Constitutional Court

The sculptural frieze adorning this neoclassical building depicts workers, peasants, soldiers, and children marching in progressive unity, a 1940s vision of ‘Labor Kyrgyzstan’ that has outlasted every government beneath it. Once home to the Soviet prosecutor’s office, then seized from the Communist Party in 1991, the building became the Constitutional Court in 1994. That court was abolished in 2010 after revolution, replaced by a Constitutional Chamber, which itself became a reconstituted Constitutional Court in 2021. Three constitutions, two revolutions, and counting, but the frieze marches on.

Olga Manuylova carved her workers and soldiers into permanence in 1942, at a moment when nobody inside that building could have guessed how often the sign out front would change. The prosecutor’s office held the space for half a century without incident, which in hindsight looks like the calm part. Everything since 1991 has moved faster: a court, then no court, then a quieter chamber pretending not to be a court, then a court again, each version occupying the same rooms under the same procession of bronze figures who never got the memo that the institution upstairs kept getting renamed. The frieze was built to outlast one government. It’s now on its fourth.