Did you read Tintin? I did. That’s a Tintin reference. Yes, perhaps that reference would be more aptly placed in the Balkans, but, if I am honest, so too would Tashkent. It’s incredibly difficult to pinpoint exactly where Tashkent is. I mean, it’s definitely there, and I was definitely in it, but if you were to ask me where the centre is I would be hard pressed to point it out. It reminds me of the outskirts of every major Soviet city I have ever been to. And that’s the whole city. I kept wandering around hoping to find the centre but I never really did. I have taken at least two Urban Planning classes during undergrad, and I feel like it has given me enough familiarity with such favourite concepts as “Tower in the Park,” “Garden City,” and “Lollipops and Curlicues.” Tashkent had all of these, just no core.
If you’re as into Soviet centralized city planning as I am, then you’ll know that there was a horrific Earthquake in 1966 and the local planners used this as an opportunity to redo Tashkent, historically a bastion of bourgeois and feudal power, in true Socialist modernism and Soviet idealism. Or the other way around. The two have become so intertwined it’s easy to conflate. All grid, all decentralization, all the time. No doubt, as I describe this, you’re thinking about Skopje. Well you’d be right, except there was no massive horse statue with equally and unnecessarily enormous testicles (and an explicably missing penis*), so that’s where you’d need to drop the comparison.
The first day in Tashkent was spent acclimating to the oppressive heat and trying to orient myself in the, well, Orient. I was staying at what was considered to be the only “hostel” in Tashkent at the time and it had a nice pool in the courtyard where I chatted with a few Russian and Dutch people. I then set off to explore the city, which was extremely difficult to do as no amount of map investigation could really ascertain for me where I’d find much of an historic centre, if any. I hopped on the metro and had just as much fun seeing all the different themed stations as what was likely up above. I did quite enjoy the metro stations but good luck ever getting a picture of these because they are so on edge about the potential for these photographs being used for terrorist intel. I don’t even know enough about cameras or at all to frame a picture well enough to ever be considered for any sort of espionage shortlist, but I suppose at quick glance that’s neither here nor there.
*Okay, we need to talk about the elephant [trunk] in the room here: the Alexander the Great on a horse statue in Skopje is very genital-presenting, but the designers were faced with quite the predicament when they needed to either put the full stallion genitalia on display, or save on the cost of steel by avoiding it. In the end, they decided on half a penis, and two full testicles, so there is no way you can look at this horse and not think that they could have done this a better way. No matter how you slice it, it would have been awful. My advice is not to put a statue of a Greek leader in a Slavic city. But who am I?
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