IN A REGION well-known for historical cities, Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, is new: 100 years in the past, it was solely a dusty village between Samarkand and Kabul. Starting within the Thirties, the Soviets despatched architects to rework its scattering of mud-brick buildings right into a metropolis whose official identify, for many years, can be Stalinabad. Right now Dushanbe, a metropolis of about 1 million in a rustic of 10 million, remains to be recognized for its large boulevards lined with previous chinar aircraft timber that give shade to residents taking night walks through the ferociously sizzling summers; for neo-Classical structure within the Stalinist model, like its opera theater, in whose motifs St. Petersburg meets Bukhara; and for the good colours of its buildings’ dazzling mosaics — of Tajik miners, farmers, dancers and weavers, of stylized atoms, cotton bolls and skeins of thread.
Three writers go trying to find echoes of a vanished tradition — or a resurrected one.
– Spain: Within the nation’s church buildings and streets, the remnants of eight centuries of Islamic rule are hiding in plain sight.
– Singapore: Delicacies is among the few methods to outline Peranakan tradition, a hard-to-pin-down mix of ethnic and racial identities.
– Tajikistan: Whereas the nation’s historical past is being hidden behind glimmering new facades, its artisans maintain on to custom with quiet dedication.
But over the previous decade, the nation’s president, Emomali Rahmon, has chipped away at this Dushanbe to construct a brand new metropolis, one which takes its inspiration extra from Dubai: glass and metal rising from the mud. Within the face of uncommon public protests, Rahmon’s authorities has flattened landmarks just like the Home of Peasants — the place the Tajik state was first created in 1929, and the location of the nation’s first theater — and razed house blocks to create sightlines for brand new buildings just like the Nationwide Museum and the Nationwide Library, which is famously in need of books. “The authorities simply need to demolish individuals’s reminiscence,” the Tajik author Abduqodir Rustam has mentioned. “For the longer term era, historical past will begin from this time, as if there had been nothing earlier than.”
Not fairly nothing: A lot of Dushanbe’s new artwork and structure is supposed to evoke the glories of the Persian Achaemenid Empire, based in 550 B.C., which as soon as stretched from the Aegean to the Arabian Sea and which lasted till Alexander the Nice invaded within the fourth century B.C. Though Sunnism is the dominant department of Islam right here, Tajikistan in any other case has shut cultural and linguistic ties to Iran, which is majority Shia. Most Tajiks converse a variant of Farsi or different Iranian languages, whereas their northern neighbors have Turkic-speaking majorities. Other than the Achaemenid references scattered all through the town, Rahmon’s dynasty (his son Rustam Emomali, mayor of Dushanbe, is broadly anticipated to take his place when Rahmon, who’s 70, dies or lastly steps down) is usually portrayed because the successor to the Islamic Samanid Empire (A.D. 819-1005), when “historic Tajikistan” stretched over what’s at this time a lot of Iran, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan, and its courts impressed a Persian literature of nice brilliance. All undesirable historical past between then and now — Mongol invasions, Turkic overlords, Russian colonization, the Soviet empire, civil battle, the introduction of Western capitalism with out Western European social security nets — has been elided.
On my first week in Dushanbe, I went to see maybe the top of the nation’s neo-Persianate structure, the Navruz Palace. Conceived because the world’s largest chaykhana, or “teahouse,” the palace, accomplished in 2015, serves as a spectacular stage for visiting commerce and diplomatic delegations. Flanking the doorway’s marble staircase, frescoes echo historical reliefs from Persepolis in Iran, full with the Zoroastrian winged Faravahar image and bearded emperor. There are additionally scenes from the Eleventh-century epic “Shahnama,” with the legendary King Jamshid celebrating the primary Navruz, or “pageant of spring.” The phrases “Nationwide Id” are painted beneath one of many tableaus.
Inside, the official information threw open door after enormous door into shimmering halls so huge that they seemed like computer-generated photos on a cinematic inexperienced display. “This tiny closet impresses you, does it?” she requested an Uzbek couple as they gasped at its scale and posed for selfies. “But it surely’s only one little antechamber!”
