TUNISIA, DAY 3: TUNIS - THE BARDO MUSEUM

 March 22, 2024

On our way to our next destination, we passed by the Tunisian Parliament building.  Its style really seems to fit what we had seen of the country. I love it.

Somewhere near there we picked up our guide Feker's cousin (on the right next to Stan, below):

There are multiple gates to the old town/medina of Tunis still standing, and this is one of them: the Bab Saadoun gate, first constructed as one arch in 1350 and reconstructed in 1881 with three arches to better handle the traffic. The wall it was once part of is gone, but the gate remains as the central feature of a modern roundabout.

Wikipedia has a picture of what it looked like with one arch in 1880:

. . . and another photo from 1940 showing what it looked like when the wall was still there.

TASHKENT, UZBEKISTAN: HAST IMAM SQUARE AND A MAUSOLEUM, A MOSQUE, A MUSEUM, AND MORE ENCOUNTERS WITH THE LOCALS

Our next stop was Hast Imam Square, the religious center of Tashkent.

We stopped first at the Mausoleum of Abu Bakr Kaffal Shoshi, the first imam of Tashkent who lived in the 10th century. He was an expert on the Quran, a polyglot, a scientist, a poet, a craftsman and a teacher.   

I love this shade of what I would call either cyan or robin egg blue. The dome rises from a band of intricate mosaic patterns:

Looking at the dome from another angle reveals the thin, vertical slab that surrounds the front door, a Western Asia architectural style we would see again and again.  I read a description that said the mausoleum "acquired its modern shape in 1541." They have a very different definition of "modern" than I do.