Posts Tagged ‘Statue’
Nezami Ganjavi
Posted by Ryan Schaffer in My photos Sunday, 3 January 2009 16:03 No Comments
Nezami Ganjavi 1141-1209 is the national poet of Azerbaijan and considered one of the greatest in Islamic history. He was born in Gange, Azerbaijan and it is believed that he spent his entire life in the Caucasus regions. One day I was walking to work and found them dismantling this statue. When I later showed it to my Azerbaijani counterparts they expressed sadness and remorse saying that they would never see the statue again. The story was that they were building a new Nezami park and that this space was going to be used to build a new music school. The new Nezami park was never built and the statue remains absent.
Lenin
Posted by Ryan Schaffer in My photos Saturday, 2 January 2009 20:39 No Comments
Like a small pilgrimage, most Peace Corps volunteers in Azerbaijan make their way to this statue to take pictures. During the visit I was greeted by a friendly local who offered to help take some pictures and explain how the statue came to be rest in the field and halved. The story was that in the final days of the Soviet Union a group of men in a large truck toppled the statue which used to reside in front of the municipal center. They simply tied a rope around his waist, attached the other end to the truck and drove off. He told us that for a while just the bottom half of Lenin stood at the town center. The statue appeared to be made of granite and was section in a few pieces. The man was proud of the Lenin statue and should us chips in the statue that he claimed were from bullets.