Palace of Nowruz

Dushanbe’s grandest monument is probably the Palace of Nowruz.  And for irony, it started out being planned as a simple teahouse.  How it made the transition, I never really got that story.  But today, there is nothing simple and plain about the Palace of Nowruz.  The building itself is 151 feet tall and some 377,000 square feet.  The palace plus the gardens, fountains, pavilions and all is about ten acres, so it’s a large parcel.  From the start, nothing looked like a converted tea house.

The Nowruz Palace is a cultural and entertainment center.  It was constructed using ancient architectural decorative traditions of Tajiks.  It is a monument of culture.  Tajik colors and style are captured in every element of the interior.  The best craftsmen of Tajikistan were invited for decorative carving, wall decorations, woodcarving, Florentine mosaics, mosaic in colored glass, and painted ceilings.   

You can see the palace in the first photo as we approached the building.  The palace didn’t seem quite so big from the outside but it really is a large building.  As we approached the building, I took the second photo.  I was really too close for these photos but the building was designed in the form of a crown, symbolizing the crown-bearing ancient Tajik nation. 

Our entry to the palace was up the stairway in the third photo.  We could already begin to see some of the details in the granite, the marble, the painted ceiling, the chandelier and so on.

Once up the stairs, I walked out to the left along the second story walkway and ended up taking the fourth photo.  Again, from floor to ceiling it was all very impressive.

Looking out from where I took the fourth photo, I took the fifth photo.  The grounds are also quite impressive.  They have pavilions, water features and nicely planted gardens.  Trees include redwood, fir, chestnut, maple, magnolia, pine, cypress, and birch.  I’m sure that it looks spectacular in the fall with colorful leaves.

Palace of Nowruz, Halls

The Palace of Nowruz has fifteen halls, a banquet room, an art room, a lounge room, five VIP rooms, a billiard room, a supermarket, a bowling hall, a night club, a cinema with 3D, and a souvenir shop.  It holds some 3,200 guests.  We didn’t get to visit all the rooms but we visited enough to give a good idea about the place.  It has held international conferences but can also be rented by Tajiks for weddings or parties or anything they want.  Each hall and room was very different from the others.  We were told that some 4,000 artists and crafts people worked for five years doing all the work.

The banquet room is in the first photo.  This will give you a start on appreciation for the marvelous work done by the local artists.  We are talking about wood carving, ceiling painting, mirror work, stone carving, plasterers, wooden ornaments, and on and on. 

It’s easy to imagine an international conference being held in the room in the second photo.  But this conference table is just the inner portion of the room.  Outside of the arched walls is a very large space clear around the table which could hold many more people.  This entire room was spectacular. 

The conference room in the third photo is actually smaller than the conference room in the second photo, but it has no partitioning between the conference table and the rest of the room.  This room was also very grand but I especially liked the wood floors with all the in-lay work.

I’m not sure the specific function of the hall in the fourth photo but it was an incredibly impressive room, though not a great photo.  I think this might have been the garden hall banquet room.  It was almost all wood from floor to ceiling and had incredible carving and inlaying in the floor.  It also had a large second story balcony which is where I took this photo from.

The last room was largely glass including the art work in the room.  This might have been called the waiting room.  If not the waiting room, then one of the smaller halls.

Palace of Nowruz, Details

As impressive as the Palace of Nowruz is on its grand scale, the details are what impressed me the most.  You really had to go slow, sit, look and appreciate the artistic craftsmanship that was done here.  Again, some 4,000 artists and master crafts people worked here for five years constructing the palace and much of that had to be doing the detail work.  I also understood that they used Tajik artists and Tajik materials so this palace is truly a Tajik work of art.  The details are amazing.  From the wood carving, mirror work, painted ceilings, all the wall art including the walls, marble floors, wood floors, carved stone work, plaster work, and everything else.  WOW!

The first photo is a close-up in the banquet hall.  You can see the impressive wood-carved staircase and second story wooden handrail.  The painted ceilings were also very impressive.  The walls were busy with all sorts of art work in many different styles and mediums.

