Samarkand and its cultural heritage: perceptions and persistence of the Russian colonial construction of monuments

Abstract

This article is concerned with the creation, by the Russian colonial administration, Russian researchers and photographers/artists, of a corpus of ‘historical monuments’ of Samarkand in the first decades after the conquest of the city. It uses travelogues, administrative reports, memoirs, the periodical press and artistic productions to determine the mechanism of selection of representative monuments, defined as the ‘cultural heritage’ of Russian Turkestan and, indirectly, of the Russian Empire. The internal logic of ‘patrimonialization’, initiated from above and ideologically engaged, becomes more obvious when it is juxtaposed against native understandings of the significance of monuments, European practices, and the political projects of the Russian Empire.