Not content with the highest, Tajikistan will now also have the longest flag in the world. Fear not the expense: Tajiks can surely overlook their brutal poverty to take pride in a two-kilometer-long national flag.
The banner is probably too heavy to fly from the newly inaugurated 165-meter pole in central Dushanbe, which – for now – the Guinness Book of World Records calls the tallest flagpole in the world. Three thousand people will carry the flag, measuring 2011 by seven meters, during an Independence Day parade on September 9, a spokesman for the Dushanbe mayor’s office told Asia-Plus.
“The flag was made by employees of the Dushanbe-based Tajiktekstil [textile plant] and the Dushanbe mayor’s office has already lodged an application to the Guinness Book of Records,” the spokesman said.
Speaking of greatness, Dushanbe Mayor Mahmadsaid Ubaydulloyev is feeling especially sycophantic with all these new monuments in his city. Though often considered a rival to President Emomali Rakhmon, Ubaydulloyev, speaking on state television September 6, said the president’s deeds (presumably more than just producing poles, flags and the like) should be “written with golden letters” in that great book of Guinness.
Tajik President Emomali Rakhmon attended the groundbreaking ceremony on Tajikistan’s second-annual Flag Day on November 24. State television reported that the flagpole is part of a series of new monuments and renovations to existing sites in preparation for the twentieth anniversary of statehood in September 2011. Rakhmon congratulated his citizens and proposed renaming a region of Dushanbe after the Tajik flag.
US-based firm Trident Support will erect the prestige project, chosen, most likely, for having already broken pole records in both Baku and, previously, in Turkmenistan’s capital.
