Tajik Museum Collections Under Threat

Unique collections of art and museum pieces in Tajikistan are slowly deteriorating because there is no money to conserve them. The lack of funding for security also leaves museums wide open to theft.



Museum directors and historians have told IWPR that they cannot protect the collections of Oriental manuscripts, Tajik antiquities and western art that they hold, let alone make new acquisitions.



The Institute for Oriental Studies and Manuscripts holds many priceless books from Central Asia’s past, in a collection put together during the Soviet period.



Alongside finely-bound medieval Persian and Arabic writings, the collection has two volumes of the Torah handwritten on 25-metre parchment scrolls, believed to have been produced by the ancient Jewish community in this region.



The manuscripts are stored in a basement – a legacy of Soviet paranoia about possible nuclear strikes. But the poor ventilation is damaging the pages, and temperature control equipment dating from the Fifties is erratic, so that scholars fear the documents could become damaged beyond repair.



“The books need to have their pages turned at least once a year,” said Amiryazdon Alimardonov, an orientalist who has worked at the institute for the last 40 years. “We have just five employees for the 6,000 books in the manuscript collection. It’s physically impossible to do it.”



The Soviet laboratories that used to treat and conserve documents have long closed.



Worms are another serious threat to old manuscripts. “They eat the books, and in time it will be impossible to read the manuscripts,” said Alimardonov. “Scholars are powerless against the march of time.”



On a salary of 40 US dollars a month, Alimardonov said he was the highest-paid person working at the institute, so it is no surprise that few graduates choose this as a career option.



Despite repeated appeals to the government, the state-run institute continues to receive only the most basic running costs. It does not even have the money to send manuscripts to Iran, where experts have offered to help with conservation.



Nor can the institute afford new acquisitions, even though manuscript regularly emerge from private ownership “People bring books and offer to sell them cheap because they are so poverty-stricken,” said Alimardonov. “But we are like beggars – we cannot find 100 dollars to buy a manuscrips.”



Over at the Behzod Museum, a collection of some 40,000 paintings is also suffering from the ravages of time.



“The museum does not have enough funding, and the collections are in a terrible state,” said Georgy Mamedov, head of the local branch of Restorers Without Borders, a group which has been helping the musueum with restoration projects.



Once again, basement storage is a big problem, with temperature change and moisture posing threats.



With no money to install good surveillance systems or hire guards, museums collections also face the more immediate threat of theft. Many of items on exhibit or in storage would find a ready market on the illicit art market abroad.



When an 18th century German painting disappeared from the Behzod museum two years ago, it was some time before anyone noticed that it had gone, despite its large size and central position in the exhibition.



Police investigators believe the painting has been taken out of Tajikistan, and there is little hope it will ever resurface.



A museum in Hissar west of Dushanbe recently lost 40 exhibits, mostly items of women’s jewellery.



Safar Shosaidov of Tajikistan’s culture ministry was unable to put a price on the stolen items, saying “they are primarily of cultural and historical value to us”.



In both the above cases, investigators have said poor security arrangements facilitated the robberies.



Although guards at the Hissar museum are not being blamed for the theft, Shosaidov said the fact that they were paid a paltry seven dollars a month could hardly have improved security.



“If we paying such wages, we cannot guarantee the safety of museum exhibits. That’s true of all museums in this country,” he said.



One option might be to hire uniformed policemen to moonlight, but Shosaidov said they would charge far too much



Remarkably, the German painting and the Hissar jewellery are the only two museum thefts to have been reported to the police in the last 14 years, according to Tuychi Musoev, who heads the interior ministry department for crimes involving state-owned property.



Although Musoev sees this as a sign that Tajikistan is not yet plagued by organised art robbers, some suspect that minor pilfering is going on unnoticed. A cynical view expressed by some is that the only reason more is not stolen is that people are generally ignorant of the treasures housed in the nation’s museums.



UNESCO, which held a meeting on museum conservation in Dushanbe at the end of January, has launched a project to assist the Behzod Museum and the Museum of Ethnography to care for and document their collections.



But low levels of government funding in the face of more pressing social needs are likely to be an enduring problem. Mamedov offer a different solution – private donors from the emerging business community.



“There are now monied people in this society,” he says. “People who receive more from society should also give more back.”



Mamedov recommends passing legislation to allow museums to seek support from institutions and private patrons. In the end, though, he says incentives can only go so far and much will depend on people’s “selfless intentions”.



Ravshan Abdullaev is an IWPR contributor and Anora Sarkorova a BBC contributor in Dushanbe