Rohat Teahouse

In 2022, authorities promised Dushanbe’s Rohat Teahouse would survive the wrecking ball that had claimed the city’s Soviet-era landmarks. The 1958 chaikhana, where families gathered over lagman soup beneath painted ceilings and twenty slender columns, had dodged demolition once before in 2015 through public outcry. But in March 2025, construction workers quietly fenced it off and tore it down anyway, replacing it with a high-rise government building. The teahouse had been declared one of the world’s best by CNN, a rare fusion of Soviet modernism and traditional Tajik craftsmanship that could seat 1,000 guests at once.

The 2022 promise came with a footnote nobody paid much attention to at the time: officials said Rohat itself would stay, but the buildings around it would go to make room for a new Justice Ministry complex. Three years later, that distinction turned out to matter less than it seemed. When the teahouse’s own demolition was finally confirmed in 2024, the reaction was almost inaudible compared to 2015, an online petition that gathered fewer than 800 signatures, a handful of nostalgic posts, and then, by March, a fence and a crew. Ho Chi Minh and Chinghiz Aitmatov had once passed through its halls. In the end, the building outlasted an American diplomat’s compliment and a government’s own promise by almost exactly the same margin, not quite long enough.