Well, I just figured out what's on the agenda for tomorrow. Apparently the Museum of National Antiquities is a treasure and not to be missed, and it's around the corner from the Serena. Or so says the internet. We'll see what actually happens tomorrow. But now I've got a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Cool.
UPDATE: Sunday afternoon - 19 January
The Museum of National Antiquities absolutely ruled. I was the only visitor there when I arrived. You have to take your shoes off or wear plastic booties to walk around, I guess to save on vacuuming costs. It's a pretty big place and mostly unheated, and they're very electricity-conscious. A young woman stayed in range of me the whole time, turning on lights in rooms ahead and turning them off behind me. She sang Koranic verses quietly to herself pretty much the whole time I was on the ground floor. The museum is medium-sized, certainly not small: a main hall with a little gift shop on one side and then five or five-and-a-half display rooms with many cases in each. There are thousands of artifacts on display, organized roughly chronologically. The ground floor starts about 4500 BCE and works its way clockwise to the 8th century CE, then things pick up in the 9th century CE on the second floor and end about the 15th century.
The curation is a bit strange: They don't seem to be very discriminating about what goes in the cases. If we have twenty little clay horse figurines that are all more or less the same, what the hey, let's put 'em all in there. The displays can also be quite crude. The jewelry and coins and other small items are mounted on rough blocks of packing styrofoam, some of the pottery is pretty roughly plastered together, and a few of the pieces have permanent marker right on them!
But there's also a lot of interesting information, some of it even in English, and there's some pretty arresting stuff. For example:
1. A complete human skeleton, partially unburied but otherwise in dirt, found with bracelets and other jewelry on in a tomb in the southern part of the country
2. A tiny bronze statue from ca. 300 BCE of a man playing a flute on a small pedestal, which the wall copy explained was an altar to the Marsiya, a Greek river god.
3. Many, many other items from a fort and temple that housed #2, called Takht-e Sangin. The temple was dedicated to Oxus, god of the Amu Darya River. There were beautifully carved bone and ivory flutes and scabbards next to a bunch of the nails and door knockers from the ruins. Central Asia spent a good chunk of its history as a stage in a major trade route, and the syncretism between the Bactrian and Greek cultures 2000+ years ago (and later with Hindu/Buddhist and finally Islamic cultures) is obvious.
4. Speaking of Hindu/Buddhist, there's a huge statue of Shiva, missing the top of its torso and head. Probably seven feet across at the base.
5. On the stairs to the second floor, there's a life-sized statue of a prone lion that used to have a goddess sitting on it. In her place there's a weirdly primitive painting of what she must have looked like, together with the rest of the lion.
6. Beautiful wall paintings from thousand-year-old buildings depicting scenes of people hunting and relaxing.
7. Black and dark grey toaster-oven-sized stones covered in etched Arabic script.
But the coup de grace is the statue of Buddha. In the first room to the left after you climb to the second floor, it is literally stunning - it stopped me in my tracks. The Buddha, reclining with his eyes closed and a peaceful look on his face, is 42 feet long and nine feet high at the shoulders. He is beautifully rendered, with supple folds in the fabric of his tunic and carefully carved hair. The statue was discovered in the '60s and finally restored by the government of Tajikistan, together with ACTED and some other international experts, about 12 years ago. It's all the more breathtaking because the room in is itself only about 50 feet long and 12 feet high. The statue fills and dominates the space. It is awesome.
So I feel like I got my 20 somoni's worth (about $4).
Now I'm back in the Serena, thinking I was going to be clever and download a movie to watch, but it's going to take longer to download than I have hours left in this room. Some stuff at work blew up at the end of this past week and continues to explode today. I won't go into detail, none of it is directly related to me, but it's quite embarrassing for a number of the people involved.
Guess I'll read a bit, maybe take a nap, go to the gym, who knows what-all. Pack, of course. My flight's tomorrow morning at 6:30 AM, and 22 hours and change later I'll land at 6:45 PM. The strange miracle of rapid intercontinental travel.
