Born in Koson district of Kashkadarya, he was one of the leading Uzbek poets of the later 20th century, author of the words of Uzbekistan's national anthem and translator of Dante's Divine Comedy. He was named Hero of Uzbekistan.
Abdulla Oripov was born on 21 March 1941 in the village of Nekuz in Koson district, Kashkadarya Region, at the foot of the Kungirtau hills, the son of a collective-farm chairman. He studied journalism at Tashkent State University and published his first poem, “Little Bird”, as a student. From 1963 to 1974 he worked for the Yosh Gvardiya and G'afur G'ulom publishing houses, later heading journals and the Writers' Union, and from 2005 until his death he sat in the Senate. He was named People's Poet of Uzbekistan in 1983 and Hero of Uzbekistan in 1998. He died after a long illness in Houston, USA, on 5 November 2016 and is buried in Tashkent's Chigatay cemetery.
His work
His first collection, “The Little Star”, appeared in 1965, followed by “My Eyes on Your Road”, “Mother”, “My Soul”, “Wind of My Homeland”, “Wonder” and more. His 1960s poems “Uzbekistan” and “Qasida” became some of the best-known verses about the homeland. The long poems “The Road to Paradise”, “The Healer and Death” and “Ranjkom”, and the dramatic poem on Amir Temur, “Sohibqiron” (1996), won wide acclaim. He wrote the words of the State Anthem of Uzbekistan, adopted on 10 December 1992, and translated Dante's Divine Comedy, Pushkin, Nekrasov, Shevchenko and Lesya Ukrainka into Uzbek.
Remembrance
Oripov's poems live on in school textbooks and songs, and the anthem with his words is heard every day in schools, at official ceremonies and at sports events. Many schools, streets and cultural centres bear his name. Koson district, his birthplace, lies close to the Karshi–Shakhrisabz route.
Between 1941 and 1945, by various estimates, 1.5 to 2 million people from Uzbekistan went to the front, and more than 500,000 never returned. Over 300 natives of the republic were made Heroes of the Soviet Union. Uzbekistan became a rear base: dozens of factories, research institutes, theatres and hundreds of thousands of evacuees, many of them orphaned children, arrived from the west. The Tashkent blacksmith Shoahmad Shomahmudov and his wife Bahri became famous for adopting orphans of many nationalities — between 14 and 16, according to different sources. The war turned Tashkent into an industrial centre, while the countryside endured gruelling work and shortages.
Efforts to irrigate the waterless Hungry Steppe (Mirzachul) on the left bank of the Syr Darya began in the late 19th century: a canal named after Nicholas I opened in 1895, and Grand Duke Nikolai Konstantinovich dug channels and founded villages for Russian settlers. Large-scale development came in the 1950s and 1960s: in 1956 part of the steppe was transferred from the Kazakh SSR to Uzbekistan, the Kirov Northern canal was rebuilt and new Central and South Hungry Steppe canals were dug. Some 800,000 hectares of new cotton land appeared, along with Gulistan, Yangiyer and dozens of state-farm villages. Syrdarya Region was created in 1963. Soil salinisation later became a serious problem.
In 1958 geologists discovered a giant gold deposit in the Muruntau hills of the south-western Kyzylkum; the team won the Lenin Prize in 1966. Industrial mining began in 1969, creating one of the world's largest open-pit gold mines, some 3.5 km long and about 600 metres deep. The city of Navoiy was founded near Karmana the same year as the discovery, and desert towns such as Uchkuduk and Zarafshan grew up around the Navoi Mining and Metallurgical Combine. Navoiy Region was created in 1982 (temporarily abolished in 1988–1992) and is today one of Uzbekistan's main industrial regions.
Once covering 68,000 km² and among the largest lakes on Earth, the Aral Sea began to shrink in the 1960s, when the waters of its feeder rivers, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, were diverted to irrigate cotton. By 2007 it had fallen to about 10% of its former area and split into several lakes, leaving behind the new Aralkum desert. Moynaq, once a busy fishing port, now lies tens of kilometres from the water, with a “graveyard” of rusting ships on the sand. Salt and dust storms have seriously affected public health. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called it one of the planet's worst environmental disasters.
Early on 26 April 1966 a powerful earthquake of magnitude 5.2 struck directly beneath central Tashkent at a depth of only 3–8 km. It destroyed much of the old housing in the centre and left 200,000–300,000 people homeless; the official death toll was 15, though other estimates are far higher. Builders from across the Soviet Union rebuilt the city, and within a few years new housing districts and broad avenues gave Tashkent its Soviet-modernist face. In 1977 Central Asia's first metro opened. The Courage Monument has marked the epicentre since 1976.
During perestroika interest in the national language, history and culture surged. On 21 October 1989 the Supreme Soviet of the Uzbek SSR passed the Law on the State Language, making Uzbek the state language while Russian kept its role as the language of inter-ethnic communication. The law widened the use of Uzbek in administration, education and the press, and became a key symbol of the national revival on the eve of independence. Since 2019, 21 October has been celebrated as Uzbek Language Day. In the same years victims of the purges were rehabilitated, and the works of Qodiriy, Cho'lpon and Fitrat were published again.
