The Soviet Mosaics of Tashkent: A Walking Route
Tashkent has at least 486 Soviet mosaic panels on ordinary apartment blocks. Where to find the best of them, who made them, and which are protected.
There are at least 486 Soviet mosaic panels in Tashkent. Most are on the gable ends of ordinary apartment blocks, in districts no tour bus goes near, and almost none of them are signposted. A government resolution has added 157 panels across the whole country to the National List of Tangible Cultural Heritage Objects, which means the arithmetic is uncomfortable: the majority of what's on the walls of the capital has no formal protection at all.
That's the reason to go looking now rather than later, and it's a better way to spend a Tashkent afternoon than another museum.
Why a city full of mosaics
The short version runs through the earthquake. On 26 April 1966 a shallow quake wrecked much of central Tashkent, and the reconstruction that followed brought in construction brigades and artists from across the Soviet Union. Thousands of prefabricated apartment blocks went up fast, and monumental art was written into the budget as a matter of policy: blank concrete walls got smalt, ceramic tile and relief panels.
What makes the Tashkent examples worth a detour, rather than just a curiosity, is the hybrid. The artists were working in a Soviet idiom but drawing on Central Asian ornament, Persian miniature composition and local subject matter. You get cosmonauts next to girih geometry, cotton harvests rendered like carpet borders, and portraits framed by the kind of floral scrollwork you'd see on a suzani. We've written about the same collision in built form in our piece on the capital's Soviet architecture, and the mosaics are its decorative wing.
The Zharski family panels
Three members of one family left work across the city, and all three panels are on the protected list.
Pyotr Zharski's panel of Abu Rayhan al-Biruni covers the stages of the scholar's life and sits in the Yakkasaray district at Babur Street 69/2. It's the most rewarding single stop on this list if you only make one, because it's a serious attempt at portraiture rather than decoration.
Nikolai Zharski's landscape panel is out in Chilanzar at Katartal Street 12, which is a metro ride and then a walk through a wholly residential district. Alexander Zharski's Young Uzbek Woman, a figure in a coloured dress holding a petal and a star motif, is further out still, in Bektemir at Vodnik bloc 78. That one is for completists.
The Drygin panels at Urikzar
Two panels by Vladimir Drygin stand in the third passage of Urikzar Street, also in Yakkasaray, and they're the pair we'd send a first-time mosaic hunter to.
Bayram, meaning celebration, puts three doira frame drums and three karnay trumpets inside a central circle. The karnay is the long horn you'll hear at Uzbek weddings, which makes the subject immediately legible once you know what you're looking at. The second panel, Asia, carries a portrait of the artist's wife in the upper section above a floral pattern.
Both are worked in smalt with raised relief, so they change noticeably as the light moves across them. Late afternoon is better than midday.
The ones you'll see anyway
Some of the best work is in places you're likely to be already.
Kosmonavtlar metro station is the obvious one, and it's now a UNESCO-listed monument in its own right after the July 2026 inscription of ten Tashkent modernist buildings. A continuous composition runs along the platform walls, carrying twelve circular ceramic medallions: Ulugh Beg, Galileo, Icarus, Sergei Korolev, Yuri Gagarin, Valentina Tereshkova, Vladislav Volkov and Vladimir Dzhanibekov among them, with Sputnik and other spacecraft between. Photography in the metro has been allowed since 2018, so you can take your time. Our metro guide covers fares and which other stations repay a stop.
Novza station on the Chilanzar line and Uzbekistan station on the Tashkent line both carry murals by Abdumalik Bukharbaev, who also did the ceramic and marble panels on the first floor of the TV tower.
The facade of the Tashkent Television Centre at Navoi Street 69 in Shaykhantakhur is the best-known work by Evgeny Ablin and is visible from the street without going anywhere near the building.
How to read one
Five minutes of vocabulary makes the whole afternoon better.
Materials. Most of the big facade works are smalt, an opaque coloured glass cut into small irregular tesserae, which is why they hold their colour after fifty years of sun that fades everything else in this city. Ceramic tile appears more often underground and on interiors. Relief panels, where the tesserae sit at different depths, are the ones that reward visiting twice at different hours.
