The story of how realtor Brian Jamison came to possess the intricate pieces of a hand-carved, hand-painted Tajik teahouse sounds almost unbelievable. What began as a simple clean-up job turned into a decades-long mystery spanning continents, cultures, and Cold War history.
Years ago, Brian was hired to clear debris from a property after a couple’s divorce. The site included a barn packed with what looked like junk. But beneath the “mountain of trash,” Brian and his crew uncovered stacks of wooden crates. The property owners dismissed them, saying the contents were abandoned long ago, useless, and should be scrapped. But when Brian opened the crates, he was struck by ornate carvings, and what he’d come to find were the building blocks of apparently an old “Russian teahouse.”
Rather than trashing the crates, Brian loaded them onto trailers and, for the next decade, moved them from one Maryland farm to another, not fully understanding their significance.
“In the past year, I went poking around,” Brian said, and that curiosity eventually led him to Nate Jones, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and a board member of Boulder’s Sister Cities of Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan. The Dushanbe-Boulder Teahouse, gifted in the late 1980s after the Cold War began to thaw, was crafted by Tajik artisans as a gesture of peace and friendship. Brian bought a book that Jones co-authored about that teahouse and reached out to him directly.
Intrigued, Jones and his co-author, Kate Sector, flew to Maryland to see Brian’s trove firsthand. When they arrived, they confirmed the astonishing truth: Brian’s crates contained another authentic Tajik teahouse, built by the same craftsmen who created Boulder’s.
How the Maryland teahouse ended up in MD remains a mystery. The previous barn owner recalled that a man named “Izat” brought the crates to the barn but disappeared soon afterward, abandoning the crates. Some involved with the Boulder teahouse recall a man named Izatullo Khoshmukhamedov, whose name appears on a plaque within the structure, speaking of plans to build one in Maryland decades ago. The circumstances of the second teahouse’s arrival in the States are yet unclear.
Today, the teahouse remains boxed up in two 53-foot trailers filled with massive, vividly painted panels. Nate Jones has proposed involving University of Colorado students in 3D scanning and digitally reconstructing it, potentially leading to its physical restoration, as no current drawings or plans exist.
For Brian, who has spent years preserving the crates, the dream is to see the teahouse finally erected, an architectural and cultural monument bridging Maryland, Boulder, and Tajikistan. “It would be amazing to bring it to life,” he says. “It deserves to be seen.”
The same artisans who made Boulder’s teahouse made it.