Shahidlar Khotirasi Memorial Complex

History

The complex lies in a ravine cut by the Bozsu canal, known as Alvasti Kuprik ('Devil's Bridge'). Between the 1930s and 1950s more than 13,000 people were shot and buried here. The mass graves were found by chance in 1990, during construction of a tennis court near the TV tower; archives show that 6,920 people from Uzbekistan were executed in 1937–1939 and another 7,100 in 1950–1953.

In just 4–16 October 1938, 507 political prisoners were sentenced to death, among them Jadid reformers, writers and scholars such as Abdulla Qodiriy, Abdulhamid Cholpon, Abdurauf Fitrat and the first Uzbek film director, Khudaybergen Devanov. A government decree of 22 July 1999 turned the former execution ground into a memorial.

The memorial and museum

Covering more than 17 hectares on both banks of the canal, joined by a 100-metre footbridge, the complex centres on a rotunda with a symbolic tombstone. The Museum of Victims of Political Repression opened here on 31 August 2002, with photographs, documents and personal belongings of the victims, models of camps and prisons, and displays running from the Russian conquest through the Soviet era to the 'cotton affair' of the 1980s.