Kyrgyzstan Diaries #3

Bishkek

This week I didn't travel to the countryside, I stayed in Bishkek working with my coordinator. We had several meetings, with artists and people that want to collaborate with us on the project. Probably we will be able to have some workshops where artists with different backgrounds will work together to produce arts that will be sell in one, or maybe more, exhibition/s.

During my free time, I visited different parts of the city, by myself and also on a walking tour. I feel that I started to become familiar with this city, I have still a lot of things to learn, but I'm not just a tourist anymore. Now I have also a photographic project in my mind, if there will be a development in the idea I will let you know in the next diaries.

With the walking tour, we visited where the industrial part of the city started. Almost 100 years ago Interhelpo organisation comes to the city from Czechoslovakia with the idea to develop the country to industrialisation. 

There are still the firsts houses that the people from Interhelpo built up when they arrived, now migrants of the countryside live there, most of them work in the big bazaar of the city. These houses had just the essential upgrade, but they have been the same for 100 years now.

I went back to street photography after a while, I walked around the city to take some pictures in the main square. I realise that now I am more patient as a photographer, probable the portraits I did during the winter helped in it.

I like the building of the history museum, the first picture of the blog, it has nice geometry. I also like that there are usually a lot of people there, it is a meeting point and a place for chilling. Like the girl in the first picture people are sitting near to it, or like in the last one guys are playing skateboarding in the square, these are nice opportunities for street photos. I was lucky because I was able to see changing of the guard.

After it, I visited the main orthodox church in the city.

It is the biggest Christian church in central Asia, Christianity in Kyrgyzstan is dated to the 7th century by some archaeological remains of churches, so a lot earlier than Russians arrived. By the way, the main religion here is Islam, around 90% of the population define themselves as Muslim, the other 10% are Christians.

The three pictures are from the main part of the church, there is also a small chapel on the right of the last picture. I suppose that the pews are missing because of COVID precautions, on the floor, there were signs telling where people were supposed to stand.