Soviet Piala (Uzbekistan)

Commentary
Soviet Piala (Uzbekistan)

An example from the jubilee of Ali Shir Navai (1441–1501)

This piala or tea bowl was issued in 1968 to commemorate the 525th anniversary of the birth of Ali Shir Navai (1441-1501), the famous Uzbek poet and political figure of the Timurid period. The bowl was made at the “May Day” porcelain factory in the village of Pesochnoe in the Yaroslavl region in Russia in 1968. The inscription on the bowl in old Uzbek (Chaghatai) reads:

Bu gulshan ichra yukdur bako guliga sabot,

Ajab saodat erur chiksa yakhshilik bila ot.

There is no eternal flower in this flowerbed (i.e., the world),

It would be a blessing to leave behind a good name.

This verse is one of the most famous and widely-known examples of Navai's poems. It is similar to an aphorism in its philosophical idea. On the piala, the text is reproduced in both the Arabic and the Cyrillic scripts. The combination of Soviet and Muslim is also shown in the combination of Oriental motifs and the red colour of the revolution. The Arabic script was abolished in the USSR in 1929, so its use in 1968, when it was known mostly only to those who had finished their schooling in Uzbekistan before 1930, was intended as a special tribute to Alisher Navai and the language in which he wrote his works. The Arabic script also had a broader symbolic meaning in the context of the Cold War.

Although Navai’s anniversary actually fell in 1966, the lavish jubilee celebrations were only organized two years later in 1968, in both Tashkent and Moscow, the capital of the USSR, where my father, Prof. Sadir Erkinov (1930-2009), an expert on Navai's works, was invited. This specially-made jubilee porcelain and other gift items were received by the participants. My father brought  these anniversary artifacts from Moscow, including this bowl with a couplet from Navai's poems. That same year, the international film festival of Asian, African, and Latin American countries began in Tashkent, and its participants had the opportunity to observe the celebration of Navai's legacy. 

This jubilee piece was presented (symbolically and physically) as an object of national culture, but it also served the international goals of the Soviet Union. In the 1960s, the USSR sought to communicate to the world its care for national cultures of its republics. Glorifying a Muslim poet through official artifacts of this kind aimed to show Cold War rivals and the countries of the so-called Third World that the Soviet Muslim East was blossoming within the USSR. The creation of the piala in honor of Navai also reveals an episode of the Sovietization of Navai's heritage and the appropriation of his works by the state.

Prof. Aftandil Erkinov is a Leading Researcher at the Center for Research on Uzbekistan’s Cultural Wealth, located overseas under the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Uzbekistan. He has been a visiting professor at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center of Hokkaido University (Sapporo, Japan) and at the Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (Tokyo, Japan) in 2013-2014; Visiting Professor  FMSH (Fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme) (Paris, France) in 2016; and a Fellow at ZMO (Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, Germany) in 2016.