Olmazor Metro Station (Sabir Rakhimov)

The Tashkent Metro was built starting from the outskirts. The Sabir Rakhimov station stands in the southwest of the city, at the intersection of Peoples' Friendship Avenue and Gavhar Street, and back in 1975, Pravda Vostoka described it precisely like that: the station from which, essentially, the Tashkent Metro begins. Nearby was a railcar depot, nearby the Zhiguli car service center was under construction, and from it, through underground vestibules, passengers descended to the platform. The logic was not ceremonial, but construction-driven. Here the line emerged toward the depot, here it was easiest to carry out work using the cut-and-cover method - the station was built in an open pit from precast reinforced concrete - and from here the rails went forth. In July 1976, the newspaper reported that on the section between the Sabir Rakhimov and Chilanzar stations, they had begun assembling twelve-and-a-half-meter rail lengths. In the spring of 1977, this same section was being laid by Moscow metro builders: a reporter watched as steel lengths of rails and sleepers were assembled under the arches of the tunnel, and marveled at how neatly everything turned out for them. On July 28, 1977, a test passenger train ran along this section for the first time. The newspaper stated the distance it traveled down to the meter: 2,105 meters. A little over three months remained until the opening: the first segment of the line opened on November 6, 1977, for the sixtieth anniversary of October, after five years of construction. The entire 12.17-kilometer line, from this station to the October Revolution station in the center, was considered a gift to the city. The construction took place in soils that were a problem in themselves. The chief engineer of Tashmetroproekt, Georgy Oganesov, explained in a magazine that the loess soils making up the site are prone to settlement, most severely in the six-meter stratum, and that below eight meters they become compacted - which is why the tunnels of the first section were laid in non-settling soils. Half the line was driven using mined tunneling and half using cut-and-cover: 6.4 kilometers versus 6.7. All this in an area with high calculated seismicity, so the structures were made with rigid connection nodes and anti-seismic belts. The station itself is of the column type, bright and emphasized in its tranquility. The walls of the pedestrian exits, the lobby columns, and the track walls are faced with light Gazgan marble, the platform hall columns with white Nurata marble, and they support a white ribbed ceiling with hidden lighting fixtures between the ribs. Everything bright in this hall is gathered in the middle of the platform, and the second review is about that. The station also had a very late, perestroika-era fame. In May 1989, Pravda Vostoka complained about an experiment with automatic ticket machines: passengers had to stock up on coins in advance, and there was nowhere to exchange them. The duty attendant advised going up to the street and asking passersby for small change. And only one person in this report gave sensible advice: go to Sabir Rakhimov, they will exchange them there, it is the only metro station outside the experiment.

In the middle of the platform stand six pylons made of red Emelyanov granite. These are not supports - structurally, the hall is held up by marble columns - but an independent sculptural composition that gives the station its distinct character. On the pylons are high reliefs, each with a title: "The Oath", "Seeing Off to the Front", "In a Single Family", "Everything for the Front", "To Defend the Motherland", "Victory". On the ends of the pylons are high reliefs of military orders. Together, this is a story about the war, and a dual story at that: both about the front and the rear, about how the peoples of the Soviet Union fought and worked. The author is sculptor Kh. Salakhitdinov. The composition is completed by heraldic panels made of colored smalt depicting the triumph of victory. And on one of the pylons is a high relief of the man whose name the station bore. Sabir Rakhimov, Hero of the Soviet Union, the first Uzbek to become a general, died in March 1945 near Königsberg. A 1977 magazine wrote about him with the formula of its time: the son of the Uzbek people, in whose honor the station is named. Artists V. Zhmakin, A. Khabidulin, and V. Loginov worked on the portrait and panels. It is worth noting how this decoration is technically arranged. The red granite of the pylons is the only dark spot in the hall, where everything else is white: the marble of the columns, the ribbed ceiling, the light track walls. The light in the station is hidden, it comes from the spaces between the plate ribs, and the cornices above it are decorated with national details. That is, the hall is made as a neutral light background, and all the semantic load is moved to the center, to the six stones. The station was designed at Tashmetroproekt by architects A. Tabibov, V. Makhmudov, and Ya. Mansurov. The same people made the neighboring station "50 Years of the USSR": the names in the captions under the photographs in the magazine match almost completely, only the order is different. The station is called "Olmazor" today - named after the housing estate; it bore the general's name until 2010. The pylons with high reliefs have not gone anywhere: the Tashkent metro, unlike much in the city, has hardly been rebuilt, and the underground halls of the first phase stand just as they were commissioned in 1977. Mostly the lighting was changed: at some stations, warm lamps gave way to cold ones, and white marble reads differently because of this than the authors intended.