01 Forty years without photographs
The stated reason for the ban was neither aesthetic nor commercial: the system was classified as a military installation because of its secondary function as a bomb shelter. Photography and video were prohibited until 31 May 2018; from 1 June of that year, they were allowed.
An underground museum through which hundreds of thousands of people passed daily, and of which for forty years almost no images existed.
02 Why it was built
Planning began in 1968, two years after the earthquake that destroyed some 78,000 homes in the city. That chronological detail is not incidental: the metro was conceived, among other things, as resilient infrastructure in a city that had just discovered the hard way that it sat on dangerous ground.
The available sources say the infrastructure can withstand earthquakes of magnitude 9. That figure is worth treating with caution — it is not clear on which scale or by what criterion it was calculated, and the Richter scale it is quoted against is not the one used for such magnitudes today — but the underlying fact is clear: it was designed with the earthquake in mind, not with ordinary use.
It opened on 6 November 1977, with nine stations on the Chilonzor line. It was the seventh metro built in the former Soviet Union and the first in the whole of Central Asia.
03 The figures
Today the system has four lines, 50 stations and 70.4 kilometres of route. In 2025 it carried 286.8 million passengers, giving an approximate average of 785,000 a day. The tunnels run between 8 and 25 metres deep.
The technical details are those of the Soviet school: 1,520-millimetre track gauge and third-rail supply at 825 volts DC. If you have ridden the metro in Moscow, Kyiv or Baku, the rolling stock will look familiar.
04 What to look at
Each station has its own theme and a distinct decorative treatment. The materials used are a catalogue in themselves: metal, glass, plastic, granite, marble, smalt, ceramic and alabaster. No two platforms look alike.
The practical advice is simple: buy a ticket and stay down there for a couple of hours. Get off at a station, look at all of it, take the next train, get off at the next one. It costs the price of one journey and it is, by a distance, the best way to spend time in Tashkent in July, when it is 36 degrees up top.
And take a photograph, just because. It is a banal gesture in any other city in the world, and here it was forbidden from before most of the people now doing it were born.
Tamorlan ToledoAlmost none of the damascene work you will see is steel.
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David McKelvey HanoiThe coffee here has egg in it because there was no milk.
Artur Baboev Ashgabat