Tuesday 29 March 2022

Seeing Statues In Tashkent, Part 1

They like their monuments in Tashkent. In a park, in front of an important building, maybe the Metro, a house museum. If there's room for a pedestal or a frieze, there's plenty of bronze to fill it.

Let's start with the most significant sculpture in the city, the grand statue of Amir Timur riding a horse, located in the central square in downtown Tashkent. He's kind of the George Washington of Uzbekistan, if George Washington had been born in the 1300s. Of course, the square saw the inevitable march of Lenin, Stalin and Marx statues before Uzbekistan gained independence and a homegrown hero was installed.
More heroes. How about the humbly titled Oath to the Motherland? You fight, mamma always looks down, watching. It's not all military conquest, figures from the Arts can also get a sculpture. Here's Ural Tansykbayev, a successful painter during the Communist era.

The Metro gets some good art, like this large frieze outside a downtown station.

A detail of the frieze, shirtless man banging an anvil. Get us a Diet Coke. Moving on from humans, storks are popular. Or some sort of fantastical bird that kind of looks like a stork. Anything is powerful atop a column.
Another Silk Road era big boy, the famed astronomer Ulugh Beg. He gets a chair and a celestial globe. And fresh flowers every week.

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