On 17 and 18 July 2024, a delegation from the State Hermitage took part in an international conference on “The Archaeology, Material Culture and Art of the Zarafshon River Valley and Adjoining Territories”.
The event was held in the city of Penjikent in Tajikistan and was dedicated to the memory of the archaeologists Farkhod Razzokov (Tajikistan) and Nikita Semionov (State Hermitage, Russia) who studied the upper reaches of the River Zarafshon and worked for many years on the Penjikent-Sarazm archaeological expedition.
“In 1946, during the extremely difficult post-war period, the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences passed a resolution creating the Sogdian-Tajik archaeological expedition. The core of that substantial research project was made up of archaeological scholars, orientalists, restorers and architects from Leningrad and the young Tajik SSR. From the expedition’s first year of operation, the main object selected for study was the settlement of ancient Penjikent and for almost 80 years now, researchers from Saint Petersburg and Tajikistan have been engaged in the study of that outstanding site,” Mikhail Piotrovsky, General Director of the Hermitage, said, greeting those attending the conference.
From 1946 to the present day, excavations of Penjikent have practically never ceased for a single year, despite objective difficulties.
Colleagues from Tajikistan gave a warm welcome to the Hermitage delegation, which was made up of members of staff from the Laboratory for the Scientific Restoration of Monumental Paintings led by its head, Yelena Stepanova; Larisa Kulakova, a researcher in the Oriental Department and keeper of the Penjikent murals; Igor Malkiel, creator of the “Invisible Art” programme, and Svetlana Datsenko, advisor to the Hermitage Director; as well as the conference’s co-organizer Pavel Lurye, head of the Central Asia, Caucasus and Crimea Sector within the Hermitage’s Oriental Department and the present leader of the archaeological expedition in ancient Penjikent from the Russian side.
The Hermitage restorers of monumental painting – Yelena Stepanova, Yelena Baranova, Inga Budnichenko and Maria Zherve – had prepared presentations on the procedures most recently carried out on works from ancient Penjikent – ones that came into the Hermitage back in Soviet times and are still undergoing restoration.
Nowadays, all cultural artefacts and artworks discovered at the excavations undergo a process of temporary conservation in the field before being sent to research institutions in Tajikistan. Their restoration has still to come.
Oriental Department researchers Larisa Kulakova and Pavel Lurye spoke about the study and interpretation of the murals in ancient Penjikent’s dwellings and religious edifices.
Igor Malkiel, who himself previously headed the Penjikent expedition for a number of years, spoke about the “Invisible Art” project developed for blind and partially sighted museum visitors on the basis of the Penjikent murals.
In her contribution, Svetlana Datsenko, advisor to the Hermitage Director, focussed on the presentation of Sogdian cultural art in the museum’s display activities.
The culmination of the conference was a visit to the sites themselves – the ancient city of Penjikent and settlement of Sarazm. Both are recognized as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. On the territory of those places, which existed almost 3,000 years apart in time (Sarazm dates from the 3rd millennium BC, Penjikent from the 5th–8th centuries AD), one gets an almost physical sense of human history. And it becomes clear that it is impossible to pursue this field of study without work that is hard, yet accompanied by a never-ending sense of romance.