The Navruz marries the grandiose with the flimsy: pure gold leaf and glitter, Pamiri lapis alongside rendered chipboard and glue. It’s not likely a chaykhana, both. These open-air teahouses are intimate areas the place buddies meet, on the market or in neighborhoods referred to as mahallas — mazes of whitewashed mud homes with corrugated roofs and orchards behind excessive, windowless partitions. Every mahalla has its personal teahouse.
And but nothing within the Navruz Palace invitations a mahalla’s emotions of connection. “The palace isn’t supposed to be a public house,” Tim Epkenhans, the creator of “The Origins of the Civil Warfare in Tajikistan” (2016), instructed me. “Rahmon is reconfiguring the town like one thing out of Minecraft. These new buildings are theater units, and so they exist to be threatening.”
However one should discover nice magnificence contained in the palace’s halls. Whereas Twenty first-century Dushanbe is being constructed on a intentionally inhuman scale, it’s nonetheless being made by people, and the designers and craftspeople who’re making it, often called usto, are heirs to a few of Central Asia’s richest — and most culturally resonant — artisanal traditions. The phrase comes from the Center Persian ustad, which means “discovered particular person,” and refers not solely to grasp artisans however to anybody with exemplary ability; the sociologist Irna Hofman, who has studied Tajikistan’s rural financial system, together with its textile industries, instructed me that whereas a wonderful tailor is likely to be referred to as an usto, a gifted automobile mechanic would qualify, too.
I HAD COME to Tajikistan to fulfill a few of these artisans. I wished to know the way they instructed their very own tales about customized and innovation in a rustic whose historical past is continually being erased and rewritten. What makes the usto ply their craft when their very own tradition strikes past them? Some discover work by updating previous strategies for brand new patrons. Others create as a result of that alone is what offers their life goal. However for every artisan, by means of traces join the previous, with its deletions and innovations, to an unpredictable future.
Tajikistan is the poorest of the 15 former Soviet republics, all of which emerged out of the shatter zone of empires. Because the Twenties, it has been formed by each the contesting forces of Soviet energy and ethnic nationalism, caught in a century-long battle of making a brand new id for itself (one not so simply declared by way of fresco). Debates about what the nation ought to develop into — some Tajiks welcome the glittering modernity of the brand new Dushanbe, whereas others view it with suspicion, as they do China’s rising affect within the area — are mirrored by regrets of what the nation would possibly have been, if solely issues had taken a unique flip a thousand years in the past. Think about, the artist Hassan Jumaev mentioned to me, if the Mongols had by no means invaded: “We’d be New York Metropolis by now.”
Jumaev, the primary usto I sought out, is famend for his virtuosic expertise carving wooden and ganch, a gypsum-rich materials used since medieval instances to create intricately patterned inside partitions and ceilings. He spent 4 years engaged on the partitions of an unlimited corridor inside the Navruz Palace, the Guliston, or “backyard of flowers.” 2 hundred carvers adopted his plans, utilizing principally Siberian cedar.
He retains a two-room Soviet-era studio off Dushanbe’s Omar Khayyam Avenue, the place skyscrapers look down on the intimate gardens and walled labyrinths of a mahalla. His workshop was stuffed with unpainted carved picket panels and, in golden frames, summary aid work referred to as kundal, an artwork type that developed in Fifteenth-century Samarkand to make flat surfaces seem like three-dimensional textured brocade. Jumaev gestured to a kundal he had painted of the medieval polymathic Avicenna, whose picture stood on the coronary heart of a starburst of gold, inexperienced and yellow. Circling the portrait in calligraphy have been the phrases “I’ve solved all of the universe’s puzzles aside from Loss of life.”
