/Białystok Tower of Babel
January 23rd – February 12th, 2017
As we know from the Old Testament, the construction of the Tower of Babel ended up in failure. People were punished for their pride by the confusion of languages that continues to this day. Ludwik Zamenhof dreamed of bringing one common language back to mankind. That’s how Esperanto was created.
Nearly 100 years ago one man had a dream: he wanted a huge tower in the centre of Bialystok, inspired by the biblical tower of Babel, in honour of Ludwik Zamenhof. The monument was never built. But we can use our imagination and smooth hands. We invite you for the Winter Break with LEGO Bricks, where we will show you a model of a monument that was never created, built with approximately 10 thousand blocks, invite you to see the city from the bird's eye view, and encourage to participate in the great construction, from which the city we all would like to show to Ludwik Zamenhof will be created.
Unfulfilled dream
1930, Jakub Szapiro, one of the most active Bialystok Esperantists of the interwar period, urged the city authorities to create a monument symbolizing one common language of all people on Earth. The design of the monument was created by the eminent Warsaw artist Abraham Ostrzega. It was supposed to be a huge monument (7x4 m in the base, 12 m height) in the shape of the Tower of Babel. In the fall of 1931, the cornerstone for the construction of the monument was laid in a place, where today is a roundabout in front of the Bialystok Philharmonic. And that was the end – the magnificent monument of Zamenhof and Esperanto remained an unfulfilled dream.
