Great Monuments In Jizzakh, Uzbekistan

Jizzakh is a smallish city in Uzbekistan and it has a small number of monuments. Gotta show off the hometown greats, right?

Here's Sharof Rashidov, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan from 1959 until his death in 1983. Big term, big, gold statue.

Here's a small, random red fox, maybe president of a primary school in 2024. Back to important folks, here's famous writer and poet, Hamid Olimjon and his wife, Zulfiya, a writer in her own right. "Hamid, you've read it to me 10 times now, send it to your editor!"

The biggie monument in Jizzakh, placed on the top of a hill. Say hello to the mighty, mystical hero bird, Humo. Please fix that missing tile.

Humo is great to photograph, lots of good, weird, abstract angles. That bird flies. Another unimportant primary school animal. Monuments come in all shapes and sizes. Hello, sitting Bambi. And big mushroom.

Ahem, back to Rashidov, looking all powerful.

The Museum Of Fruit

Brilliant. It's the ripe time to get fruity in Turin. Never rind the rotting puns.

It only takes one man with a wild obsession to turn a hobby into a museum. That man is Francesco Garnier Valletti. He did confectionary work and fake flowers before turning to fruit in the mid 1800s. Gardens and botany were all the rage then and Valletti was tasked/obsessed with modeling as many fruit varieties as possible. The endless cases at the museum bear this, ahem, fruit.

One of several packed room as the museum, filled with inedible and impressive fruit.

Method to the madness. Or, at least, a couple of room re-creations, a lab, and an office.

Jars of supplies, looking a little horror movie set. "It's just apples!"

Modeling details. Valletti devised a a new material to use, more permanent than the wax used at that time.

No bad apples. The detail is impressive, definitely not an assembly line of the same fruit with similar skin. Crispy!