Jumaev, who’s 65, first got here to prominence in 1984 with a woodcarving impressed by Jack London’s novel “The Name of the Wild” (1903) and tales he had heard as a boy from shepherds in his small mountain village north of Dushanbe. “They instructed me about wolves they’d seen hunt,” he mentioned. “And after I slept, I dreamed about an eagle chasing a fox who chases a chook.” Jumaev pointed to the panel’s middle. “Solely right here can a chook feed her nestlings. Sanctuary is all the time elusive.”
The piece prompted a furor. Russian observers understood it as a critique of Soviet rule. Some Muslims have been offended by its zoomorphic motifs. “I used to be threatened,” he mentioned. “The deeply non secular mentioned it was blasphemy. The politically minded mentioned I’d be jailed. I used to be criticized a lot that I virtually gave up.” He lastly resolved to destroy the work, however then a well-respected artist locally referred to as it a masterpiece, making his profession.
Jumaev’s work features a luminous 46-foot-long wall of ganch carvings at Toronto’s Ismaili Centre with the 99 names of Allah rendered in treasured stones by the artist Minaz Nanji, and ganch panels in Dushanbe’s Istaravshan teahouse, completed within the late Nineteen Eighties and one of the lovely areas within the metropolis. However regardless of his prominence, Jumaev has not but been capable of finding an apprentice who needs to discover ways to, say, match colours in a kundal. “Right now, college students can solely take into consideration money,” he instructed me. “They’ll deal with a single decoration, and what they create is someway off.”
This younger era was robbed, he mentioned. As youngsters, that they had smartphones and the web as a substitute of the knowledge of fairy tales. “I’m nonetheless ready to show the proper pupil,” he mentioned. “And what’s life, anyway? Solely hope.”
LONG BEFORE THE web, different forces threatened Central Asia’s inventive traditions. The Soviets have been suspicious of any trace of individuality; some designers have been imprisoned for “unauthorized exercise.” After the united statesS.R. collapsed in 1991, new borders led to a severing of connections between artisans. The Soviets by no means supposed the boundaries they drew to mark divisions between unbiased states, and the vagueness of those traces could make for chaos at this time, generally resulting in deadly clashes (this previous September, greater than 100 individuals died at Batken, the place Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan meet — virtually half of the 600-mile border has but to be absolutely outlined). Villagers should usually cross worldwide boundaries to attend college, go to their ancestral mosques, bury their useless and even accumulate water. Ethnic enclaves inside states of different nationwide ethnic teams — Kyrgyz inside Tajikistan, Uzbeks inside Kyrgyzstan, Tajiks inside Uzbekistan — have led locals to nickname these areas “chessboard” borders. Central Asia’s frontiers “haven’t any rationality, whether or not geographic, financial or ethnic,” the French political scientist Olivier Roy as soon as wrote. For Tajiks, maybe the worst instance of capricious Soviet demarcation was the choice to connect Bukhara and Samarkand, which had Persian-speaking majorities, to the Soviet Socialist Republic of Uzbekistan in 1924. Tajiks remained livid in regards to the division for many years, with one historian evaluating Tajikistan with out Samarkand and Bukhara to “France with out Paris.”
I made a decision to journey from Dushanbe to the southwestern province of Khatlon, which borders Afghanistan: A number of of Tajikistan’s best historic websites are there, like Takhti-Sangin, with the ruins of its third-century B.C. monumental Hellenistic temple devoted to the Oxus River, now referred to as the Amu Darya, and the stays of a spiritual complicated the place archaeologists uncovered what’s now Central Asia’s largest surviving historical Buddha within the Sixties.
However few areas in Central Asia have suffered as a lot as Khatlon over the past century. Right here insurgents held out in opposition to the Soviet revolutionaries into the Twenties, and right here among the worst atrocities of the 1992-97 civil battle occurred. The historian Parviz Mullojonov, whose new e book, to be printed this month, “The Historical past of the Tajik Civil Warfare,” would be the first complete account of the battle, which killed 50,000 to 100,000 individuals (casualty estimates are simply among the info beneath dispute), writes that the battle started with protests held by these locked out of energy and oppressed through the Soviet period: regional elites, non secular teams and intellectuals who dreamed of organising Baltic-style democracies. Lots of them hoped for a return to the golden age of Tajik historical past, as seen by nationalist historians: the Samanid Empire. What occurred as a substitute, in keeping with a subject commander who was quoted in a 1993 Human Rights Watch/Helsinki report, was a fratricidal battle that was fought “with out guidelines, and with out wounded, solely corpses.” That yr, the nation’s two most outstanding warlords killed one another in a shootout, and Rahmon, who was already head of state, gained the presidency in 1994 after an election marked by “fraud and intimidation,” in keeping with the U.S. State Division. Political figures and journalists have been assassinated, and the opposition was shut out of the federal government. It could take Rahmon one other decade to do away with the community of unbiased subject commanders throughout the nation and really consolidate energy.
Through the civil battle, there was abruptly intense bloodshed between communities that had lived facet by facet for generations — southerners versus northerners, the descendants of mountain populations pressured emigrate to collective farms versus these already on the plains. John Heathershaw, the creator of “Dictators With out Borders: Energy and Cash in Central Asia” (2017), instructed me that Tajikistan had not skilled any type of nationwide reconciliation. Though June 27 is now often called the Day of Nationwide Unity, many Tajiks don’t deal with it as trigger for celebration. When Heathershaw requested his Tajik buddies why, they instructed him, “The battle was strife between brothers — nothing we need to bear in mind.”
Grey smoke smudged the horizon on the route I used to be taking by means of Khatlon; tires have been burning close to the inexperienced seam the place the sluggish Vakhsh River flowed south by means of marshes, on its approach to merging with the Panj on the nation’s southern border to develop into the Amu Darya. Through the civil battle, tens of 1000’s of determined individuals forded that river and crossed into Afghanistan. Tajikistan, against this, accepted only a few Afghan refugees after the Taliban retook energy in 2021, and plenty of of those that did enter the nation shortly moved on. Lately, a whole bunch of Afghan refugees have been repatriated, no matter whether or not or not they is likely to be punished by the Taliban.
As I listened to the automobile’s chassis rattle like a nail caught in a spice grinder, I questioned what would occur if it broke down. Forward, energy traces and street stretched to the horizon; behind, the view was the identical. No villages. No individuals. No animals. Simply rocks and sand.
“Are you afraid?” the motive force requested. “At the very least round right here there’s some visitors! It’s best to see what it’s prefer to be stranded within the mountains. Generally no automobiles cross for days. Let only a single stone fall and also you’ll end up caught the place you might be. No means out.”
We drove by deserted gasoline stations, together with one with an A.T.M. that had been dragged out of a wall. On a hill, the cranium of a markhor goat was nailed over a graveyard’s gate. My driver instructed me the poet Rumi was born close by. Jewel-bright oases sometimes appeared, timber and water in shining colours seen by means of the haze. At one roadside cease, an excellent white marriage ceremony costume was on the market alongside luggage of cement.
“Water Is the Supply of Life,” learn a placard on a gateway over the street to the Chiluchor Chashma, or Forty-4 Springs. Locals imagine that beside these waters lies the grave of a saint, and pilgrims go to every day. Contained in the gate, desert dunes rolled away from horizon to horizon, however the Forty-4 Springs flowed by means of lush greenery, lapping on the roots of previous timber and new flowers. Plastic bottles have been lined up on one financial institution, ready for the trustworthy to fill them with water they believed to be sacred. Above the stream, an previous man beckoned to us. His identify was Hakberdy, and he talked in regards to the therapeutic properties of the water, which he claimed might treatment each sickness from the pinnacle to the center. Based on legend, anybody who eats the fish right here will die, and so the waters have been thick with silvery our bodies.
Hakberdy was born in 1937, however even he knew of no usto close by. The civil battle had uprooted households on this area, lots of whom have been right here within the first place as a result of their family had been relocated in mass deportations from the north starting within the Thirties. Warmth publicity and polluted ingesting water killed many settlers who have been made to farm cotton. “My household was despatched right here from Ayni, within the mountains. Once I was 10, each my mother and father died,” he mentioned. “I’m an orphan.”
THE DIRECTOR OF Dushanbe’s Ethnographic Museum instructed me that only a few grasp weavers remained within the nation, although she knew of 1, a person who constructed his personal looms and knew find out how to make fabric the previous means. His identify was Saidmurod, and he lived in a distant village west of Dushanbe, within the Karatag Valley. I set out for the gorge the place Saidmurod is likely to be discovered.
Within the late nineteenth century, a German traveler to Bukhara recorded 96 dyeing workshops close to Samarkand and 270 within the Ferghana Valley, the place the borders of recent Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan interlock. When the Soviet Union took over, nevertheless, dyeing cooperatives virtually went extinct. Guilds have been dissolved and artisans put to work paving streets. After independence in 1991, Uzbekistan started reviving its personal weaving custom by means of financial incentives and partnerships with organizations like UNESCO and the British Council. Tajikistan, nevertheless, has not had the identical success. Dushanbe’s well-known textile collective — a metropolis inside the metropolis that when employed a number of thousand weavers — was broken through the civil battle, its looms later bought as scrap steel.
We handed a small cotton gin, the place individuals took previous mattresses to be fluffed again to life, earlier than leaving the principle street for a slender observe that adopted little canals lined with sycamores and willows. Ultimately, we stopped in a village the place a shepherd directed us to the compound through which the weaver lived along with his youngsters and their households. In preparation for a marriage, a bull had simply been slaughtered beneath a fig tree; blood darkened the gnarled roots. Saidmurod invited us to sit down on a dais in his internal courtyard, within the shade of pomegranate timber and grapevines, and instructed us about his materials, such because the atlas fabric, a satin weave, with a silk warp and weft, that his mom had taught him to make. Its designs and colours can have infinite variations, from multicolored stripes to ikat patterns which are common for robes. He handed me a bolt of undyed ivory material streaked with indigo, the final that he had woven. It had the nacreous sheen of an oyster shell. But lately, many of the material bought in Tajikistan comes from factories throughout the Chinese language border. A lot of the cushions on Saidmurod’s dais did, too.
Earlier than industrial colours grew to become widespread, flowers and crops have been floor into dyes. Walnut skins might create a vibrant inexperienced; a plant referred to as hiri, a wealthy yellow. Saidmurod, 84, mentioned a particular black shade, created from an herb referred to as zabonigov, or “cow’s tongue,” was his favourite “as a result of it has so many potentialities. You’ll be able to’t make something with out utilizing black.”
When Saidmurod was a boy, weaving households crammed the valley. “As soon as, you’d adapt the material to match the individual,” he mentioned. “You’ll take into consideration who they have been, and solely after that might you sit down at your loom.” Right now, he’s alone, his eight-harness handmade loom sitting dismantled within the attic of the home of certainly one of his grandsons — the one different member of the family who might weave completely. However the grandson, alongside along with his father and uncles, skilled as an electrician with the intention to work in Russia. Saidmurod was not nostalgic; he himself had wished to be an engineer. He was pleased with his grandson for rising on this planet.
ON THE STEEP street that leads north towards the traditional cities of the Ferghana Valley, inexperienced mountains blocked out the sky, and the air smelled of diesel and wild fennel. Simply earlier than we entered the three 1/4-mile-long Shahriston Tunnel, which a Chinese language building firm accomplished in 2012, a bulldozer was backing up slowly towards the abyss. The ravine lay greater than 9,000 ft beneath, and no guardrail lined the street.
On the opposite facet of the tunnel, we pulled over in Shahriston. A ruined citadel stands right here, a part of an eighth-century community of fortifications constructed by the Sogdians, an Iranian-speaking inhabitants whose descendants nonetheless inhabit Tajikistan at this time, to guard themselves in opposition to Arab invaders and different roaming bands of raiders. Sogdian buying and selling networks as soon as stretched from Samarkand into historical China and India. Soviet archaeologists excavated frescoes within the area (now in St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum and Dushanbe’s Nationwide Museum) depicting scenes from Aesop’s fables. Different tableaus function hunters, heroic tales and harvest festivals.
