V–A–C Sreda online magazine presents a special issue timed to coincide with the Split Together, Merged Apart exhibition, which is taking place at GES-2 House of Culture from April 3 to September 28, 2025. The exhibition explores the relationship between modernism and archaeology and centres on the history of the Khorezm Archaeological and Ethnographic Expedition of 1937–1991.
In this issue, we publish an essay by Tigran Mkrtychev, a scholar and specialist in the ancient art of Central Asia. Mkrtychev describes the intricacies of archaeological science through his own personal history—from his first steps in choosing a profession to the formation of his later path. Reading books on ancient history, the opportunity to “hide” from the Soviet reality in the past, moving to Tashkent, and participating in important expeditions gradually define the image of archaeology as a kind of Mobius strip, allowing for the connection of distant realities and find in them traces of other times.
I do not honestly know if I can call myself an archaeologist. Many years ago, I graduated from the Central Asian archaeology programme at Tashkent State University, but my honours diploma identifies me as a history and social studies teacher. It says nothing about archaeology. I did subsequently have the opportunity to teach, but not in schools. Archaeology was my conscious choice as a child.
Everyone thinks that romance and adventure are the main motivations at that age. It was a little different for me. I saw the Indiana Jones movies much later in life.
Books were the first reason I decided to become an archaeologist. In the third grade, I read several works by Yavdat Ilyasov (1929–1982) about Alexander the Great’s Central Asian campaign, which featured the Sogdians and other Central Asian ancients. I knew nothing about the author or the setting of his narrative, Central Asia. But that was not what had grabbed me. This ancient history, described in surprising
depth and detail (and which, I later realised, was also quite emotional), made me wonder how the author knew all that stuff. I do not remember exactly where I got the answer: that ancient history is based on historical sources and archaeology.
The solution came to me at once: I would become an archaeologist and write similarly interesting stories.
The second reason was the Soviet environment of my childhood. I should say at once that I had wonderful parents, and we were a well-off family. My parents were not dissidents and did not discuss contemporary politics with me. My father was a Communist who held management posts at various levels, including the directorship of large factories. But my own experience of society at school clearly showed me there was a huge difference between what the television, newspapers, and teachers told us and what was happening around me. Archaeology provided a perfect opportunity not to be involved in modern life. At least, it seemed that way to me at the time. It was another plus when I was choosing a profession. I enrolled at Tashkent State University in a naive attempt to find an accessible way to get into a history programme. In those days, the universities of Moscow, Leningrad, and Kyiv were regarded as unscalable mountain peaks. No one remembers this now, but in the late 1970s, history departments were bastions of ideology, important primarily because of their programmes in the history of the Soviet Communist Party (the guiding force of Soviet society). A diploma from a history department gave its bearer the excellent chance to pursue a well-paid and fairly trouble-free career as a Party functionary. The archaeology departments remained the province of
romantics and misfits, but it was extremely difficult to break into their ranks at universities. My choice of distant Tashkent had been a necessity, and I intended to transfer to Moscow or Leningrad after completing my first year.
My first year in the east was quite hard: I was living on my own among different people, who had a different perception of reality. Everything was different. I felt like
an immigrant in Tashkent, although I had gone into “exile” voluntarily, and I was still in the same country. But they were very different parts: Kalinin (present-day Tver), where I had been born and gone to school, was nothing like Tashkent, where I studied at university. At that difficult time, I remembered my distant landsman, the Tver merchant Afanasy Nikitin, author of A Journey Beyond the Three Seas (1466–1472). I sometimes used his name as a pseudonym. About a year later, I managed to immerse myself in the “dust of the east” and become a particle of this dust. Just like Afanasy Nikitin, I had come to take a lot of things (but not everything) for granted.
