Clay Whistle (Tajikistan and Uzbekistan)

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Clay Whistle (Tajikistan and Uzbekistan)

Zoomorphic clay whistles, mostly in the form of four-legged lion-, ram-, horse- or dragon-like phantastic animals, originate in regions of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. They can measure anything from some 7 to 40 cm in height. Sometimes, the figurine carries a smaller version of itself on its head or back, sometimes an anthropomorphic rider, sometimes only a piece of clay or nothing. There are elaborate ones with multiple smaller heads or animals emerging from the big animal. These zoomorphic whistles were originally used as a kind of toy, especially during the evenings of the fasting month of Ramadan. Children would run through the streets blowing them for fun and to announce the daily break of the fast to everyone. Many of the whistles, especially the handmade ones, are painted in bright colours, adorned with stripes and dots although monochromatic ones in earth colours also exist and may have been an older variant when colours were expensive or not easily available. Stripped of their religious connotations during Soviet times, the whistles turned into symbols of traditional toys, craftsmanship and simple instruments. They seem to have become popular as exotic souvenirs from the “Soviet Orient” in the Soviet Union quite rapidly as a painting from 1966 by Galina Neledva (called Family Celebration, until recently on display at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin) shows. On the left side of the painting that depicts several people engaged in diverse activities in a living room, a Central Asian zoomorphic clay whistle, painted in the same bright colours as the example here but with a clay rider on its back stands in the bookshelf as decoration. Around the same time, a female Bukharan whistle maker and her colourful clay animals became the heroes of a children’s book by the Soviet author Gennadi Blinov (published in English as Granny Hamro’s Fairy Tales in 1985). The whistles also started to enter handicraft collections in museums across the Soviet Union; some of their creators managed to make a name for themselves. The exemplar depicted here is much humbler. It does not origin from a specific craftsperson but is an industrially produced consumer good for the Soviet tourism market. A figure of exactly the same shape and colour had been brought back by my father from his first visit to the Soviet Union in 1987 and aroused my interest. It is thus an example of a process over several decades that turned a piece of material religion into mundane artwork and souvenir, and an individual craftsperson’s output into a standardised, shop-made commodity, echoing wider trends in the Soviet handicrafts’ sphere from the late 1960s onwards.

Dr. Jeanine Dagyeli is Assistant Professor at the Department of Near Eastern Studies, University of Vienna and Research Fellow at the Institute of Iranian Studies, Austrian Academy of Sciences.