If you remember the conference table in the second photo of the “halls” post, this second photo is a portion of the outer part of that same room.  The conference table is to the right, inside the partial walls with arches.  The third photo is also in this portion of the room.  You can see Vicky sitting to take it all in.  These chairs are functional chairs as this is not a museum but a working cultural and entertainment complex.  The stone and wood work here was incredible. 

The stone work was some of my favorite and you can see a close-up of some in the fourth photo.  It’s all native Tajik stone.  Clearly, the Tajikistan mountains contain a wide variety of stone.

I’ve saved the best for last, or at least my favorite.  The last photo is of a wall painting, only it’s not painted.  It’s about fifteen feet tall.  This is all stone work and was done with all native stone.  No painting here.  And we were really lucky because our next stop after the palace was the ‘artists gallery’ and we actually got to meet the people that did this.   Not only that, but because of our enthusiasm, they demonstrated their work for us and it was unbelievably impressive.  They make these Florentine mosaics from local semi-precious stones.  I will be doing a post on this when we get to the artist’s studio.

Artist's Gallery

We followed our visit to the Palace of Nowruz by a visit to the “Artist’s Gallery”.  It was a large industrial type complex and not a new building.  It was two stories high with large outside workshop areas as well.  There were people painting, working with jewelry, glass, plastics, mosaics, and many more artists outside doing sculpting, welding, and so on.  Many of these artists worked on the Palace of Nowruz so it was really a fun visit and we also got to see people working.

In this post, I will concentrate on the people working inside the building.  Actually, the art was everywhere.  In the first photo, these paintings are on the outside of the second story workshops but the outside walkway was covered by a roof and the halls were all covered by paintings.

For whatever reason, we seemed to concentrate on the painters.  I believe that majority of the artists here were painters.  Plus, the actual sign on the building said “Academy of Painters of Tajikistan”.  It did not say artist’s gallery.  You can see a couple of guys with their own room in the second photo.  The two painters in the third and fourth photos were working in different rooms.  Everyone seemed very busy.

The guy in the last photo worked in the plastics section.  I don’t know what he is building there but I thought I would throw in at least one other area of art.

Artist's Gallery, Outside

We are still at the “Artist’s Gallery”.  Now we will look at some of the artist’s works that were being done outside the buildings, in the sheds and outbuildings.  Most of this work was welding and sculpting.

The first photo looked to be a work in progress.  No one was working right here but I took the photo.

I’m standing with a completed work in the second photo.  I didn’t see any name on the piece, maybe “man and bear”.

The piece in the third photo looks like something made for a Star Wars movie.

I don’t know anything about the works in the fourth photo but they looked interesting – coming out of the stone like that.  Maybe it was women coming out of the stone age.

The last photo is one I took from the second story of the painter’s area, looking out the window.  It shows the end of some of the sculpting sheds.  We eventually got down to this area.  But if you look just to the right of the tree, you will see the top of a twelve foot tall statue of Lenin.  I think he’s pointing to the sculpting sheds, which I’m sure is a step down from whatever he used to point to.

Florentine Mosaics

We are still at the “Artist’s Gallery”.  Now we will visit the artists that did the Florentine mosaics that we saw in the Palace of Nowruz.  For myself, I had never heard of Florentine mosaics before.  It has evidently been an artistic endeavor since the end of the 15th century.  My guess is that is started in Florence, Italy.  My understanding is that there are still a few shops in Florence today that carry on the craft. 

Florentine mosaics are unlike any other mosaic work, such as Byzantine or glass mosaics.  With other mosaics, you can see the pieces and the spaces between clearly, that is how the pieces are done.  With Florentine mosaics, cut pieces of stone are fit together in such a way that you can’t determine the pieces or spaces in the finished work.  They are made up of many small pieces of semi-precious stone.  These mosaics require incredible time and patience, not to mention finding all the perfect colors of stone.  Each individual piece must be found, sized, carved, shaped, filed, measured and reworked until it meets the connecting pieces perfectly.  It’s like creating a perfect puzzle that is not seen as a puzzle but as one piece of art.

You can see the artists in their shop in the first photo.  We were shown work and talked with both the man on the left and the one in the center.  The works on the walls are some of their work.

