Central Asia, Gems of 9th-19th Century Architecture -Written and Compiled by Iraida Borodina

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Description

Located in Soviet Central Asia are three ancient,world-famous cities – Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva – containing priceless gems of architecture.These monuments are of so high an artistic level and are so unique, that they arouse as much admiration today as centuries ago. In the history of every nation there have been times of prosperity and of ordeal.Which is true of the Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Kirghiz, Tajiks,Turkmens and other peoples of Central Asia, though hundreds, if not thousands of years ago, they had already attained pinnacles of social and cultural
achievement. Among the oldest written alphabets to be found within the territory of the USSR are those of Bactria, Sogdiana and Chorasmia. One could likewise mention the runes of the Turkic peoples, artifacts with inscriptions in the Orkhon script that were found along the banks of the Yenisei River, or the Kiul-Teghin inscriptions carved on rocks and cliffs.Many other relics of early Turkic written sources could also be listed.
However, the descendants of these peoples experienced numerous tribulations, with generation after generation compelled to struggle for national independence right up to the 20th century. Time and again their very existence hung by a slender thread,
and it remained for the cleansing storm of that great Revolution which rolled over a sixth of the Earth’s land mass to decide their destiny.Art enables us to preserve the memory of the past. By arresting the instant, it perpetuates what would have
otherwise receded into oblivion, and at the same tim sustains the flame of the present day. Along our by no means royal road of ascendance we have come an
unbelievably long way in our artistic cognition of reality. We have created that unprecedented multinational amalgam of Soviet art which has imbibed the finest achievements of all the associated peoples,big or small.Soviet culture exercises a distinctively magnetic
appeal by virtue of its never repudiating the gains of previous cultures. The multiplicity of human life styles,the national traditions and mores consequent upon specific historical, geographical and cultural contexts,
always evoke our admiration.Soviet Central Asia is of an ancient land that extends from the Caspian in the west to the Chinese border in the east, and that incorporates today the four Soviet socialist republics of Uzbekistan, Kirghizia, Tajikistan and Turkmenia. Located in what is today southern Turkmenia was a region known in medieval times as Khorassan; Chorasmia (Khorezm) occupiedbthe districts enclosing the delta of the Amu-Darya, celebrated in antiquity as the Oxus; the territory beyond the river was known as Transoxiana.The sprawling territory of Central Asia is a land of geographical contrasts.Most of the area is taken up by the scorching arid deserts of the Karakum and the Kyzylkum. Formerly studded with a few green oases, they now have far more fields under crops irrigated by the waters of the Karakum Canal that has been dug in Soviet times. Even so the seemingly endless, clayey
flats, which, otherwise, would be the driver’s delight, hobnob with slowly
shifting, undulating sand dunes, hemmed in down south by the relatively young Alai, Turkestan, Zeravshan and Hissar mountain ranges and by the Pamirs and the Tien Shan with their inordinately high, forbidding peaks,eternal snows and glaciers. This is a land of scattered wells, that dry up in summer, and of tempestuous mountain streams of crystal pure water that run into the main river arteries – the Vakhsh, the Zeravshan, the Kashka-Darya, the Syr-Darya, and the Amu-Darya, one of the world’s longest, broadest, fastest and most intractable rivers. This is a land of
bitter-salty, solonchak pools, that vanish in summer, and of limpid, deep mountain lakes, among which the Issyk Kul is the largest.The climate is sharply continental, with the mercury shooting up and down
depending on the season. Thus, in and around Khorezm, one may encounter heat waves with temperatures rising to as high as 45° C and snowless winter frosts that crack the earth and that, in former times, froze desert caravans to death. Fertile oases and plains where subtropical crops grow lie at the foot of alpine regions where a planted apricot tree will die for want of warmth.One will scarcely think the spreading fields and orchards in the valleys and the verdant alpine pastures could partner scrappy plots of tilled land wrenched from the hillside terraces and boundless, dry stennes.

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