The archaeology of Central Asia proved to be an order of magnitude cooler than the archaeology of Central Russia, where I had already had the chance to work on an
expedition during my school years. The contrast was of cosmic proportions. When I first climbed the fortress wall of Gyaur Kala (second century BCE—seventh century CE), I saw a landscape resembling the moon: thousands and thousands
of pottery shards were scattered everywhere, testifying to the city’s antiquity and greatness. I immediately recalled my first find, a small shard of a Slavic pot, carefully planted by the head of the excavation to bolster my fading enthusiasm. But there, right on the ground, for the taking as it were, one could find a hell of a lot! Later, at Central Asian sites in places other than the Merv Oasis, I had the opportunity to discover many delightful treasures: gold (or rather, to be honest, gold foil), a
large silver ring with a carnelian inset (now in the collection of the Museum of Oriental Art), and gorgeous turquoise beads. Hunting for retrievable archaeological material is much more exciting than picking mushrooms, and not because I do not
like picking mushrooms: it is another (the highest) class of free exploration, the search for traces of time. During my youth, however, archaeologists condemned this practice, especially as performed by non-professionals (the so-called tomb
raiders, armed with metal detectors), and they still do today. So, archaeology can be very provisionally defined as the search for something you never lost, a fusion of the unknown and hope. Archaeology is partly built on this fragile ground, and all prehistory grows from it.
An archaeological expedition is something like a submarine or a space station. It usually involves working autonomously far from the mainland: no one will send a shuttle into orbit to deliver a batch of new shovels. Your submersible or aircraft must have a professional, reliable crew, able to work under pressure. Gone are the blessed days when archaeology was the domain of brave loners leading squads of clueless labourers. Archaeological expeditions are now crewed not only by the usual restorers, photographers, and architects, but also by a multitude of specialists in the hard sciences. Personally, I still have doubts about them, especially when they try to use different scientific methods to determine promising areas for excavations. I was around, however, for the quite romantic times of tents in the desert, run-of-the-mill spirit levels, spades, digging knives, brushes, scholarly intuition, and luck. In the old days, overhead photos of excavation sites were taken by a photographer balancing on the top rungs of a stepladder. Today, this work is done by drones. Aerial photography was once regarded as mind-blowing, but now Google Earth supplies these panoramas.
Life does not stand still, but the sites which archaeology studies do stand still. They can be ruined, but it is difficult to move them. Despite all our technological progress,
archaeology is still a science which destroys the material layers of the past in the process of studying them, and this is an irreversible process. Excavations often disturb the object of study, because certain stages of the site’s existence are
inevitably eradicated. The modern archaeologist causes irreparable change to the material traces of the past, and this damage cannot be corrected yet. If we overlook these negative consequences, however, the archaeological expedition is the best place to knock all the nonsense of the present out of your head. At the excavation site, you can easily, if you wish, dive into the abyss of a past in which you have never been. It clears your mind perfectly. An archaeological expedition is a genuine
time machine which travels from the present to the past and then to the future. It is like a Moebius strip.
Life in the east and archaeology have taught me to see events as cyclical and regular. Thus, in Tashkent, I became friends with the son of the very writer who had made me want to become an archaeologist. My friend is also an archaeologist and one of my constant co-authors. I think that the high quality of his father’s works serves as an additional incentive for us in our “creative work, ” as we are used to calling our scholarly research collaborations.
Another twist of fate is connected with my research adviser, for whom I worked as an assistant for many years before becoming his graduate student. In 1937, the then-young scholar was exiled from Moscow to Bukhara as a family member of an “enemy of the people.” In his case, this was extremely humane treatment, as his wife was shot. Finding himself in Central Asia in a powerless position (for a long time
he was unable to get official employment), he managed to build his academic career on the material that was at his fingertips, so to speak. In Tashkent, he became an absolutely legendary art historian. I am certain that if it were not for his Jewish
background, Lazar Rempel (1907–1992) would have become an academician. I still very much regret that I did not write down my conversations with him. Thus, it transpired that he had worked briefly (in 1929–1930) as deputy research director at
the State Museum of Oriental Cultures in Moscow. Years later, I spent over a decade as the deputy research director at the Museum of Oriental Art—the new name of the same institution.
Once at Rempel’s house over tea, I met a strange man, an exceedingly thin fellow with an unusually high, almost feminine voice. I thus became acquainted with Igor
Savitsky (1915–1984). He was a painter but was quite fond of archaeology and consequently abandoned his own art, started collecting Karakalpak folk art, established the Nukus Museum, and worked as its director for many years. After Savitsky’s death, the museum was named in his honour. It so happened that after graduating from an archaeology programme, I defended my Ph.D. dissertation and then my habilitation dissertation in art history. Both dissertations dealt with ancient
art, and so to archaeologists I am an art historian, while to art historians I am an archaeologist. Because of my appearance (stereotypes kick in) I am often mistaken for an artist, and for a while I worked as director of the Savitsky Museum. Such things happen.
One of the high points of my archaeological career occurred in the final Soviet years. The Soviet Union was falling apart, but I was digging at a dream site: the Buddhist worship centre of Kara Tepe (first to sixth centuries CE), in Old Termez in southern Uzbekistan. Paradoxes piled up at this site. Kara Tepe was located not far from the bank of the Amu Darya, in a restricted border zone. The river was just a short distance away, but it was impossible to go to the shore: along the bank was a no man’s land separated by ploughed land and a barbed wire fence. On the other side of the river was Afghanistan, where the war was underway. The closed state borders of the present day contrasted with the openness of the world of two thousand years earlier, when Buddhist missionaries had travelled freely from India to China via Central Asia. In the years I worked at the site, one of the hills where the Buddhist caves were located served as the backdrop of a military firing range, and the disembodied ghosts of the Buddhist monks of antiquity, whose basic principle was to do no harm to the living, were shot with enviable regularity with all manner of modern small arms. Nature and life enhanced my experience. I often saw cranes flying toward India regrouping in the blue autumn sky just over Kara Tepe. Choppers speeding toward Afghanistan on missions also rattled and chirped in that same sky.
Time has wrought changes on the Buddhist monastery. Judging by the artefacts which were found there, after the Buddhists left Kara Tepe, the abandoned caves served as a refuge for members of a Christian sect and for Muslim hermits. The aura of Buddhist teachings hovering over the abandoned Kara Tepe shaped the worldview of the famous Sufi scholar Hakim al-Tirmidhi (circa 755–869 CE), who lived
and was buried in Old Termez. His mausoleum was one of my favourite places. The firing range has now been removed, the no man’s land has been abolished, and Kara Tepe has been opened to the public and is about to be restored. The
modest Sufi mausoleum has been “restored” and turned into a popular pilgrimage site surrounded by the usual shops for tourists. An exact copy was made of Hakim al-Tirmidhi’s marble tombstone and placed next to it in the museum. There are now
two tombstones: shrines multiply, as they should. Serenity has
given way to frivolity.
Today, field archaeology for me is like the recollections of an old cowboy pestering his drinking buddies in a backwoods saloon with tales of his youthful exploits. But the
Moebius strip still functions and from time to time transports me to the plane of my past. Needless to say, this is not déj. vu. There is nothing wrong with my psyche yet. This is reality. On a May evening, after a long and pointless day of work and endless meetings, I called the chauffeur and asked him to drive me to the archaeological expedition where my friends were. After three hours of awful roads, we drove onto
the flat takyr where the camp was located. In the twilight, the walls of the ancient site could be seen in the distance, and a huge moon loomed over the desert and the old tents of the Khorezm Expedition. It was the birthday of one of my friends. The people who welcomed me had not quit the “tribe of archaeologists, ” and so I had the sense that I was on an Indian reservation where the old customs had been preserved,
where hunting with a bow and arrow was still practised, and knowing how to handle firearms was as obligatory as knowing how to use the internet. We sat for a long time at a roughly hewn table by the light of a dim bulb powered by a generator.
We drank and ate, reminisced and shared our joys and problems. I quickly switched to the archaeological lingo, which I now get to speak quite rarely. Then, when everyone had begun to disperse, I exited the tent into the night and gazed at the
barely visible silhouette of the archaeological site for a long time. It seemed as if in the darkness the shades of my great mentors in Central Asian archaeology passed before me.
In the morning, I was already back in my office running a board of directors meeting.