Hands that built the palace

Oversaw the construction of the whole Sitorai Mohi Xosa under Amir Sayyid Olim-khan, including the Banquet Hall, the Chess Room and the throne hall. His name signs the structural decisions visible in every doorway.

Drew up the project of the palace during 1860–1885. Tried to braid Eastern tradition with European modernity — a hybrid the building still wears in every cornice and ayvan.

Worked the initial designs of the gardens and courtyards before the main palace took shape. The geometry of the rose garden and the outer hovli still follows his proportions.

An academician of architecture. In 1937 he documented every wall, niche and ceiling of the palace — single-storey and double-storey walls, the deep ayvans, the carved ganch above and the parquet below. His blueprints became the reference document for every restoration that followed.

Carved the White Hall in two years (1912–1914) with thirty assistants — ganch laid over mirror so that one candle multiplied to forty reflections. He was once imprisoned for blasphemy under Abdulahad-Khan, sent to military service in Karmana, then pardoned to decorate the throne room. After 1920 he refused to flee to Afghanistan with Sayyid Olim-Khan. In 1946–48 he built the Bukhara Hall of the Navoi Theatre in Tashkent — a State Prize.

Filled the Waiting Hall with painted vases in every size, from floor-to-ceiling pieces to small alcove blooms. Made his own pigments from egg yolk, camel milk, apricot-tree resin, plant dye and gold dust, and sealed them under a pistachio-and-almond varnish that has held the colour for over a century.

With Qori Cho‘bin produced the figured ceiling and the wall panels of the Banquet Hall in the «guldor jimjimador» style — densely floral carving that runs through the palace like a signature.

G‘afurov’s partner on the ceiling carving. Their dense floral grammar repeats in the doors and panels of the Mirzo-xona and the corridor to the Bathroom.

A sangtarosh (stone-master) from the Nurota workshops. Carved the two marble lions at the entrance in 1913 — each from a single block of Nurata marble. The lions, symbols of justice and power across the Bukharan emirate, still face every visitor.

Head of the Bukhara People’s Republic. After the Red Army takes the palace in September 1920 and the gardens are trampled, the gateway portal shot at, Fayzulla Xoʻjayev makes the palace the official government residence — a single bureaucratic stroke that stops the mass looting and saves the building for what becomes its museum decade.

Minister of Education and Secretary of the Bukhara Central Executive Committee. With Abdurauf Fitrat and Abdulvohid Burhonov he sets up the first systematic inventory of Bukharan monuments — including a photo archive — and pushes through the «Sredazkomstaris» committee’s proposal to open a museum here. His memoranda to the Uzbek government argue the palace should become «something like Peterhof or Tsarskoe Selo». The 1927 branch museum that follows is his idea made law.

One of the founding intellectuals of modern Uzbek literature. Worked with Saidjonov on the monuments inventory; his particular contribution to the palace was the repair of the road that led to it from Bukhara — without which curators, scholars and the first visitors could not have reached the building in the 1920s.

Late mayor of Bukhara. In 2019–2020 a contractor without restoration expertise damages ancient tiles and patterns on the staircases and ayvans and replaces the original windows with cheap wood. Kamolov, together with the Regional Cultural Heritage Department, demands a halt. After warnings, formal letters and a referral to the prosecutor’s office, the works are finally stopped in March 2020. The case becomes a textbook example in Uzbekistan of why heritage restoration needs scientific oversight.

A graduate of the Eastern Languages Institute at the Central Asian State University, Goncharova arrived in Bukhara in the early 1930s and, with the art historian L. I. Rempel, carried out the first systematic ethnographic and curatorial fieldwork at the palace. Their proposals turned the museum from a display of confiscated objects into an academic institution — and led directly to the 1937–38 «Chinese Porcelain» exhibition that became the country’s first scientifically catalogued ethnographic display.

Co-worker of Goncharova on the museum’s 1930s research programme. Rempel’s art-historical lens — provenance, attribution, decorative grammar — turned the palace inventory into a curatorial scheme that European ethnographic museums of the period would recognise. The 320-piece Chinese Porcelain catalogue prepared by the Uzbek Republican Art Museum was the visible result of his method.

An expert in local-history museum work. Under his leadership in the 1930s the Bukhara museum became a centre of regional academic life — collections were systematised, scientifically catalogued, and put on public display for the first time. The model of museum work in Bukhara today still runs on the foundations he laid.

On his appointment in 1985 many objects that the Soviet authorities had quietly transferred to other regional collections were brought back to Bukhara. Under him new branches opened, several monuments themselves became museums, and ethnographic field expeditions reached Romitan, Peshku, Shafirkan, Qiziltepa, Vobkent and Gijduvon to enrich the holdings.

Author of the master’s dissertation «Processes of museification of Sitorai Mohi Xossa (XX–XXI cc.)» (K. Behzod National Institute of Painting and Design, 2026). This site’s halls, biographies and timeline are drawn directly from her work — names, dates, attributions and pigment recipes that would otherwise live only in the archive.