"Mirzo Ulugbek" Metro Station (50 Years of the USSR)

Of the nine stations of the first phase, this one is the most straightforward in its design. It was named "50 Years of the USSR" after the anniversary celebrated in 1972 while the metro was still under construction, and all the subsequent decoration was subordinated to this name. It works like this. The platform hall is supported by two rows of red granite columns - a magazine calls them sculptural, and for good reason: the top of each column is encircled by a relief capital, and it is on these bands that the entire program rests. They depict the coat of arms of the USSR and the coats of arms of the union republics against the background of their flags. That is, a passenger walking along the platform passes along a row of coats of arms - fifteen republics, repeated across the columns. Artists E. Aliev, V. Degtyarev, and N. Bandeladze worked on this. The same motif is repeated in the vestibules, but differently: there, the heraldic panels are designed in the form of a national carpet, and in the middle of the carpet is the coat of arms of the USSR. This is a characteristic technique for Tashkent of the seventies: state symbolism is not opposed to local tradition, but embedded into it, like pattern into pattern. The station stands at the intersection of Peoples' Friendship Avenue and Volgogradskaya Street, next to administrative and cultural-consumer complexes and a park of culture and recreation that bore the same name - 50th Anniversary of the USSR. The names here went in pairs: station and park, metro and recreation spot. Even buses measured their routes from here: in November 1977, "Pravda Vostoka" announced a new inner-ring route "K", which started from the metro bus station "Named after the 50th Anniversary of the USSR" and ran along Peoples' Friendship Avenue, Ivan Franko, Katartal, Segizbaev, Gafur Gulyam, and Volgogradskaya streets. Since 1992, the station has been called "Mirzo Ulugbek" - after the grandson of Tamerlane, a 15th-century astronomer and ruler who built an observatory in Samarkand. The anniversary date was replaced by the name of the scientist, and the granite columns with coats of arms remained: the Tashkent metro was almost never rebuilt. The station named by time survived this time and preserved it in stone.

To understand how '50 Years of the USSR' differs from neighboring stations, you need to look not at the coats of arms, but up and down - at the ceiling and the floor. The ceiling is made using a technique that is not repeated anywhere else in the Tashkent metro. The side aisles are paneled with profiled aluminum with recessed lights, and they are directed not just into the hall, but onto the boarding part of the platform - right where people stand waiting for the train. A 1977 magazine explained this directly: light here serves as an important means of spatial formation, an organic structural element emphasizing the spatial solution. Simply put, the station was built from light just as much as from concrete: a light strip along the edge of the platform dictates where to walk and where to stand. The floor is arranged no less calculatedly. The floors of the passageways, vestibules, and platform are laid with Aktau gray granite, and a pattern of black labradorite runs along the platform - a stone with a characteristic bluish shimmer that changes depending on the angle from which you look at it. The track walls and vestibule walls are faced with light-toned Gazgan marble, so the dark floor pattern turns out to be the deepest spot in the entire hall. The station was designed by the Tashmetroproekt institute: architects Ya. Mansurov, V. Makhmudov, and A. Tabibov. The same trio designed the 'Sabir Rakhimov' terminal at the other end of the line, only the order of the surnames in the signature is different - Tabibov comes first there. Their two stations turned out fundamentally different: at the terminal, all the semantic weight is placed in the center of the platform on six granite pylons, while here it is distributed among the columns and the light. The station was built mainly using the cut-and-cover method. In July 1975, 'Pravda Vostoka' reported that the routes 'Chilanzar' - '50 Years of the USSR' and 'Hamza' - 'Komsomolskaya' were being created by the open method and were nearing completion, and the section '50 Years of the USSR' - 'Hamza' had already been tunneled using the underground method. A year later, in August 1976, the newspaper wrote that construction and installation work at the 50th Anniversary of the USSR station was still intensively ongoing - it was one of those stations that did not open first.