FROM CLASSIC BURJ TO BURJ KHALIFA

Text and photos Andrei Dorian Gheorghe
Design Florin Alexandru Stancu

In 2019 September 5
I visited the Dubai Heritage Village in Deira,
or East Dubai, or the Old Town of Dubai.

An initiative from the 1990s,
necessary to keep alive the Arab traditions in a federal state,
United Arab Emirates,
which lives a fantastic development
with an impressive international contribution,
and where the native population represents only around 15%.

I could admire here a traditional “burj”,
the Arabian tower of Persian inspiration,
which, through a special system for the circulation of the air,
can be considered an ancestor of the air conditioned installations.

I also visited two interesting rooms:
-in the first of them
I saw very kind people, beautiful arabesques and nice carpets;

-in the second room
I saw a fascinating collection of old Arabian coins,
dated after the Arabian Lunar Calendar.

(This made me look for the Moon over Deira later,
and I found it in 7 September).

I enthusiastically continued my visit:
other traditional buildings and elements,
an impressive mosque with superb stellar arabesques,
a vision from the distance of the Dubai Creek…
at a temperature of around 45 degrees.

Thinking of the fact that the classical Arabian “burj”
inspired a lot of modern towers in the Emirates
(including Burj Khalifa, the highest building in the world - 828 m)
I imagined finally the following paradoxical moral:

If for us, the distances
from a classic “burj” to the Sun
and from Burj Khalifa to the Sun
are a little different,

the inverse distances
from the Sun’s flame
to them
are the same.