UPDATE: Sunday afternoon - 19 January
The Museum of National Antiquities absolutely ruled. I was the only visitor there when I arrived. You have to take your shoes off or wear plastic booties to walk around, I guess to save on vacuuming costs. It's a pretty big place and mostly unheated, and they're very electricity-conscious. A young woman stayed in range of me the whole time, turning on lights in rooms ahead and turning them off behind me. She sang Koranic verses quietly to herself pretty much the whole time I was on the ground floor. The museum is medium-sized, certainly not small: a main hall with a little gift shop on one side and then five or five-and-a-half display rooms with many cases in each. There are thousands of artifacts on display, organized roughly chronologically. The ground floor starts about 4500 BCE and works its way clockwise to the 8th century CE, then things pick up in the 9th century CE on the second floor and end about the 15th century.
The curation is a bit strange: They don't seem to be very discriminating about what goes in the cases. If we have twenty little clay horse figurines that are all more or less the same, what the hey, let's put 'em all in there. The displays can also be quite crude. The jewelry and coins and other small items are mounted on rough blocks of packing styrofoam, some of the pottery is pretty roughly plastered together, and a few of the pieces have permanent marker right on them!
But there's also a lot of interesting information, some of it even in English, and there's some pretty arresting stuff. For example:
1. A complete human skeleton, partially unburied but otherwise in dirt, found with bracelets and other jewelry on in a tomb in the southern part of the country
2. A tiny bronze statue from ca. 300 BCE of a man playing a flute on a small pedestal, which the wall copy explained was an altar to the Marsiya, a Greek river god.
3. Many, many other items from a fort and temple that housed #2, called Takht-e Sangin. The temple was dedicated to Oxus, god of the Amu Darya River. There were beautifully carved bone and ivory flutes and scabbards next to a bunch of the nails and door knockers from the ruins. Central Asia spent a good chunk of its history as a stage in a major trade route, and the syncretism between the Bactrian and Greek cultures 2000+ years ago (and later with Hindu/Buddhist and finally Islamic cultures) is obvious.
4. Speaking of Hindu/Buddhist, there's a huge statue of Shiva, missing the top of its torso and head. Probably seven feet across at the base.
5. On the stairs to the second floor, there's a life-sized statue of a prone lion that used to have a goddess sitting on it. In her place there's a weirdly primitive painting of what she must have looked like, together with the rest of the lion.
6. Beautiful wall paintings from thousand-year-old buildings depicting scenes of people hunting and relaxing.
7. Black and dark grey toaster-oven-sized stones covered in etched Arabic script.
But the coup de grace is the statue of Buddha. In the first room to the left after you climb to the second floor, it is literally stunning - it stopped me in my tracks. The Buddha, reclining with his eyes closed and a peaceful look on his face, is 42 feet long and nine feet high at the shoulders. He is beautifully rendered, with supple folds in the fabric of his tunic and carefully carved hair. The statue was discovered in the '60s and finally restored by the government of Tajikistan, together with ACTED and some other international experts, about 12 years ago. It's all the more breathtaking because the room in is itself only about 50 feet long and 12 feet high. The statue fills and dominates the space. It is awesome.
So I feel like I got my 20 somoni's worth (about $4).
Now I'm back in the Serena, thinking I was going to be clever and download a movie to watch, but it's going to take longer to download than I have hours left in this room. Some stuff at work blew up at the end of this past week and continues to explode today. I won't go into detail, none of it is directly related to me, but it's quite embarrassing for a number of the people involved.
Guess I'll read a bit, maybe take a nap, go to the gym, who knows what-all. Pack, of course. My flight's tomorrow morning at 6:30 AM, and 22 hours and change later I'll land at 6:45 PM. The strange miracle of rapid intercontinental travel.
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