Dushanbe - Dushanbe

Founded as the capital of the Soviet Republic of Tajikistan in the 1920s, Dushanbe was literally built by the USSR: its wide boulevards, its neoclassical buildings and its cultural institutions — opera, museums, botanical gardens - are all direct legacies of that time. The city also takes its name from the Tajik word meaning "Monday", the day of its old weekly market, before the Soviets made it a planned capital in a few decades. To understand Dushanbe is to understand how a small town on the Silk Road became, by administrative decision, the political and cultural center of a Central Asian republic.

This day on foot crosses the visible layers of this history. The Museum of Antiquities preserves the fruits of the great Soviet archaeological excavations of the 1950s-1970s, including the famous reclining clay Buddha discovered on the site of Adjina-Tepa. Rudaki Boulevard, named in tribute to the great Persian poet of the tenth century, illustrates the Soviet desire to build a Tajik national identity rooted in a millennial culture. The TsUM - the universal department store — and the Aini opera house, dedicated to the writer Sadriddin Aini considered the father of Tajik Soviet literature, testify to this same ambition: to endow the new capital with all the attributes of a modern city.

What makes this course particularly valuable today is its fragility. Since independence in 1991, Dushanbe has been rapidly transforming: Soviet buildings are gradually giving way to prestigious architecture that erases the traces of this period. The Mehrgon bazaar with its Doric columns, the botanical garden founded in 1933, the small museum of Musical Instruments nestled in its yellow building — all these places are survivors. To visit them today is to grasp a city that is still legible in its history, before the next wave of reconstruction transforms it again.