Victory Park Tashkent: WWII Memorial, Museum, Tickets
Victory Park Tashkent opened 9 May 2020. What the WWII memorial and Museum of Glory show, the disputed Uzbek war figures, tickets, hours and metro access.
On 9 May 2020, the 75th anniversary of the German surrender, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev opened Victory Park in Tashkent at a scaled-down ceremony. The city was under Covid quarantine, and the memorial built for crowds stayed shut to the public until 15 October 2020.
That timing tells you what the place is for. Victory Park (G'alaba bog'i in Uzbek, Park Pobedy in Russian) is a state memorial to the Uzbek SSR's part in the Second World War, run by the Ministry of Defence and built around one date on the calendar. It isn't a leafy city park, and you should know that before making the trip out to the Olmazor district.
The numbers the park was built to announce
The opening wasn't only a ribbon-cutting. It was where a new set of figures went public.
In his 9 May 2019 speech, a year before the park existed, Mirziyoyev gave the numbers Uzbeks had grown up with: over 1.5 million citizens took part in the war, more than 500,000 fell and nearly 133,000 went missing (president.uz transcript). At the park's 2020 opening he replaced them. Citing newly declassified archives, he put mobilisation at about 1.951 million, deaths at over 538,000 and missing at 158,000 (Xinhua, 10 May 2020). Qalampir.uz repeated the 2020 set for the 80th anniversary in 2025 and added about 870,000 wounded. Some older Uzbek sources, including an embassy article, quote a much lower historic death toll of 396,000.
So which is right? We'd give it as a range: roughly 1.5 to 1.95 million mobilised, and somewhere between 396,000 and 538,000 dead, plus 133,000 to 158,000 missing. The higher figures are the current official ones. No independent archive study we could find has checked them, which is why we're not dropping the lower ones entirely.
For scale, the 1939 Soviet census counted roughly 6.3 to 6.5 million people in the Uzbek SSR (sources round it differently). Either end of the mobilisation range means somewhere between a quarter and a third of the whole population went.
The home front gets as much space as the front line. Official figures credit the republic with sheltering about 1 to 1.5 million evacuees, including 200,000 to 250,000 children (again, the 2019 and 2020 speeches differ), plus more than 2,000 aircraft built in the republic.
What's inside
The grounds cover about 12.5 hectares. The layout runs along a long axial boulevard, and it's organised by theme rather than chronology: the horror of combat, the home front, grief, then celebration.
- Museum of Glory (Shon-sharaf). The main indoor exhibition, in six sections: mobilisation, the home front, wartime science and culture, memory and celebration, art and media, and a memorial hall holding the 33-volume Book of Memory with the names of the dead. Budget 1 to 1.5 hours if you read the captions.
- "Ode to Resilience" (Matonat madhiyasi). A monument to Zulfiya Zokirova, a Tashkent mother who lost all five sons in the war. Mirziyoyev proposed it in the 2019 speech, and it's where Vladimir Putin and Mirziyoyev laid a wreath during Putin's state visit in May 2024.
- "Eternal Courage" (Mangu jasorat). The central monument, with the museum built into it.
- Hardware and trenches. Tanks, artillery, aircraft replicas, dug-in trenches, a field kitchen and bunkers you can walk into. Children climb on the smaller replica guns.
- The wire figures. Outlines of soldiers with a lamp glowing where the heart would be. They're better after dusk, but you'd need to be there before the 18:00 close in winter to see them lit.
How it frames the war
The language on site is the Soviet one. It's the "Great Patriotic War", 1941 to 1945, rather than the Second World War starting in 1939, and loudspeakers along the boulevard play mid-century Russian choral music (a detail noted in an August 2025 visitor report from USC Global Studies). The architecture is monumental and state-scaled, with little in it that borrows from Uzbek tilework or courtyard building.
What's new is the emphasis. Soviet-era memorials folded Uzbek losses into a single Soviet story. Here the headline figures are Uzbek, the named heroes are Uzbek (Zokirova, and General Sobir Rahimov, whose older monument reportedly stood on this site), and the evacuee children get their own space. After a decade of low-key observance following independence, Uzbekistan renamed 9 May the Day of Remembrance and Honour on 2 March 1999, and the park sits somewhere between that mood and the older Victory Day one.
Our take: go for the museum and the Zokirova monument, and read the rest as a statement of how the state wants the war remembered right now. That's interesting in itself, whatever you think of it.
Victory Park tickets and opening hours
The park was free when it opened in 2020, with only the museum ticketed at 6,000 som (UzNews). That's no longer the case. Some guides still say the grounds are free. The photo permit is the charge people don't expect.
| Item | Price or time | Source, date |
|---|---|---|
| Entry, foreign visitors (park + museum) | 50,000 som | USC visitor report Aug 2025; 4traveler Apr 2024 |
| Entry, Uzbek citizens | 8,000 som | USC visitor report, Aug 2025 |
| Camera / photo permit | 40,000 som extra | 4traveler, Apr 2024 |
| Opening hours | Daily 09:00–18:00 | 2GIS listing |
All of the above: the most recent reports we found date from 2024–25 (searched September 2026), and none of it comes from an official price list, because the park doesn't publish one online that we could reach. A presidential resolution of 9 September 2020 allowed online ticket sales, and iTicket.uz has a venue page for the park, but it didn't show prices when we checked. At 11,825 som to the dollar (Central Bank rate, 26 September 2026), 50,000 som is a little over US$4. Carry the som in cash in case the card terminal is down.
Getting there
The address is Karakamysh-2/1, Olmazor district, near Turin Polytechnic University, in the city's northwest just outside the Little Ring Road.
The nearest metro is Beruniy, the northern end of the blue Uzbekistan line, about 2 km away. That's a 25 to 30 minute walk along main roads, fine in October and a bad idea at 3pm in July. The Tashkent metro fare rises from 1,700 to 2,500 som by card or app (3,000 in cash) on 1 October 2026 (Gazeta.uz, 28 September 2026). The easier option is metro to Beruniy and a short Yandex Go ride from there, or a taxi straight from the centre, which takes roughly half an hour or more depending on traffic.
Pair it with something in the same half of the city. Chorsu Bazaar is two stops back down the same line, and the State History Museum, which reopened in July 2026, gives the longer run of Uzbek history the park leaves out. If you're weighing it against the free options, our list of zero-cost Tashkent sights is the place to compare.
When to go
9 May is the day the whole park was designed for, with official wreath-laying, veterans' families and heavy security. It's also the day you're least likely to have the museum to yourself, and official ceremonies and security take priority over casual visitors. Check the holiday calendar before planning around it.
Weekday mornings are the quiet window. That's when the Book of Memory hall works best: 33 volumes of names in a room built for silence. If your family has an Uzbek wartime connection, bring the surname and home district with you.