Split Together Merged Apart Zasypkin texts

Restoration, as practice and as idea, is by nature historical. The word “monument” can have different meanings; the methods of restoration work, its goals, and the desired result also vary. All that unites these multiple versions is the inevitable time lag between the restorer and the object, which is to be transformed in some way.

In 1923, the architect, scientist, and restorer Boris Nikolaevich Zasypkin made his first visit to Samarkand under the aegis of Glavnauka, the Soviet state body with responsibility for museums. Over the next ten years he travelled regularly to Uzbekistan and studied historical monuments there as a representative of the Central State Restoration Workshops and the Museum of Oriental Cultures. In 1937, having returned from a three-year political exile in the Russian Far North, Zasypkin accepted an invitation to become the senior architect of Uzkomstaris (the Uzbek Committee for Monuments of Culture and Nature) and settled permanently in Uzbekistan. He remained there for the rest of his life, taking part in restoration of the principal architectural monuments in the Republic and creating the institutional foundations of a school of restoration.

This chapter of the exhibition aims to give a view from the inside of the life and working practices of a restorer in Soviet Uzbekistan in the 1920s—1950s. Zasypkin’s texts reflecting on the theoretical foundations of his work, his reports on the restoration projects, and photographs of the architectural monuments themselves show how restoration is about the production of images. This optical focus of Zasypkin’s restorations, which emphasises filling voids and recreating integrity, was complemented by specific techniques for working with artefacts and buildings, based on archaeological methods and traditional crafts. The restorer’s hands, and the construction materials and methods that are used, serve as a sufficient basis for Zasypkin to give “authenticity” to whatever has undergone restoration. What we see, therefore, is the transformation of a building into a monument, which stands apart from the urban space and is endowed with a special significance. Restoration is not a consequence, but a condition and a tool of this transformation.

The material for this study is drawn from Zasypkin’s collection in the National Archive of the Republic of Uzbekistan, and also from several archives and museum collections in Russia.

Anna Pronina

Showcase 1. The Whole and the Broken 

What does the restorer restore? Zasypkin was in search of the "Ur-monument“—the monument in its speculative, primordial, and perhaps never fully realised condition. This, he believed, is what the restorer must try to reconstruct, relying on the scientific method and interfering as little as possible with the surviving fragments, “letting each brick that lies in its place lie in its place,” and “restoring only those parts of the detail and facing that are confirmed by documentary and archaeological data as belonging to the monument itself.”

Cracks, seams, patches, and later over-layers are a source of disquiet, and the restorer must be ruthless with them (“Empty nests,” where pieces of mosaic have fallen away, “give an unpleasant impression, they are disquieting”), but at the same time they are a working material, which the restorer can use in order to reassemble optical wholeness piece by piece. Zasypkin’s sketches and photographs of the Gur-e-Amir Mausoleum in Samarkand were a preparatory stage for such restoration. And the photographs depicting the stages of restoration of the Samanid Mausoleum in Bukhara illustrate the path to the Ur-monument, which should create the proper “impression of antiquity.” The search for the required right impression on the viewer can be illustrated by the following account of restoration work on the masonry wall of the Samanid Mausoleum: “A famous Bukhara me’mor [Uzbek architect], usto Shirin Muradov, was put in charge of the team of craftsmen. [...] There were some attempts at restoration of the brick facing. In one instance, it turned out that the new masonry was ‘better,’ more correct, than the ancient work, but it stood out as different. In another case, when they began to imitate the old manner of laying the masonry, it came out askew and untidy. The trial section had to be redone many times until the craftsmen finally grasped the exact manner, which was required for laying the bricks and pointing the mortar. Once the technique was achieved, usto Shirin did the most important sections himself, selecting the bricks with care.”

Showcase 2. The Alchemy of Restoration  

Restoration as a practice has both conceptual and physical dimensions. The latter has to answer the questions: what materials, tools, and techniques are to be used in order to bring forth the desired Ur-monument? How are restorers to build in the twentieth century as if they were working in the fifteenth? This puzzle, posed by the lapse of time, could be solved in two ways. First, the restorers experimented with the recreation of historical recipes for making mortars, bricks, colours, and other materials. They relied on surviving images of the sites and on information gleaned from present-day local craftsmen who knew and remembered such techniques and recipes. Most of the monuments were restored using materials produced at an experimental ceramic workshop in Samarkand under the supervision of Uzkomstaris. Bricks for the vault of the Shir-Dor Madrasah (1926) and face tiles for the dome of the Gur-e-Amir Mausoleum in Samarkand (1940s) were made there.

The second approach for solving the puzzle was to reuse historical materials. The ruins of ancient monuments that were to be dismantled by government order were often used as “donors” for the restoration of others that benefited from protection orders. Chunks of ganch (a mixture of gypsum and loess used in Central Asia as mortar or plaster and for carving and casting), facing bricks and other bricks found during excavations and the clearing of historical buildings were also used. Pieces of hardened ganch found around the Samanid Mausoleum in Bukhara were melted down to make fresh mortar, which Zasypkin applied in restoration work in order to preserve the material and chemical integrity of the monument. He described this process in his field diaries: “After the dismantling of the residential quarters and the cemetery, the surface of the ground was strewn with pieces of old ganch mortar. The old ganch was collected, a primitive kiln was built nearby, and thorn bushes, which grow in abundance in Bukhara, were used as fuel. The grey-coloured mortar obtained was used for restoration work; in some cases new ganch was added, and hidden works were carried out using pure ganch [...] Bricks of the right size from the Samanid period that were found during excavations were used for restoration of the walls.”