Samarkand old city

Cities and Memory - remixing the world

This recording was made in the midst of my migration from Russia to Uzbekistan, through Kazakhstan.
This recording was also made in the Hamida guest house in Samarkand, but in the internal open courtyard. In the recording, you can hear the hum of the air conditioner, the quiet conversation of guests and the distinct speech of the muezzin coming from the mosque on the next street.
Despite the fact that I am not a religious person at all, I am impressed by the beauty of the phonetic pattern of the Arabic language performed by the muezzin. The contradiction between the beauty of rituals, visual ornaments, architectural pearls on the one hand and the cruelty of the orthodox tradition on the other hand direct my attention to the existing contradictions in my own judgments. I am immersed in contemplation and reflections.
Recorded by Vladimir Bocharov.
Part of the Migration Sounds project, the world’s first collection of the sounds of human migration.
For more information and to explore the project, see https://www.citiesandmemory.com/migration
IMAGE: RyansWorld, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons