgan marble, and the floor is laid with gray granite slabs. There are two vestibules, and stair descents from them lead directly into the platform hall.

The track walls at this station are red. They are faced with Gorokhov marble, which immediately distinguishes the hall from its neighbors on the line where the track walls are light: gray and white at Sabir Rakhimov and Peoples Friendship, and a color that cannot be confused with anything at Komsomolskaya. Shield inserts are set against the red background. A magazine calls them thematic and heraldic and explains that they depict the labor and combat feats of the Komsomol, meaning the station told its story not through a continuous panel like most neighbors, but through separate signs hung on the wall in a heraldic manner. Two more artistic panels are located above the stairway descents to the platform, where the passenger enters the hall. The authors of these works are artists B. Dzhalalov and R. Nemirovsky. If the first one is Bakhodyr Dzhalalov, and the initial and time match, then the station turns out to be one of his early works: five years later he would start painting Messengers of Eternity at the Cinema House, and in the nineties Dreams of Omar Khayyam at the Turkiston Palace. In 1977, he was approaching thirty. The architectural part was designed by the UzNIIIP Urban Planning Institute, architects V. Agafonova, A. Ablaeva, and R. Zaripov. Of the nine stations of the first phase, this is the only one made by this institute, while the rest were distributed among Tashmetroproekt, Tashgiprogor, TashNIIPIGenplan, TashZNIIEP, and Moscow Metgiprotrans. The station is located along Peoples Friendship Avenue, not far from the Leninist Komsomol Park of Culture and Recreation, hence the name. It was built partly using the cut-and-cover method: it was precisely on the section between Khamza and Komsomolskaya that metro builders first used industrial seismic-resistant lining made of monolithic volumetric blocks, which were first made in-house by the trust and later mastered by the Sergeli Reinforced Concrete Structures Plant. Today the station is called Milliy Bog - National Park: the park above changed its name, and the station followed, though not immediately, as there was another intermediate name between Komsomolskaya and the current one. The red marble and ganch arches remain in place.