Culture of Tajikistan Malika Sobirova won a gold medal in an international ballet competition. Since independence, there has been a pre-Soviet cultural revival in an attempt to foster a sense of national identity. Novelist Taimur Zulfikarov, and professors Rahim Masov and Bozor Sobir being prominent. Culture of Tajikistan The culture of Tajikistan has developed over several thousand years. Tajik culture can be divided into two areas, Metropolitan and "Kuhiston" (Highland). Modern city centres include Dushanbe (the capital), Khudjand, Kulob, and Panjikent. Zoroastrianism had been adopted by Persian emperors as a state religion, and was practiced in Central Asia as well. It eventually declined
Geography of Tajikistan Uzbekistan, generates large amounts of toxic waste gases that have been blamed for a sharp increase in the number of birth defects among people who live within range of its emissions. In 1992 the Supreme Soviet of Tajikistan established a Ministry of Environmental Protection. However, the enforcement activity of the ministry was limited severely by the political upheavals that plagued Tajikistan in its first years of independence. The only registered private environmental group in Tajikistan in the early 1990s was a chapter of the Social-Ecological Alliance, the largest informal environmental association in the former Soviet Union. The Tajik branch's main