Dushanbe
— — a capital named for the day the market came.
Not only on a wall.
“The city took its name from the Monday bazaar that traders held on this bend of the Varzob River. The capital sits in the Hissar Valley between two ridges of the Pamir foothills, west of the mountains that hold the roof of Asia. Soviet planners drew its long boulevards in the twentieth century, but the older traditions — the choyhona, the bread oven, the wedding music — still set the pace.
Dushanbe, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Dushanbe is the capital of Tajikistan, set in the Hissar Valley at about 706 metres of elevation on the Varzob River. The name means Monday in Tajik Persian, after the weekly bazaar that once gathered here. The city grew quickly under Soviet rule from the 1920s onward, replacing the village of Dyushambe with planned boulevards centred on Rudaki Avenue. The population today is around 950,000, making it the largest city in Tajikistan and the political and cultural anchor of the country.
The civic axis runs along Rudaki Avenue, named for the tenth-century Persian poet Rudaki, regarded as the father of Persian-language literature. At its centre stands Dousti Square with the gilded statue of Ismoil Somoni, the ninth-century founder of the Samanid dynasty whose memory the modern state reclaimed after independence in 1991. The nearby National Museum of Tajikistan holds the reclining Buddha of Ajina-Tepa, a thirteen-metre clay figure from the seventh century, the largest such Buddha found in Central Asia.
Dushanbe sits between two ridges that rise quickly into the Pamir foothills. The Varzob River canyon north of the city climbs into alpine pasture within an hour's drive, and the Fann Mountains lie a half day to the northwest. The Pamir Highway, one of the highest paved roads in the world at over 4,600 metres at the Ak-Baital Pass, runs east from the city through the Gorno-Badakhshan region toward the Chinese border at the Kulma Pass.