ajina tepe buddhist monastery Айина Тепе
The Buddhist monastery Ajina Tepe, which dates back to the 7th and 8th centuries, is located in the Vakhsh valley in Southern Tajikistan, one km north of the ruins of an early medieval town now known as Chorgul Tepe. Ajina Tepe can be directly translated as "the Devil's hill" or "the Hill of Evil Spirit" most likely due to local resident's perception of unattractiveness surrounding the earthen site. Before the archeological excavation in 1961 and 1975 led by scientist Boris A. Litvinskii, the site was considerably damaged first due to the Arab conquest of the region and second, to the decades of neglect after the excavation carried out in Soviet times and so was in dire need of urgent consolidation work. As a result, the fifty by a hundred meter mound covering the ruins of the Buddhist monastery was subjected to intense excavation carried out by the joint expedition of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, the State Hermitage, and the Academy of Sciences of the Tajik SSR. The interiors of many chambers as well as the monastery itself were richly covered with decorative paintings, most of Indian element and local traditions of ancient Tokharistan. Archeologists discovered 500,000 artifacts which included sculptures, bas-reliefs, wall painting fragments, etc. But the most sensational of these is a 12-meters height clay statue figure of Buddha found in one of the eastern corridors, now displayed in the Tajikistan National Museum of Antiquity in Dushanbe. It is the biggest sculpture of Buddha found in modern Central Asia.
On September 11, 1999, this site was added to the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List in the Cultural category. In conjunction with the Japanese Government, UNESCO launched several cultural heritage conservation projects along the Silk Road with one of them being the preservation of the Buddhist Monastery of Ajina Tepe in April of 2005. Today, this monument has been completely excavated.