Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.com) -- On 27 September 2019, in the prestigious hall of the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, the media event “New Uzbekistan: Unique Cultural Initiatives” was held in the US capital, Washington.

Most of the participants in the event are well-known American historians, orientalists, collectors and others dressed in robes made of luxurious Bukhara and Margelan textiles, thereby giving a special Oriental spirit to the media event. It was Uzbek textile that was given special attention at the media event. Scientists openly confessed love to the Uzbek ikat, they spoke of its indescribable beauty in reports and presentations, and demonstrated their outfits.

“If I could enjoy one kind of art in my life, the answer is obvious — it’s Uzbek textiles,” cited a quote from the Washington Post newspaper, world-famous collector, founding director of the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, Dr. Guido Goldman.

Representatives of the museum community and collectors expressed their undoubted intentions to cooperate with the project “Cultural Heritage of Uzbekistan in the collections of the world”, emphasizing its uniqueness for world practice.

“After successful events in England, Germany, France, Poland, the Czech Republic, the wave of presentations of cultural initiatives of the New Uzbekistan has reached America,” Frederic Starr, founder and chairman of the Central Asia and Caucasus Institute, said in his opening remarks. “This is a very ambitious project. No other country has ever collected its cultural heritage, located in various collections of the world into a single catalog. US scientists also welcome and support Uzbekistan’s efforts in this direction. ”

“Today we met only with a small part of this work. We understand that today he enjoys the full support of the Uzbek government, as the President of Uzbekistan Shavkat Mirziyoyev fully supports this initiative, which made an indelible impression on all of us today. I think that the media event in this sense has reached its goal today,” Deniz Beyazit, deputy director of the Museum of Islamic Art Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said.

At the end of the media event, the chairman of the world society for the preservation, study and popularization of the cultural heritage of Uzbekistan, Firdavs Abdukhalikov and collector Guido Goldman agreed to release the album “Uzbek Ikats”, which includes a rich collection of unique samples of Uzbek textiles, which Dr. Goldman donated to a number of American museums . The world-famous collector also announced his full support for the project and his disinterested participation in the publication of the catalog on Uzbek ikat.

“This media event differs from similar events held by us in other countries in that for the first time in the history of our project, large private collectors openly expressed their cooperation. This is a great success and demonstration of the level of trust in the new Uzbekistan, since we know that it is in private collections that there is a huge layer of so far unknown to the general public masterpieces of the cultural heritage of our people,” Firdvs Abdukhalikov said.