The story of Tashkent Metro

Until 31 May 2018 you could not have taken a single photo down here. The stations were treated as military installations, because the metro also had a secondary role as a nuclear bomb shelter; from 1 June 2018 the long-standing ban was lifted. Planning began in 1968, two years after the major earthquake of 1966, and the first line opened on 6 November 1977 with nine stations.

It was the seventh metro built in the former USSR and the first in Central Asia. Built to resist earthquakes of magnitude 9.0, its tunnels lie only 8–25 metres deep. Each station is designed around its own theme, often reflected in its name, and leading Uzbek architects and artists decorated them with marble, granite, smalt, ceramics, glass and alabaster.

After 1991 many stations were renamed to remove references to Communism. Today four lines run over 70.4 kilometres and serve 50 stations, and in 2025 the metro carried 286.8 million passengers, about 785,000 a day.