Freeview Fridays: Some of my favourite things

Under the title “Freeview Fridays”, the people of TCA – journalists, editors, authors – share their personal experiences of Central Asia and its people. By listing their favourite places, literature, films, art, architecture and archaeological sites, as well as encounters with customs and traditions, they give tips to readers who want to visit the region.

Stephen M. Bland – Editor-in-Chief and Head of Research

Architecture: Bukhara – The Kalon Trinity

The Kalon Mosque, Bukhara; photo: TCA, Stephen M. Bland

From the ninth-century Pit of the Herbalists to the Ismail Samani Mausoleum and the Bird Market, Bukhara’s Old City isn’t really about the individual sights, it’s the sum of its parts, a timeless city imbued with an air of antiquity like a window into the past. That said, the jewel in Bukhara’s crown is the trinity of the Kalon Mosque, the Minaret and the Mir-i-Arab Madrasah.

The Kalon Minaret – “great” in Tajik – was built as an inland lighthouse for desert caravans and was probably the tallest building in Central Asia when it was completed in 1127. The third minaret to be built on the site, previous incarnations had caught fire and collapsed onto the mosque below, officially due to the “evil eye”. Also known as the “Tower of Death”, the minaret has seen countless bodies sewn into entrails, caught in bags and thrown from the 47-metre-high lantern over the centuries. The practice was particularly popular during the Manjit era and continued until the 1920s.

The lantern of the Kalon Minaret, Bukhara; image: TCA, Stephen M. Bland

Home to the first recorded use of the now ubiquitous blue tile in Central Asia, the minaret’s 14 distinct bands stand majestically in the pink evening light, their scale and complexity remarkable. While the sense of history lingers, daily life carries on unabated at the sturdy base, and when the heat of the day subsides, headscarf-clad babushkas would sit chatting on the Madrassa’s cool stone steps, while children kicked footballs against the ancient stones.

Art: The State Art Museum of the Republic of Karakalpakstan, Nukus

Lev Galperin – “On His Knees”

Once a thriving agricultural center, Karakalpakstan is now one of the diseased places on Earth. Respiratory diseases, typhoid, tuberculosis, and cancer are rampant, and birth defects and infant mortality rates are among the highest in the world. The deliberate destruction of the Aral Sea for irrigation has created toxic dust storms so large they are visible from space, ravaging an area of 1.5 million square kilometers. These storms, which spread nitrates and carcinogens, used to occur once every five years but now occur ten times a year.

Yet it is in the capital of Karakalpakstan, Nukus, that a remarkable art collection survives, partly because of its inhospitable location. Risking being branded an “enemy of the people,” the obsessive Ukrainian painter, archaeologist and art collector Igor Savitsky smuggled out thousands of avant-garde works that had been banned in the Soviet Union. In this far-flung corner of the former empire, the State Art Museum of the Republic of Karakalpakstan houses works by a forgotten generation. A mishmash of styles and influences far removed from the supposedly uplifting romanticism that socialist realism had permitted, many of the artists on display here met an unsavory end.

Aleksandr Volkov’s oil paintings, with dazzling geometric scenes of everyday life in Central Asia, are awash with color. When the crackdown on freethinking artists began in the USSR following Stalin’s edict, Volkov was branded a bourgeois reactionary for his Kubo-Futurist views. He was dismissed from his post and lost everything. Over the next three years, all of Volkov’s works were removed from the major Russian galleries. Until his death in 1957, he was isolated by order of Moscow from all contact with artists, critics, or art lovers. Anyone who wanted to meet Volkov declared that the painter was too ill to see them. Yet in many ways Volkov was one of the lucky ones, for at least he avoided the gulags.

A fusion of Dadaism and Cubism, a piece entitled On his knees is probably the only surviving work of Lev Galperin, a widely traveled painter and sculptor from Odessa. After his return in 1921, he was banned from leaving the motherland, so he eked out a meager existence working on bas-reliefs to order. Because his paintings were considered counterrevolutionary, he was arrested on Christmas Day 1934 and sentenced to five years of hard labor. During his trial, Galperin dared to express his skepticism about the Soviet system and the state of affairs in the union. His death certificate simply states: “Cause of death: execution by shooting.”

Sketch of a Gulag by Nadezhda Borovaya

A series of sketches by Nadezhda Borovaya show what conditions were like in the gulags. When her husband was executed in 1938, Borovaya was sent to the Temnikov camp, where she spent the next seven years secretly recording and smuggling out scenes of everyday life. With dazzling bravado, Savitsky obtained government funding to purchase these drawings by convincing party officials that they were depictions of Nazi concentration camps.

Film: The murderer by Darezhan Omirbaev

Poster for The Killer by Darezhan Omirbaev

The murderer is a 1998 crime drama film directed by minimalist Kazakh filmmaker and screenwriter Darezhan Omirbaev, which won the Un Certain Regard Award at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival and the Don Quixote Award at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. A spare, tense, but simple story, the film tells the tale of the seemingly inevitable downfall of an Almaty chauffeur who, after a series of unfortunate events, accepts a loan from a mafia boss. Though relentlessly bleak, it is impeccably paced, filmed, and acted, and, as noted by Varietyhas “its own kind of beauty”.