Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
DUSHANBE
ДУШАНБЕ
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37 / POP 600,000 / ELEV 800M
Backed by a hazy phalanx of mountains,
Dushanbe is a city in rapid transition. Its
long, tree-lined central avenue still passes
a collection of pastel-hued neoclassical
buildings from its original Soviet incarna-
tion. But much is threatened with the dem-
olition ball as a whole new gamut of glitzy,
oversized newcomers rise in a style that is
often an intriguingly discordant blend of
Roman triumphalism and budget futur-
ism. The focus for this curious renaissance
is a manicured central park dominated by
a vast new museum and the world's tall-
est flag pole. Around the edges, the city has
plenty of musty Brezhnev-era apartment-
block ghettos. Yet remarkably, especially
given the city's dangerous image during
the 1990s' civil war, today the atmosphere
is one of unthreatening calm… perhaps
not unrelated to the fact that so much of
the male population are away working in
Russia.
History
Although there are hints of settlement here
dating from the 5th century BC, modern-day
Dushanbe was a small, poor village until the
1920s. So unimportant that its name, mean-
ing Monday, was simply synonymous with
the day of its weekly bazaar.
Dushanbe saw a brief flurry of excitement
in 1920 when the last emir of Bukhara took
refuge here, fleeing from the advancing Bol-
sheviks. But despite this and a 1922
basmachi
(muslim guerrilla fighters) takeover, Dush-
anbe quickly reverted to Bolshevik authority.
Things suddenly changed in 1929 when
the railroad arrived and Dushanbe was
made the capital of the new Soviet Tajik
republic. It was known as Stalinabad until
the 1950s, by which stage the population
had been greatly swollen, initially with Tajik
émigrés from Bukhara and Samarkand,
then many more during the 1940s including
around 50,000 Germans, both POWs and
Soviet-German exiles from Russia (coming
directly, or arriving after periods in Siberia).
As Tajikistan's cotton and silk industries
were heavy-handedly instituted, so Dush-
anbe developed as a processing, industrial
and administrative centre.
As the USSR crumbled, Dushanbe was
the epicentre of riots in 1990 and demon-
strations in the autumn of 1991. During
the civil war, a dusk-to-dawn curfew saw
armed gangs controlling the roads in and
shoot-outs occurring between rival clans.
But random acts of violence had petered out
by 2002 and over the last decade the city's
image has transitioned into one of calm,
and apparently prosperous, confidence with
barely a bullet hole to remind visitors of the
bad old days.
1
¨Sights
National¨Museum¨
MUSEUM
(Osorkhonai Milli; foreigner/camera 25/10TJS;
h
10am-4pm Tue-Sat, noon-7pm Sun)
Opened in
2013, the impressively airy National Museum
is especially strong on archaeological exhib-
its, both real and recreated. The reconstruc-
tion of the Ajina-Tepe Buddhist monastery
site is particularly successful in conjuring up
the feeling of how the 7th-century original
might have appeared. Labels mostly include
English translations and though ill-lit, the
top floor art gallery has some great works.
The building fritters away masses of space in
a vast atrium which, from the east, makes it
look like the love child of a classical mansion
and gigantic cement mixer.
Bayrak¨(World's¨Tallest¨¨
Flagpost)¨
FlAg
Built to commemorate 20 years of independ-
ence, the world's tallest flagpolw (165m) is
the centrepiece of Dushanbe's growing
ensemble of fountain-parks and public
buildings including the new
National¨¨
Library
and the gold-domed
Palace¨ of¨¨
Nations
government building.
National¨Museum¨of¨
Antiquities¨of¨Tajikistan¨
MUSEUM
(
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227 13 50; www.afc.ryukoku.ac.jp/tj; Ak Rajabov
7; foreigner/local 20/5TJS;
h
10am-5pm Tue-Fri,
10am-4pm Sat, 10am-2pm Sun)
Though the in-
terior is dowdy and poorly illuminated, the
archaeological collection here is excellent. In
many cases what you'll see are the originals
from which copies were made for the out-
wardly far grander new National Museum.
Notably, the 13m-long sleeping Buddha here
is the real one as removed from Ajina Teppe
in 1966, when Soviet archaeologists sliced it
into 92 pieces. Dating from the Kushan era
(around 500 AD), it is the largest known
Buddha figure in Central Asia.
Gurminj¨Museum¨
MUSEUM
(
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573 10 76; www.gurminj.tj; Bokhtar 23; admis-
sion 10TJS;
h
11am-6pm)
Hidden within a pri-
vate family compound behind unmarked
