On the trail of Tashkent’s bizarre Soviet relics

My visit to Uzbekistan began with a near fatality – mine. I had just clambered up and down the steps of a 20-storey-high giant mirror. The entire structure clanked and creaked with every step and buzzed with the noise of welders, none of them wearing safety equipment, all attempting some kind of lofty repair, ciggies dangling from lips, hardened by desert life in a former Soviet republic.

That a piece of the Sun Heliocomplex, one of the USSR’s most surreal scientific sights, had fallen off and nearly lamped me seemed oddly in keeping with the experience. It was the views from the top which felt incongruous – a syrupy panorama of Mount Kyzyl Zura and the auburn Uzbek peaks meandering away in the distance towards the border with Kyrgyzstan. And were those eagles swooping in the cloudless sky?

Dating from the early 1980s, the once-secret complex was a Soviet brainchild that was intended to harness the awesome power of the sun to heat up alloys for scientific research. The giant mirror reflects light from a few dozen smaller mirrors arrayed up a parallel hillside, focusing great heat onto chunks of metal. Its location, 20 miles north-east of Tashkent in the golden foothills above the small town of Parkent, was selected because it is one of the sunniest places on earth – an ideal choice for the world’s biggest solar furnace.

For me, it was an ideal place to start my exploration of the timewarp Communist remnants in and around Uzbekistan’s capital, now being promoted as part of the Tashkent Modernism programme (tashkentmodernism.uz) – a strange, dystopian lens through which to glimpse the surreal former might of the USSR.

The grinning, exuberant head of the project – his head topped, like so many others, with a traditional Uzbek “doppa” cap – handed me a piece of Russian space rocket made there and led me outside, where a kettle was placed next to a mini version of the giant furnace, the sun’s heat making it sing as the water boiled. Inside the main building, extravagant artworks vied with nerdy explanatory posters. Round the back, a careless Chernobyl-esque decay – fuelled by the stupidity of bureaucracy coupled with the cash running out – seemed to have set in, with bits and pieces strewn all around and nary a safety hat as we climbed.

My tour now finished, I headed back to Tashkent – passing donkeys pulling carts and roadside fruit vendors pulling faces as they flogged a rainbow of exotic produce. Soon enough, we were in the city’s main square, towered over by the Hotel Uzbekistan. I reflected on the irony of these concrete hotels being so in vogue with the Western cognoscenti when they’ve fallen so out of favour in their homelands. How modern hipster hoteliers luxuriate in bare concrete interiors, and how the insides of these mid-century relics are always conversely dripping in scuffed chintz.

The bar at the top of the hotel lay completely empty; a deserted countertop standing ready to dispense vodka martinis to nobody. It was like a scene from JG Ballard’s book High Rise. Through the window, the modernist core of “New Tashkent” was laid out, like a model on a 1950s Soviet planner’s desk in Moscow. From the window, you could see all the way to the enormous crouching blue dome of the National Circus, built in 1976 as an otherworldly example of so-called “Soviet cosmic architecture”.

I took the metro, which also emerged during this era, from the wild Cosmonauts Station, its blue and grey walls plastered with homages to astronauts. My eyes were drawn to the relief of Valentina Tereshkova – the first woman in space. The train clanked a few stops and I emerged at the Panorama Cinema. A small exhibition about Uzbek film-making sat in the foyer, with full-scale model people and cars and posters. On the main stage, I turned to see a rake of red seating laid out ready to watch a 1970s movie.

Outside the State Museum of Arts I saw something which brought it all home: a drum-shaped tower – a dead ringer for the Rotunda in Birmingham, a city I once called home. In many ways, there are similarities between these two cities, both so comprehensively rebuilt in the 1960s. But, unlike its British counterpart, there is something cheering about Tashkent, where – instead of knocking it all down and starting again – this weird and wonderful cityscape is valued for what it is. As the number of millennial mid-century devotees explodes, perhaps more places should take note, and promote these most bizarre of design destinations for the surreal, splendid relics they truly are.

Essentials

Christopher Beanland was a guest of Tashkent Modernism.

Tours of the Sun Heliocomplex cost from 10,000 Uzbekistani Som (63p) for one hour, and can be booked at imssolar.uz.

Sapiens (00 998 71 203 33 35) is Tashkent’s trendiest hotel, with a dark palette in its small but perfectly formed rooms and a bar, club and restaurant on the roof. Doubles from £47 per night.

Uzbekistan Airlines flies from London to Tashkent from £268 return.