We are in Kamoli Khujandi Square. During Russian times, it was called Pushkin Square. Kamoli Khujandi was a Persian (Iran today) born in Khujand. He was considered to be among the great romantic poets of the 14th century.

The square had lots of different things going on the day we visited. It has some very nice buildings such as the Kamoli Khujandi Theater. It has fountains and many bronze statues of Khujand’s historical leaders, bridges, a large auditorium, the Timur Malik Fortress, the Historical Museum of the Sugd Region, and a number of cafes and restaurants. I’ll try and give just a glimpse of the square area. The whole square is on the banks of the Syr Darya River.

We started at this end of the square, and I’m not sure why it’s called a square anyway. I believe the large structure might be a mausoleum. You can see a bronze statue on the right side and the Syr Darya River is just to the right of the photo.

From about where the first photo was taken, there was a series of three very large raised gazebos. You can see one in the second photo. This was a chess tournament for kids age 6 to 16. Talk about supervision, the adults greatly outnumbered the kids in the tournament. We saw video cameras and judges and parents and policemen and scorers and who knows who else. It looked like fun but the kids were busy concentrating.

The third photo is near the other end of one branch of the square. The river is still to the right. Another long arm of the square goes down to the left of here. It was a beautiful park and much more crowded than this photo indicates.

The interesting part of the fourth photo is probably not the part you noticed. This is the wall of the fortress that witnessed the invasions of Alexander the Great, and the Arab, Mongolian, and Russian armies. But the part on the left is a recreation. The original part of the wall is the section on the rights side. It mostly looks like a pile of dirt today but if that dirt could talk….

We were stopped a number of times by groups and mostly by kids. You can see a part of one of the kids groups in the last photo. They loved to take our photos and to chat, mostly through our guides as interpreters. They seemed to be very interested in us and most certainly knew about the United States – as in a lot more than we knew about central Asia.