Amir Timur Museum and Square, Tashkent
A blue-domed museum of the Timurids, a square that has changed its statue four times, and the pedestrian street beside it. What to see and what it all means.
The centre of Tashkent is a park with a statue of a man on a horse. The man is Timur, the museum next door is dedicated to him and his dynasty, and both are as much about the 1990s as about the 14th century.
This is the most convenient historical stop in the capital and the one that tells you most about how modern Uzbekistan chose to present its past.
The square and its four statues
The park was laid out in the Russian colonial period and has carried a series of monuments, each removed when the politics changed.
First came a statue of the Russian general Konstantin von Kaufman, who conquered Tashkent. After the revolution that went, replaced in time by Stalin. Stalin was removed during de-Stalinisation and replaced by Karl Marx, whose bust stood here for decades. In 1993, two years after independence, Marx came down and Timur went up.
The present bronze shows Timur mounted, one hand raised, with an inscription reading that strength lies in justice. Whatever you think of the sentiment, the sequence of statues is a compressed political history of the city, and standing in front of it with that in mind is more interesting than the monument itself.
The museum
The State Museum of the History of the Temurids opened in 1996, on the 660th anniversary of Timur's birth. It is a circular building with a ribbed blue dome, built in a deliberately Timurid idiom, with a marble and gold interior and a painted ceiling above the atrium.
Inside, across two floors, the collection covers the Timurid century and its legacy:
- Manuscripts and documents, including copies of works produced under Timurid patronage.
- Arms, armour and coins from the period.
- Ceramics and metalwork from Samarkand and the wider empire.
- Models and reconstructions of the great buildings, useful if you have not yet been to Samarkand.
- The forensic reconstruction of Timur's face, based on Mikhail Gerasimov's work after the 1941 opening of the tomb in Gur-e-Amir.
Much of what is displayed is reproduction rather than original, which disappoints some visitors. The building, the murals and the framing are the real exhibit.
Reading the politics
Timur was rehabilitated deliberately. In the Soviet period he was taught as a destroyer; after 1991 the new state needed a national figure who predated Russia, and he was the obvious candidate, appearing on banknotes, in street names and in this museum.
The historical Timur was both a patron of extraordinary architecture and a conqueror whose campaigns killed on an enormous scale. The museum presents the first half of that with great care and the second half lightly, which is not unusual for a national museum anywhere.
Knowing this does not spoil the visit. It makes it a more interesting hour, and it is the context our Registan guide and Samarkand guide assume when they describe what he built.
The opening of the tomb
One exhibit deserves its own explanation: the reconstructed face.
In June 1941 a Soviet team led by the anthropologist Mikhail Gerasimov opened Timur's grave in Gur-e-Amir in Samarkand. The examination confirmed details the chronicles had recorded, including injuries to the right arm and leg that matched the nickname Timur the Lame, and established that the man in the tomb was tall for his time.
Gerasimov's speciality was reconstructing faces from skulls, and the head he produced from Timur's remains is the basis for nearly every image of him you will see in Uzbekistan today, including the statue outside.
Attached to the story is a famous piece of folklore: that an inscription warned of disaster if the grave were disturbed, and that Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union days after the opening. The dates line up, which is why the story has never died. It is a coincidence with excellent timing rather than evidence of anything, and Uzbek guides tell it with relish either way.
The remains were reburied in Samarkand in late 1942. Our Samarkand guide covers Gur-e-Amir, where the story properly belongs.
Visiting
- Where: on Amir Timur square, in the middle of central Tashkent, a short walk from the Amir Timur Xiyoboni metro station.
- Hours: daily, generally 10am to 5pm, with a weekly closing day; check locally.
- Tickets: inexpensive, with a separate fee for photography (last checked: July 2026).
- Time needed: 45 minutes to an hour.
- Guides: available at the desk and worth it; English labelling is limited.
What else is on the square
The area around the park is the most walkable part of central Tashkent.
Broadway, officially Sayilgoh street, runs off the square: a pedestrian strip of cafes, portrait painters, souvenir stalls and buskers. It is where Tashkent goes in the evening and the best place in the city to sit outside with a coffee.
The Hotel Uzbekistan, a Soviet modernist slab on the square's eastern side, is one of the best-known buildings in the city and a period piece worth photographing.
The chiming clock and the old cinema buildings nearby fill in the Soviet-era streetscape, and the Museum of Applied Arts is a short taxi ride away.
Our Tashkent travel guide puts these into a day, and the metro guide covers the stations around the square, several of which are worth seeing for their own decoration.
One small tip for photographers: the museum's dome and the statue line up from the northwest corner of the park, with trees framing both. It is the standard Tashkent postcard shot and it takes about a minute to find.
Half a day here, ending on Broadway at dusk, is the easiest good afternoon in the capital.
Featured image: Petar Milošević (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons.