The big sofas of Central Asia: Dushanbe

Tadjkistan, Douchanbé, Bibliothèque, femmes, © L. Gigout, 2012

Femmes assistant au spectacle donné à l'occasion de l'inauguration de la Grande Bibliothèque de Douchanbé.

Tadjkistan, Douchanbé, Ismaïl 1er, © L. Gigout, 2012

Monument à Ismaïl 1er (de dos), émir samanide.

Monday, September 3rd. In Dushanbe, I will stay in Nafisa and Antoine home not far from the University and the Botanic Park. Nafisa works for a French NGO which implement sustainable development projects and Antoine for a multinational cotton company. Both are similarly enthusiast and very involved with their respective workloads. I walk in this city that I know a little bit, having accompanied a few years ago friends for a shooting. No visible tapshans in the center. We find here the Soviet architecture with its apartment blocks 4 floors high, with mosaiced facades and separated by untidy green spaces. Many new buildings under construction. Sometimes, areas with old houses and gardens surrounded by adobe walls. There are the rests of the village existing before the Soviets elevated it to the rank of capital of the new republic. Dushanbe was built from scratch, endowed with a wooded parkland, an artificial lake and a regular network of tree-lined streets, with the Lenin Prospekt (today Rudaki Avenue) as vertebral column. To populate the new capital, Tajiks from Bukhara and Samarcande were "encouraged" to move up here. An opera and theaters were built, and monuments were erected to the glory of Sadriddin Ayni, intellectual native of Bukhara who helped in the spread of the Revolution in Uzbekistan and in Tajikistan, and of the poet Rudaki, first great genius of modern Persian literature. Everything is still here except the Lenin statue, mothballed in the Painters House yard. The city was called Stalinabad until Khrouchtchev decided otherwise and restored its initial name which means Monday in Persian. Since taking office after the end of the civil war, president Emomalii Rahmon worked to make Dushanbe contribute to the assertion of the national identity. In this way was erected, in 2000, a magnificent statue of Ismail Somoni, the Samanid Emir of Transoxiane and Khorasan, descendant of Saman Khoda who founded the Samanid dynasty less than two centuries earlier. The "Somoni" became the national currency. Why was Ismail chosen as national hero preferably to his grandfather ? Sokiboy, who will appear in another topic of this work, will tell me that Ismail, of all Samanids, was the most powerful, the one who has worked most consistently in the prosperity and the magnificence of the dynasty. He embodies the top. Perhaps wishing to follow this example and leave his mark on history of this country, the current president implemented a politic of large public works projects with a new presidential palace, the Palace of Nations and the National Library. Will remaining heritage former village escapes the intentions of the new builders ? This house, for example, modest, patched up but charming, will it survive the urban planners of the president ? The tapshan is next to the front door, attached to the house, under the traditional vine. A woman repairs the kurpacha. I ask her to take a photo of the tapshan. She get scared and calls her husband to the rescue. An untidy man appears, paunchy and slightly wild. With a gruff voice, he refuses, on the pretext that the tapshan is too much "malinki" (tiny) and sends me packing. The planners can tear down this house without a great damaging impact, I grumble nastily to take my revenge.