I used to think metro stations were just holes in the ground with trains.
Then I stood inside Chorsu station in Tashkent, sometime around 2019, staring up at this ridiculous concrete dome that shouldn’t work but does—and I realized Soviet architects were playing a completely different game than anyone else in the 1970s. The station opened in 1977, part of Tashkent’s first metro line, and it’s basically a massive underground yurt translated into reinforced concrete and ceramic tile. The dome spans roughly 30 meters across, give or take, with no central support column—which sounds insane until you remember these were the same engineers who built nuclear reactors and space stations. The whole thing sits maybe 20-25 meters below Eski Shahar square, where the famous Chorsu Bazaar has operated for centuries, and the architects—led by A. Kuznetsov and a team whose names history mostly forgot—decided the station should echo traditional Uzbek architecture rather than copy Moscow’s palace-underground aesthetic. It’s covered in these blue and white ceramic panels that catch the fluorescent light in ways that feel both ancient and brutalist simultaneously, which honestly shouldn’t work but absolutely does.
The Engineering Trick That Nobody Talks About Enough
Here’s the thing about building giant concrete domes underground in an earthquake zone.
Tashkent sits on seriously unstable geology—the 1966 earthquake basically leveled the city, killing around 15 people but destroying something like 300,000 homes, and that disaster is precisely why they started building the metro in the first place. The Soviet government poured resources into reconstruction, and part of that effort involved creating a subway system that could double as a bomb shelter during the Cold War, because of course it did. Chorsu’s dome uses a technique called a ribbed shell structure, where the concrete isn’t uniformly thick but instead concentrates material along specific stress lines, kind of like how your ribcage protects your organs without being solid bone all the way around. The ribs radiate from the top center of the dome downward, and between them the concrete gets thinner—sometimes only 8-10 centimeters thick in spots, which seems terrifying when you think about millions of liters of groundwater and clay soil pressing down from above. But the math works, apparently, because the station’s survived multiple earthquakes since 1977 without major structural damage.
Wait—maybe I should mention the actual experience of being there, because photos don’t really capture it.
When you descend the escalators (which are steep, like 30-35 degrees, dropping you down fast enough that your ears pop slightly), you enter this circular hall that feels more like a cathedral than a transit hub. The dome interior is decorated with geometric patterns—stars, octagons, repeating motifs lifted directly from 14th-century Islamic architecture—but rendered in this very Soviet palette of blues, whites, and golds. Natural light doesn’t reach down here, obviously, so everything’s lit artificially, and depending on the time of day the crowds shift from dense morning commuter crush to midday market-goers hauling vegetables from Chorsu Bazaar to late-night quiet when the ceramic tiles almost glow. I guess it makes sense that Tashkent’s metro became a point of civic pride—the stations along the original line (Chorsu, Alisher Navoi, Kosmonavtlar) each got wildly different architectural treatments, and Chorsu wound up being the most distinctly Uzbek of all of them, which turned out to be politically useful as the USSR started allowing more regional cultural expression in the 1970s.
Why Soviet Underground Architecture Still Matters More Than You’d Think
Anyway, there’s this weird tension in places like Chorsu between authoritarianism and genuine artistic ambition.
The Moscow metro stations get all the attention—Komsomolskaya with its baroque yellow ceilings, Mayakovskaya with the mosaics, Kievskaya’s murals—but those were designed to overwhelm you with Soviet power and glory, to make you feel small inside the state’s grand vision. Tashkent’s stations, especially Chorsu, feel different somehow. They reference local history, pre-Soviet culture, the Silk Road past, even though they were absolutely built to serve Soviet logistical and ideological needs. The architects managed to sneak in this layer of Uzbek identity, whether intentionally or because Moscow oversight wasn’t as intense this far from the capital. The station handles something like 20,000-30,000 passengers daily now, maybe more during bazaar days, and it’s held up remarkably well considering Uzbekistan’s infrastructure struggles post-independence. Some of the ceramic tiles have cracked or been replaced with mismatched substitutes, and the escalators break down more often than they should, but the dome itself remains structurally sound—a testament to overengineering, probably, and the paranoia that made Soviet builders assume everything might need to survive a nuclear blast.
I’ve seen photos of the station during construction, these black-and-white images of workers pouring concrete into massive formwork, and it strikes me how much faith that required. Faith in the math, in the materials, in the idea that this dome wouldn’t just immedietly collapse under its own weight. Turns out they were right to have that faith, even if almost everything else about the Soviet project eventually fell apart. Chorsu’s still there, still functioning, still beautiful in its strange way—a 1970s fever dream of what happens when you let engineers and artists collaborate on public infrastructure, then mostly leave them alone to figure it out.
