Barak Khan Madrasah, Tashkent: Craft Cells and History
Inside Tashkent's Barak Khan Madrasah: craft cells in old student rooms, the Shaybanid tombs, its Soviet muftiate years and where the Uthman Quran is now.
Walk through the tiled portal of the Barak Khan Madrasah and turn left or right, and you're in a row of small doorways, each one a former student's cell. On a good day, people are working inside some of them: you might catch a copper engraver punching a pattern into a plate, or a wood carver with a half-finished panel on the bench. Elsewhere there are miniatures and calligraphy pages laid out, or Quran copyists at work, alongside lacquered boxes, painted plates, scarves and embroidered bags (Turkestan Travel lists copper and brass engravers, wood carvers and Quran writers among the resident craftsmen; last checked: September 2026). Entry to the courtyard costs nothing.
That's what you can do here today: browse, watch, and buy if something catches you. The building itself has had a stranger career than its souvenir stalls suggest. It began as a royal tomb, became a school, and spent half a century as the headquarters of Soviet Islam.
What to expect in the craft cells
The courtyard measures roughly 33 by 27.5 metres, according to the Tashkent tour operator Global Connect, which makes it small enough to walk round in five minutes and big enough that you'll want twenty. The cells open straight onto the arcade. Some are proper workshops with tools out on the bench; others are simply shops, and a few are shut on any given day.
We haven't found a published price list, and we won't invent one. What we can say is that nothing is marked in the way a supermarket item is, so the first figure you hear is an opening offer. Our take: if you want a miniature or a calligraphy piece, ask whether the person in front of you made it. A maker can tell you how long it took and what the pigments are. A reseller usually can't, and that answer tells you a lot about the price.
Is it touristy? A bit, yes.
But it's one of the few places in Tashkent where a craft stall sits inside a 16th-century building, and the cell format (one room, one door, one maker) is exactly how the madrasah was designed to be used. For comparison shopping before you buy, what's worth bringing home from Uzbekistan covers typical quality markers, and the Museum of Applied Arts across town is where you'll see the museum-grade versions of the same crafts.
Barak Khan Madrasah: a tomb first, a school second
The building started as a mausoleum. Suyunchkhoja Khan (also spelled Suyunij or Soyunidj), the first Shaybanid ruler of Tashkent, died in 1525, and a domed tomb went up for him shortly afterwards. The sources don't agree on the exact year: Global Connect gives 1530, GPSmyCity gives 1530 for the tomb and 1531 to 1532 for the wider build, and several operators give 1532. We'd treat it as "about 1530 to 1532" and leave it there.
His son Nauruz Ahmed, nicknamed Barak Khan ("barak" is usually glossed as "lucky" or "blessed"), then turned the site into a madrasah in the middle of the 16th century, building the teaching rooms and cells around his father's tomb. A second mausoleum on the site was intended for Barak Khan himself. He died in 1556 and was buried in Samarkand, where he'd moved to rule, so the Tashkent tomb built for him stayed empty. The official tourism portal, uzbekistan.travel, describes both mausoleums and the reburial in Samarkand (last checked: September 2026).
You'll sometimes read that Barak Khan was a grandson of Ulugh Beg. The family link runs through the female line, and the generation count varies between sources, so "a descendant of Ulugh Beg" is the safer phrase.
The portal is the detail to look at closely. Its arch uses a type of vault that Global Connect notes was unusual in Tashkent, finished in carved brick and mosaic, and GPSmyCity reads the whole gateway as closer to Samarkand work than local style. The outer walls run about 73 by 44 metres. Earthquakes, including the 1868 one, did real damage, and the vault you see was restored between 1955 and 1963 by the master craftsman Usta Shirin Muradov, with other conservation campaigns reported in 1946, 1949, 1951 and 1967. So when you photograph the tilework, you're photographing a mix of 16th-century structure and mid-20th-century repair, a pattern we unpick city by city in our piece on what's restored and what's original.
The Soviet decades: seat of the muftiate
This is the part most visitors never hear. On 20 October 1943, in the middle of the war, Moscow allowed a congress in Tashkent to set up the Spiritual Administration of the Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan, known by its Russian initials as SADUM. Its first mufti was Eshon Boboxon ibn Abdulmajidxon, the head of a family that went on to lead the board for decades.
According to the board's own history page on muslim.uz, the Barak Khan building was renovated in 1956 and converted into its administrative office (last checked: September 2026). For the next half-century, the officially sanctioned Islam of five Soviet republics was run from these cells and rooms. It was an odd arrangement: an officially atheist state ran its supervision of Islam out of a 16th-century religious school.
After independence the body was reorganised. It was called the Muslim Board of Mawarannahr from 1992 to 1995 and took its current name, the Muslim Board of Uzbekistan, in 1996. In 2007, when Tashkent was named a capital of Islamic culture and the whole Hast Imam square was rebuilt, the board moved out into a new building. The cells now belong to craftspeople. If you've read that the muftiate still sits inside Barak Khan, that information is out of date.
Where's the Uthman Quran now?
Not here, and not next door any more either. The madrasah never held the manuscript itself; for years it was displayed in the small Muyi Muborak madrasah on the same square. On 13 November 2025 it was moved to the Quran Hall of the new Center of Islamic Civilization, where it now sits in a climate-controlled case at the centre of the hall, according to the Center's own announcement (last checked: September 2026). The Center opened to the public on 17 March 2026.
So the practical point is simple. The Barak Khan courtyard is free and quick. The manuscript needs a ticket and roughly two hours at the Center of Islamic Civilization, a short walk away.
The rest of the square, briefly
- Hazrati Imam Mosque: the big Friday mosque with twin minarets, built in 2007.
- Tillya Sheikh Mosque: 1856 to 1857, Kokand Khanate era, still a working mosque.
- Muyi Muborak Madrasah: the small 16th-century building that used to show the Quran and still holds a manuscript library.
- Kaffal Shashi Mausoleum: the tomb of the 10th-century scholar the whole complex is named after, an active pilgrimage site.
Each gets its own section in our full Khast Imam Complex guide, including dress code and how to get there.
Hours and timing
There's no official timetable for the craft cells that we could verify. Operator listings put the courtyard open through the day, broadly from 09:00 into the early evening, and individual shops keep their own hours, so late afternoon can mean half the doors are shut (last checked: September 2026). Mornings are the safer bet if you actually want to see people working rather than just shopping.
One timing tip matters more than the rest. Avoid Friday around midday prayers, when the square fills with worshippers heading to the Hazrati Imam Mosque and traffic around Karasaray Street stops. Come on a weekday morning, look up at the portal on your way out, then walk to the Center while it's quiet.