Throughout the nation, the Tajik state is constructing replicas of strongholds from the identical period: miniature fortresses ready for phantom armies. Most are vacationer follies or function the backdrop for weddings and — in a single case — an ostrich farm.
Lower than an hour away from the Sogdian ruins was Istaravshan, well-known for its many medieval mosques. One usto nonetheless labored within the metropolis’s huge market: Karim Saidov, who makes a speciality of carving combs. The courtyard of his household residence, deep inside a mahalla district, was a quiet place composed of austere geometries — a tree, flowering vines on the partitions, a drying home for grapes, an previous properly. “The smells and emotions of the nineteenth century are right here,” Saidov, 56, mentioned. He picked up a grandchild and kissed him. “You’d by no means know that the web had been invented.”
Saidov studied winemaking in Tashkent however, simply as he graduated, the Soviet Union got here aside. Tajikistan’s state vineyard, based beneath the czars, folded, too. So he fell again on comb making. “Once I was a boy, combs paid for my life,” he mentioned. The Soviet authorities by no means closed these workshops: Capitalist counterrevolutionaries and proletariat hero employees alike wanted to brush their hair. “My uncle made 10 combs a day and obtained a ruble for each,” he continued. “We felt so wealthy! I generally nonetheless discover these combs available in the market. I can instantly acknowledge our household’s work. Once I was rising up, Istaravshan had 12 comb makers. However after 1991, when the river of plastic began flowing into our nation, all the opposite workshops shut.”
He wakes up every morning at 4 a.m. to carve just a few. “Yearly, I select the trunk — by no means branches, by no means roots — of an important tree, apricot or walnut, that villagers have chosen for felling. Once I slice it, I’ve to work quick. In case you wait longer than three days, the wooden spoils,” he mentioned. “I scatter the items to dry within the solar for just a few days after which age the slices for 14 years. Look how laborious they’re!”
Saidov whacked two combs in opposition to one another forcefully after which spun one on his palm. The blows left no mark. The apricot wooden, particularly, had a wealthy luster that softly mirrored mild.
BEYOND ISTARAVSHAN LIES Khujand, a metropolis some 2,500 years previous. It was my final cease in Tajikistan and, the morning I left, crowds have been milling round a brand new citadel with its fake crenelations, constructed 20 years in the past upon the ruins of the fortress that when stood there. The town’s historical past was on sale at a market on the pavement — previous cash, samovars, a Ural bike, spinning bobbins and pocket watches.
A slender bridge traces out a protracted arc towards Konibodom-Patar, one of many checkpoints between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. We drove by means of previous apricot groves. Past a fountain left dry in an empty resort courtyard, just a few tesserae glittered on a Soviet-era bus cease; it was unattainable to inform what the unique mosaic would have been. Then we hit a stretch of street the place, in 2021, clashes between Tajiks and Kyrgyz had left gasoline station after gasoline station burned out. The petroleum fires had warped the street’s asphalt.
I obtained out after Konibodom and dragged my suitcase towards Uzbekistan. The border was an impediment course. Every stage required its personal set of papers, its personal rehearsed traces, its personal choreography.
As I waited for the ultimate official to beckon me ahead, I remembered one thing Jumaev had mentioned after we have been in his atelier, a map of the area. He had pointed to the enclaves the place one group of human beings was walled off from one other group, the place the inexperienced traces between international locations doubled again on themselves and looped into zeros, into nooses. “What the hell is that this?” Jumaev requested, tapping one of many synthetic islands. “1000’s and a whole bunch of divisions! This is our sorrow.”
Then he took the map and folded it slowly. “The skin world creates battle and wars, however irrespective of,” he mentioned. “Inside ourselves, we are able to create magnificence. We will be at peace.”
