The Press Mosaic in Baku, Azerbaijan
The building that printed Soviet Azerbaijan's newspapers and books is shaped like an open book. It takes a moment to register from the pavement, and then it becomes difficult to see anything else: two great pages picked out in cut stone, spread wide across the front of the printing house. Worked into them is a history of writing. Egyptian hieroglyphs sit at one end and a Mayan calendar at the other, with Chinese, Georgian, Armenian and Arabic script filling the space between. Above the figures run the mastheads of the Soviet press, among them Iskra, the first socialist newspaper in Russia, and Pravda. And across the wall, in Azerbaijani and Russian, sits the most reproduced political slogan of the twentieth century: workers of the world, unite! It is mounted on the building that spent decades reproducing it. The street outside is called Mətbuat prospekti, Press Avenue, named after the printing house. Nobody involved was aiming for subtlety. The building still works, and it looks it. Its own online reviews divide neatly between visitors calling the mosaic outstanding and tenants complaining that nothing has been renovated in decades and the lift is ancient. Both are right. Soviet-era mosaics have been clad over, renovated away and demolished across Baku, and this one has lasted partly because nobody has got round to touching the building underneath it.
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