I asked if we could return later to record some of these pieces. Before I left I purchased a good frame drum case, at least the drums may survive the journey ahead. A 'large' Koran in the Uzbek Museum Culture is a living thing. The way people dress, the artifacts they make tell their story. As part of Russian imperialism the 'State Museum of the Cultural History of Uzbekistan' takes Uzbek culture and sets it in stone.
Faded costumes are a poor reminder of a peoples history.
As ever the saddest exhibits are the musical instruments - sentenced to a mute death. Tar, gidchak and rubab never to sing. On a positive note the museum does feature a very large Koran, possibly the largest in the world and some intriguing pre-Islamic stones, similar to the ones we saw in Almaty. Even in the West a museum can be a poor testament. Here surrounded by a population living in a new republic a Soviet conceived museum seems an irrelevance.