The People’s Treasure

Outside the Kyrgyz National Academy of Sciences, at the western end of Chuy Avenue, a mass of rust-red concrete blocks juts out over the pavement — part tree, part cloud, part city skyline tipped on its side. Small brass plaques are fixed to the ends of the blocks. Each carries a name. Aitmatov. Sydykbekov. Umetaliev. Academician Akaev.

The names are all that’s left.

When the sculptor Turgunbai Sadykov finished the work in 1995, every block held a life-size bronze portrait of the person named below it: the writers, poets, physicians, and scientists that a four-year-old country had chosen to claim as its founders. Then the bronzes began to go missing. One, then another, then more. Most people assume they were taken for the scrap value of the metal. Rather than keep replacing them, Sadykov had the remaining figures removed, and the monument has stood empty ever since.

In 2016 the artist Brad Downey worked with a local research team to identify who had originally been portrayed, then tracked down Kyrgyz professionals working in those same fields today and photographed them standing in the vacant niches — a temporary restaffing of the nation’s fathers with the nation’s living. 

Come in the late afternoon, when the sun turns the concrete a deeper orange and the fountains behind it are running. Children cycle around the base. Almost nobody looks up. The plaques catch the light with nothing above them.