By last week, just over 1 million tons of debris had been removed -- roughly the weight of 4,400 Statues of Liberty.
But the image alongside the text in block capitals is not a patriotic depiction of the Soviet war effort, instead it's a downtrodden prisoner struggling under the weight of a statue of Stalin.
There, they met a few girls of about 12 years of age and asked them, "Do you know the weight of that statue?" I'm not sure whether they were actually curious or meant it as a joke to gauge the kid's loyalty to the regime.
Red curtains, dozens of sticks of incense and statues of Eastern deities lend an aura of spiritual searching to his front room; at the same time, barbells and weights place him firmly in the cult of body worship.
We then wandered through the medieval, carved stone gate that marks the entrance to Khan al-Khalili (the site of another bombing in April 2005), one of the biggest markets in the Middle East, where we bought colorful souvenirs for friends back home: silver cartouches, papyrus paintings, pyramid paper weights and, of course, little statues of King Tutankhamun.
It is by far the world's biggest producer of iron ore, digging up some 230m tonnes of the stuff in 2009 (a weight roughly equivalent to 1,000 of the statues of Christ the Redeemer overlooking Rio de Janeiro every day).
The house contains busts of philosophers and statues of pre-Columbian Indians, paintings by European masters, maps and globes, and a clock that uses cannonballs for weights.
As Stephen Batchelor has recently shown, the open-minded, non-authoritarian side of Buddhism, too, quickly succumbed to its theocratic side, gasping under the weight of those heavy statues.
Suffered indeed.. Works of art take on weight on this country, and pink comes into the cheeks of the statues after a while.
Our capital city groans under the weight of obelisks, equestrian statues, and grandiose temples fit for the gods but devoted to the winners of Presidential elections.
