It is a gigantic ocean liner stowed since 1970 in the heart of Tashkent. Impossible, if one does not move away, to hope to embrace with a single glance the Uzbekistan hotel and its 17 floors of rough concrete, typical of the brutalist architectural current. Tourists photograph it as much as the nearby statue of Amir Timur (Tamerlane), father of the Timurid dynasty who reigned in the 14th century, with a conquering appearance on his powerful mount, straight out of an account of the legendary route of the silk that linked China to ancient Rome. Installed in the homonymous square, the day after independence in 1991, the sculpture replaced a colossal head of Karl Marx inaugurated in 1968. Before, other "national heroes", unbolted according to colonization and annexations, have enthroned in the center of this square from where all the great avenues marked out with the Soviet line leave: Governor von Kaufmann, symbol of Tsarist power, in 1913, Lenin in 1927, Stalin in 1947.
A future under construction
There is a
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