Sogdianite, a milarite-group mineral, is extremely rare in anything above microcrystals. It was first described from Dara-i-Pioz, Tajikistan, by Dusmatov et al. (1968), from samples residing in the Fersman Museum - from which this specimen also came (the label translates at bottom as Mineral Museum of the Soviet Socialist Republic and is an old Fersman label format). This piece has a sharp, almost unbelievably fine crystal for size, beauty, and color, that is perched atop a mass of matrix which may be a zoned transition to milarite, or perhaps is just some other mineral species. I have not seen the like, and only had a few over the last 40 years as a dealer. For that matter, all previous samples I had seen also came from the Fersman Museum through Dmitriy Belakovskiy or his colleagues (he told me once that he had himself been to the region which the museum studied intently, on a very difficult expedition)! This old specimen likely came out before I started dealing with Fersman in the early 1990s (I spoke Russian at the time); it has since been through a few collections and comes with labels from Sharon Cisneros and Tom Loomis (noting a Phillips collection), as well. What a rare find!