The next phase of demolition of historical buildings in the Tajik capital has started.
The building of the Dushanbe Administration will be demolished in the near futures and the building of the Ministry of Agriculture is next in turn.
It seems that the issue has already been solved but many residents of Dushanbe hope for new mayor. Can he stop the demolition of history?
Demolition of historical buildings in Dushanbe began several years ago and the first was the building of the Main Post Office.
Plans to demolish some of the most popular landmarks in Dushanbe have sparked outrage. In a desperate bid to halt the destruction, hundreds of city residents in October 2015 signed an online petition addressed to president and Dushanbe mayor. The petition drew more than 600 signatures in the first day alone.
Reacting to a wave of Internet grumbling, Nourali Saidzoda, the first deputy head of the Committee for Construction and Architecture under the Government of Tajikistan, told Asia-Plus that time that the buildings selected for demolition were of negligible value and needed replacing with modern hi-tech substitutes.
The authorities then demolished the Mayakovsky Russian Drama Theater and Jomi Movie Theater.
Recall, the founding of the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic was declared at the Mayakovsky Theater in 1929.
Tajik intelligentsia has not yet expressed its view on demolition of the popular landmarks in the Tajik capital.
Meanwhile, they have their own position on this issue. Some of them, for example writer Abduqodir Rustam, hold quite a rigid position:
“From the architecture point of view all these landmarks are unique buildings. There are no anymore such buildings in the post-Soviet area, because they were designed especially for the young Tajik capital. Therefore, this heritage should not be demolished. I think the authorities just want to demolish people’s memory. For the future generation history will start from this time, as if there had been nothing before…”
