Moscow’s Tretyakov Sculpture Garden (aka the Art Muzeon Sculpture Park) hosts a wide variety of modern sculptures, including a number of abandoned Soviet statues. These statues appear to be consciously presented as debris from a past life – this doesn’t seem like an attempt to glorify the Soviet past, but merely to record it. It […]
Browsing Posts in Travel
Tretyakov Sculpture Garden
March 31, 2009
Astana's Cosmonauts
March 20, 2009
Astana takes pride in being Kazakhstan’s visionary new capital. But in the older parts of town there are also many traces of the Soviet past. My favorite of these is a fine Soviet era mosaic outside the train station, showing a spectacled engineer and a waving cosmonaut. A nice reminder of Kazakstan’s broader role in […]
Vladivostok and the Pacific Fleet
March 8, 2009
When I was a lad, Vladivostok was impossibly exotic, remote and inaccessible. It was a closed city, the home of the jealously guarded Soviet Pacific Fleet, inaccessible to regular Soviet citizens, let alone wicked foreigners. Well, nowadays a standard Russian tourist visa will let you enter Vladivostok and you can wander at will around the […]
A Day in Transdniester
December 21, 2008
On my way from Chisinau to Odessa, I passed through Tiraspol, the capital of the strange territory of Transdniester (aka Transdniestr, or Transdnestr, or Transnistria, or Transdniestria). This is a narrow slice of Moldova with an ethnic Russian majority. Back when the USSR was dissolved, these good folk were alarmed to discover that Moldova was […]
Zoroastrian Yazd
October 11, 2008
The city of Yazd is the main remaining Zoroastrian center in Iran. Zoroastrianism is (along with Christianity and Judaism) one of the three recognized and protected religious minorities under the Islamic Republic’s constitution. So worship and pilgrimages are officially tolerated, although probably not exactly encouraged. I hired a car and guide for the trip out […]
The Darvaza Gas Crater
October 3, 2008
The Darvaza Gas Crater is the debris from a disastrously failed Soviet gas well. After the failure, the escaping gas was left to burn itself out. It has been merrily burning for over 30 years now. (More Davaza photos.) Through StanTours, I had arranged a 4WD, driver and guide for the trip, about 150 miles […]
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