Tashkent Chiming Clock Tower

The clock tower stands on a spot that waited a hundred years for a building. A house for the military governor of the Syrdarya Region was supposed to be built here - a design by Benoit from 1878, a symmetrical two-story structure conceived as the main dominant feature of the square. There was no money in the treasury, the palace was never built, and the square remained without its main building. The palace never happened, but the clock arrived on its own - from the war. At the very end of the war in the Prussian city of Allenstein, the town hall tower, which threatened to collapse, was being dismantled. A repair crew sergeant reported to the town commandant, Major Sokolov: the clock mechanism is intact, it might come in handy, and my city does not have town clocks. The sergeant was named Alexander Abramovich Ayzenshteyn, and he was a Tashkent native from a family of hereditary watchmakers. The command issued a document stating that the clock was a gift from the regiment to Tashkent. A competition was announced in Tashkent for a thirty-meter tower in the national style. It was built in 1947 according to a design by Mukhamedshin with engineer Levchenko, and the ganch carving was entrusted to Usta Shirin Muradov, the best master of the republic. Shops were made on the ground floor. The tower was conceived as an expression of victory in the war, and in this sense the trophy mechanism inside it is not a curiosity, but part of the design. This tower has unexpected relatives. The horseshoe-shaped plan of the square resembles Piazza del Campo in Siena, which is also towered over by a tower - and it seems the architects saw this similarity. And in the very form of the chimes, one can also read Iranian wind catchers, or badgirs, such as those built in Yazd. The result is a building where Italy, Iran, East Prussia, and the Tashkent school of ganch carving came together. And the man who saved the clock was later elected an honorary citizen of the city and appointed chief keeper of the chimes. He looked after the mechanism that he himself had brought.