Italian Media: Dushanbe: A Village Transformed into the Capital of Tajikistan

The Capital Day offers us an opportunity to celebrate the immense effort made during the Soviet era to build one of Central Asia’s most beautiful cities on a desert plateau. Today, modern architectural complexes are guiding this city toward its future.

Dushanbe (Asia News) – Tajikistan recently celebrated Capital Day. Only by understanding Dushanbe’s history can one truly appreciate the enormous effort, creativity, and courage demonstrated by architects, engineers, and builders. It was they who, during the Soviet period, transformed what was once known as Dushanbe-Stalinabad into a thriving city rising from the arid highlands—becoming one of the most beautiful in Central Asia.

In fact, the core element of Dushanbe’s development lies in its architecture, which not only highlights its status as a capital but also stands as one of the most prominent representations of the nation’s and society’s overall transformation.

All these changes are reflected in both past and present buildings, monuments, and memorials. In 1930, as part of the first Five-Year Plan of the Soviet Union, the republic decided to establish the Tajik State Design Bureau (Tajikgosproekt), tasked with developing master plans for the city and worker residential areas, as well as preparing design documents for new constructions.

Since then, Dushanbe has developed at an astonishing pace—so rapidly that many, including experts, were unable to immediately grasp the scale of construction projects or the feasibility of urban planning initiatives.

Thus, Nikolai Fedorovsky, a pioneer in applied mineralogy, member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, and participant in early Tajikistan surveys, wrote in the early 1930s that Dushanbe had been designed by architects from science fiction novels.

Houses spaced far apart, vast, desolate streets stretching for kilometers… This city seemed conceived as the future metropolis of Asia.

According to Alexander Fersman, a geochemist who participated in the “Tajik-Pamir” expedition, and later became an academician and vice-president of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, “The new Stalinabad being built on the site of the old village of Dushanbe already represented a new type of city, with meticulously planned layouts… Over recent years I have seen numerous new constructions across the Urals, Siberia, the Arctic region, and central parts of the USSR—but nowhere else have I felt so clearly the concrete vision behind the creation of a new city, a fully considered and abundant one.”

During this time, architects trained at the Leningrad and Moscow Architectural Institutes arrived in Dushanbe to work at the Tajik National Research Institute of Architecture and Construction.

Among them were several architects who left an indelible mark on Dushanbe’s architectural heritage, such as Sergei Anisimov, Dmitry Bilibin, and Kirill Terletsky. Drawing upon the city’s ancient cultural roots, they successfully preserved and reinterpreted traditional architecture, modernizing it to meet contemporary social needs, seamlessly blending medieval urban planning legacies with classical European architectural models from the 19th and 20th centuries and incorporating elements of the contemporary Art Nouveau style.

At the same time, the city’s architectural history extends back to the Soviet era, including some purely European-style buildings that fit perfectly into Dushanbe’s overall aesthetic. These include the now-demolished Vakhsh Hotel, Tajik Medical University, Pedagogical University, Academy of Sciences, Philharmonic Hall (now home to Safina TV), Political Education Building (Koshi Vahdat), and many other civic structures.

The modern architectural ensemble comprising the National Palace, State Library, Republic Parliament, Ministry of Communications, Koshi Navruz Palace, and Hyatt Hotel gives this forward-looking city a strong sense of contemporaneity, reflecting its pursuit of global architectural excellence. The Independence Square complex located at the main square of Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, is a brand-new architectural masterpiece symbolizing the republic’s freedom and independence, embodying hundreds of years of national history, and closely linking the country’s past, present, and future.

Author: Vladimir Rozanskij

Original Source: toutiao.com/article/1865216130411529/

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author.