Pakhtakor Central Stadium

On the right bank of the Boz-su, right behind the Government House, the Dzhar-Degirman basin lay for a long time - the beginning of the Chorsu ravine, which cuts the old city from east to west. It got its name from a watermill on the cliff. Festivities were held on the flat bottom: people wrestled in kurash, rode horses in ulak, and walked the tightrope. According to the 1938 master plan, they were going to make a small pond here with an overpass above it. Architect Mithat Bulatov doubted this solution. In 1952, he came up with another idea: to redistribute the soil, fill in the ravines, and turn the basin into a "hill stadium" for 50-100 thousand spectators. There were models: the Kirov Stadium in Leningrad, the stadium in Warsaw. The boldness was in the location. City stadiums were usually placed closer to the outskirts, as was the case in the master plan, but this one ended up in the center, next to the main square of the capital. It was built as conceived. The stands lie directly on the ground, without supports, and form a huge earthen bowl in the shape of an ellipse. The top of the bowl rises 11.6 meters above the field, and only 5 meters above the surrounding street: from the outside, the stadium reads not as a structure, but as a green hill. The benches of the stands, if stretched in a line, stretch for more than 25 kilometers, and they are divided into 48 sectors. The embankment instead of reinforced concrete cost, according to Bulatov's biographers, at least ten times cheaper. The climate posed separate challenges. You want to play in Tashkent after sunset when the heat subsides, so eight openwork metal towers with searchlights were placed behind the stands at a height of 30 meters above the field. The field was sown with bermuda grass: on the advice of dendrologists, this grass does not burn out in summer and does not turn into a swamp in autumn and winter rains. Drainage and an irrigation water supply were laid under the turf. The only building of the complex is a three-story sports pavilion at the southern entrance, with halls, locker rooms, and a hotel for athletes. A courtyard and a tunnel under the stands lead from it to the arena. The pavilion is what drew criticism: in 1974, it was written that it was designed "with the uncritical use of elements of the old architecture of Central Asia." The bowl itself did not cause such a claim. The authors of the stadium are Bulatov and L. Karash, co-authors A. Knopova and O. Gaasenkopf, engineer V. Levchenko. Later, the entire new center gravitated toward the bowl: the Palace of Arts, the Central Committee building, the Youth House stood near it, and in the center project, sports and entertainment buildings were consciously gathered around "Pakhtakor".

Construction began on February 7, 1954, with a massive rally near the Jar-Degirman basin. The task was tough: a stadium for 50,000 spectators, with the first phase to be completed by September 25, in time for the Spartakiad of the republics of Central Asia and Kazakhstan. They missed this deadline. In the summer of 1955, graders, scrapers, and excavators were operating on the right bank of the Ankhor, while a small concrete plant roared nearby. They were concreting the tunnel through which athletes enter the field and leveling the slopes of the future bowl. Chief construction engineer V. I. Karpov recounted that the stadium would occupy 17 hectares, was built "on the Olympic model," and would "have an egg-like shape." A three-story winter pavilion was supposed to house a 325-square-meter gymnastics hall, and the stadium grounds were to be landscaped so as to merge with the boulevard on the embankment. Things did not go smoothly. In November 1955, during the campaign against excesses, builders complained that the design documentation for "Pakhtakor" was being issued to them "in parts, in pieces" and that it was impossible to organize work based on it. By the spring of 1956, the stadium was already operating, although it had not yet been officially opened. In May, a Festival of Song was held at the "new stadium," and in June, they played a match against the team from Ethiopia. In August, finishing work was underway, and the newspaper called "Pakhtakor" the country's fourth-largest stadium after Luzhniki. The construction results were summed up in a single line: in just over a year, about a million cubic meters of earth were excavated and moved, and about 18,000 cubic meters of concrete and reinforced concrete were laid. Workers, students, and schoolchildren helped out. They also counted the spectators. 47 rows encircled the bowl, 16 exits were meant to save Tashkent from crowds during football matches, and a parking lot for two thousand cars was being prepared near the stadium. A judges' box and four radio broadcast booths were set up in the central arena so that matches could be broadcast in four languages at once. Flagpoles for the flags of the union republics were installed above the stands. Ten years later, they wanted to make the stadium twice as large. In January 1966, three months before the earthquake, the head of the Tashgiprogor design group Yu. A. Khaldeev spoke about a reconstruction for 100,000 spectators: a second tier on reinforced concrete cantilevers over the western and eastern stands, which would simultaneously shade the lower rows; pavilions and locker rooms under the stands; and a Sports Palace for 15,000 and two swimming pools nearby. Hungarian specialists had already arrived to assemble the electronic scoreboard. Whether the second tier was built is not visible from our sources. Afterward, "Pakhtakor" was repaired in parts. In the mid-1970s, benches were replaced and a fencing hall was built, and in 1976-1978 the reconstruction was criticized for its slowness. In 1979, it was reassigned by a separate decree. And in the spring of 1989, it turned out that the utilities laid thirty-six years ago were "hanging by a thread," and they began replacing the lighting, with the work scheduled for 22 months.