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| Sépulture de Joseph Martin dans le vieux cimetière chrétien de Ferghana. |
It appears that Joseph Martin is a French traveler, an explorer, an engineer by training and a promoter of science. He was born in Vienne in 1848. In the 1870s, he went to Russia and participated in the war against Turkey. He travelled then in Siberia to explore the auriferous regions. He loved the steppe. He wrote numerous reports on the geology and the geography of Siberia and organized in Paris an exhibition of minerals and ethnographical material which knew a great success. At the end of 1882, he returned to Russia with the project to travel in Eastern Siberia. He mapped poorly known regions beyond the Baikal Lake and received the Russian Geographical Society's Golden Medal Award. In 1888, he undertakes the journey which will be fatal to him. He leaves Saint-Petersburg to join Beijing through Siberia with the desire to follow Marco Polo's road. But he gets the malaria in China and arrives very sick at New Marghilan. Hospitalized, he cannot be saved. Regarded as a hero in Russia, the whole city, where are living many Russian colonists, will comes to his funeral. He now lies in this old Fergana Christian cemetery, a little bit wild, with its steles askew, under a tombstone lined with bad paving blocks.
In 2009, the French Embassy and the Uzbekistan Academy of Arts announced a competition for the creation of a memorial plaque for the grave of the French traveler and the sculpture of a bust for the opening of a school in his name in Fergana. In this October 2012, no memorial plaque is decorating Joseph Martin's grave.
In 2009, the French Embassy and the Uzbekistan Academy of Arts announced a competition for the creation of a memorial plaque for the grave of the French traveler and the sculpture of a bust for the opening of a school in his name in Fergana. In this October 2012, no memorial plaque is decorating Joseph Martin's grave.
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