Recurring subjects. Once you've seen four or five panels the vocabulary becomes obvious. Cotton bolls stand for the republic's economy and appear constantly. Space imagery, unusually dense here, ties into Central Asia's astronomical lineage through Ulugh Beg, which is why a 15th-century astronomer shares wall space with Gagarin. Women with books signal the Soviet literacy campaign. Clasped hands and groups in different national dress mean the friendship of peoples, the official doctrine that Tashkent was meant to embody.
The local grammar. Look at the borders rather than the centre. That's where the Central Asian element usually sits: interlaced geometric girih patterns, scrolling vegetal forms lifted from tilework, the shapes an embroiderer would recognise. A panel can be entirely Soviet in subject and entirely Uzbek in framing.
Not everything is about Uzbekistan either. A 1969 panel by Vladimir Kutkin at School No. 110 shows the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko holding a kobza, a reference to his collection Kobzar. Panels like that one are a record of who was living in Tashkent after the earthquake, when construction brigades arrived from every Soviet republic and many of them stayed.
A practical route
Half a day, in this order, using the metro plus short taxi hops:
- Start underground. Kosmonavtlar station, twenty minutes on the platform. No ticket needed beyond the 1,700 soum fare.
- Yakkasaray next. The al-Biruni panel at Babur Street 69/2, then the two Drygin panels at the third passage of Urikzar Street. These are within a short taxi ride of each other, 15,000 to 20,000 soum.
- Navoi Street for the Television Centre facade.
- Chilanzar if you have the appetite. Katartal Street 12, and keep your eyes on gable ends as you go. You'll find unlisted panels the guidebooks don't have.
Wandering is the point. A panel at Sebzar Street 1 in Shaykhantakhur made the national heritage list without anyone establishing who made it, which gives you a sense of how much documentation work is still outstanding.
What's been lost, and the politics of keeping them
Some of Arnold Gan's panels are gone. His surviving work includes a piece at Buhoro Street 14 in Mirabad and his contribution at Kosmonavtlar, but not everything he made is still standing. That pattern repeats across the city: blocks get renovated, facades get clad in modern panels, and the mosaic underneath goes into a skip.
The 2017 demolition of the House of Cinema, a circular concrete building from 1982, was the moment the issue became public. It triggered the documentation and preservation effort that eventually produced the UNESCO nomination, and it changed the conversation about Soviet-era heritage in a country that had spent the 1990s trying to move past it.
That tension is real and worth naming. These are artworks made under an occupying political system, celebrating its themes, by artists who were often not Uzbek. Uzbekistan has decided they're part of the national record anyway. The official framing now is that the mosaics turn ordinary walls into landmarks of memory and should be studied, conserved and used for tourism.
The one outside the city
Worth a mention because it's the most ambitious piece of monumental decoration the programme produced, and it isn't in Tashkent at all.
The Sun Heliocomplex, a solar furnace built between 1981 and 1987 in the Tashkent region, was inscribed by UNESCO alongside the nine city buildings in July 2026. Its concave mirror array is the functional part. The facade carries sun-inspired artworks by Irena Lipene, and the building was designed so that the engineering and the decoration argue the same point about light. Getting there needs a car and roughly an hour and a half from the capital, and access depends on whether the facility is running tours, so check before you set out. For anyone who has spent a morning looking at cosmonaut medallions underground, it's the logical last stop.
Beyond the capital
Tashkent has the densest concentration, but the programme was national. Navoi, Nukus, Fergana and Angren all carry panels on civic buildings and housing blocks from the same decades, generally in worse condition and with far less documentation behind them. If you're travelling to Karakalpakstan or the Fergana Valley anyway, glance at the ends of apartment buildings as you pass. The hit rate is higher than you'd expect.
Practical notes for hunting them
- Bring the addresses. Nothing is signposted and taxi drivers won't know a panel by name. Street and number works.
- These are people's homes. Shooting a residential block from the street is fine. Wandering into courtyards and photographing windows is not.
- Light. Relief panels need raking light. Morning or late afternoon, not noon.
- Time. Budget four hours for a proper circuit, or one hour if you only do Kosmonavtlar and Yakkasaray.
If you're building a wider plan for the capital, our two-day route has a natural slot for this on the second afternoon, and the background to the reconstruction is in our account of the 1966 earthquake.
Sources: Kursiv Media Uzbekistan for the inventory of named panels, artists and addresses, and Gazeta.uz for the July 2026 UNESCO inscription that covers Kosmonavtlar station.
Featured image: Panpanchik (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons.