The palace of Khudayar Khan

Remarkable sights of Kokand

The Palace of Khudayar Khan (19th century) also known as the Kokand Urda stands apart from other architectural monuments of Kokand. The palace was designed in the traditional Central Asian style and ornamented with fretwork and paintings, its decoration being a mixture of a wide range of traditional applied arts.

The Palace of Khudayar Khan was the residence of the last and most famous khan of the Khanate of Kokand.

It is the largest and most spectacular of the seven royal palaces in Kokand.

The palace complex consisted of 7 inner courts with different buildings, which occupied a total area of 4 hectares. The palace was 140 m long and 65 m wide. The palace’s main structural feature was its resting on a foundation rising more than 3 m above the ground, which made all the buildings within the complex particularly solid.

The complex comprised a total of 119 rooms, many of which featured fine fretwork in ganch and wood.

The wonderfully decorated panels on the floor and ceiling were very colourful and presented a wide range of ornamental motifs and numerous quotations from the Koran and sayings by outstanding philosophers and rulers. The throne room, reception court and the personal rooms of the khan and his wives were particularly beautiful: paintings highly diverse in colour and style on the walls, gilded cornices and fretted pictographs on oriental themes on the wooden vaults.

Currently, the palace building houses a museum of local history, which is included in the World Heritage List. Khudayar Khan’s golden throne inlaid with jewels is kept in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg.

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