The painted dome
Baburnama scenes on the dome and walls.
Arina Pan — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Abdurahmon Egamberdiyev — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Arina Pan — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Arina Pan — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Arina Pan — CC BY-SA 4.0
The Babur Museum, officially the Babur and World Culture Museum, is the blue-domed building on the main stairway of Bogi Bobur, the memorial park on the Bogishamol hills of south-east Andijan. It honours Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur (1483–1530), the Andijan-born poet and ruler who founded India's Mughal Empire. The park covers 357 hectares and draws thousands of visitors a day in summer. A recreation park laid out here in 1973 took Babur's name in 1992. The memorial complex, an initiative of the International Babur Foundation under Zokirjon Mashrabov, opened in 1993 for his 510th birth anniversary, echoing the Bagh-e Babur, his garden and grave in Kabul. From 1992 the foundation's expeditions followed his trail by car through more than ten countries, gathering the collection. Inside, local artist Ulugbek Boltaboyev painted the dome and walls with scenes from the Baburnama, Babur's memoir. Cases hold rare books, manuscript copies of his works, weapons of his time, courtiers' clothing, Mughal coins, writings by his children, including his daughter Gulbadan Begum, and a reproduction of a Quran in the Baburi script he devised. Stairs climb from an eastern-style marble gate past a large statue of Babur to the museum, then on to his symbolic tomb, holding soil from his graves in Agra and Kabul. The park lies about 11 km south-east of the Jami Mosque complex as the crow flies, so take a taxi; a cable car climbs the hill for city views. Allow one to two hours. Babur's literary museum, in the old town near the Jami Mosque, is a separate site.
Baburnama scenes on the dome and walls.
A reproduction of a Quran in the script Babur devised.
Soil from Babur's graves in Agra and Kabul.
Bogi Bobur memorial park, Bogishamol hills, south-east Andijan
No: he died in Agra in 1530 and was buried there, and his remains were later moved, as he had wished, to a garden in Kabul now known as Bagh-e Babur. The tomb set up in Andijan in 1993 is symbolic: it resembles his Kabul tomb and holds soil brought from both graves.
An alphabet Babur devised from Arabic letters, simplified and adapted to Turkic pronunciation, in which he sent poems to his son Humayun and others. A Quran written in it, the Mushaf-i Baburi, is kept in the library of the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad, Iran, and the museum holds a reproduction.