In the second photo, you can see the artist with his current piece of work.  You can see the photo on the right and the Florentine mosaic on the work table in front of him.  You might notice the paint brush to the left of the mosaic but we were assured that there is no paint used on any of the mosaics.  The brush is just used to brush off the stone dust to clearly see that pieces are joined sufficiently tight.  100% of the mosaics are stones.  They also told us that they use 100% Tajikistan stones, gathered from the mountains all around Tajikistan.  Every color is a different stone or a different shade of the same stone.

The last three photos are mosaics on the walls of their studio.  They had dozens of them and every single one of them was impressive.  Sit and look at these mosaics for a bit of time and look closely at each line and piece of stone and it starts to sink in about just how much work and effort goes into making one of these Florentine mosaics. 

Florentine Mosaic Project

We are still at the Florentine mosaic artist’s shop.  I want to try and show one project that one artist was working on while we were in their shop.  We got the artist to give us an extensive look into how it was done.  I have to say that in all my years and in all my visits to artists and crafts people around the world, this might be the best artist’s shop ever!

In this project, a couple wanted a Florentine mosaic made of a photo of themselves.  You can see the couple in the first photo.  This is the photograph that the artist used to create the mosaic.

Normally, the mosaicist begins his project by doing a sketch of what he wants to create, like the flowers in the last post.  But in this case, the artist had a photograph that he used, since that was the mosaic that he was to create.  You must look closely to see how the artist made a copy of the photograph and then broke it down into pieces, in this case, the woman’s face.  Then he created the color lines in her face that he needed to find a different piece or shade of stone to make that section of her face.  You can see the shape and size and color of each stone needed.  He had to do this for the entire photo.

We asked him how he managed to create the very small and peculiar shaped pieces of stone.  So he was kind enough to demonstrate it for us.  He created a very small piece of her face.  It was slow, painstaking work.  I don’t have the patience.

He further discussed the process and talked about finding the right colors of stone and so on.  You can see the artist and his progress in the fourth photo.

The last photo is just a close-up of the work in its current state.  Compare that to the first photograph and its very impressive, as in WOW!

Dushanbe Food

Hi all,

We are now finished with Dushanbe and finished with our trip to central Asia.  I thought I would end the trip with some food that we enjoyed in Dushanbe.  In thinking back about this trip, sometimes I think we mostly ate and drank our way around central Asia.  The food was very good.  The food quantities were off the charts, just way too much food.  The drinks were all good and we tried to moderate but we probably had too much to drink as well.  When in central Asia….

We had lunch on our own on our last full day in Dushanbe.  A few of us opted to eat at a Turkish restaurant which was nearby where we were touring at the time.  The first two photos are from that lunch.  The fish in the first photo was an order by a fellow traveler.  She said that the fish was very good but it was the presentation that caught my eye.  She also gave me a bite and indeed, it was quite good.

 My lunch order was in the second photo.  The good think about eating meals on our own was that we could just order something that was about right on the quantity of food.  In this case, it was perfect.  It was a gyro and fries.  The gyro had meats and vegetables and sauces and was perfect for my lunch.

 The last three photos are from our big trip ending dinner at the Bukhara Restaurant.  A Caesar salad is on the left in the third photo and as was fairly normal, we had our choice of breads to try.

 A hot eggplant dish with peppers and cheese in a baked shell is in the fourth photo, along with another salad.  Multiple salads was the norm on this trip. 

Our main dish was lamb kabobs with rice and onions which is in the last photo.  You might also notice that I’m having a beer, a glass of wine, and a vodka shooter.  I will explain.  For most of this trip, the temperature was in the 90’s and the majority of the time it was in the high 90’s.  That explains the tall cold one (beer) to two….  I generally do enjoy a glass of wine with dinner and in this case, they had a nice light wine for us.  As for the vodka, that’s tradition.  You see, central Asians hold tight to their traditions, like being nomads and riding horses.  But most of the central Asians alive today grew up as Russians, that is a republic of the USSR.  As Russians, they picked up traditions like spending time in big parks, appreciating monuments and statues, and drinking vodka.  I fully support their traditions and in fact, I believe that I was wearing my tie-dyed shirt for dinner.