Pamirs adapt to life without Russia
BBC News, February 22, 2005
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4284083.stm
Pamirs adapt to life without Russia
By Ian MacWilliam
BBC News, Tajikistan
The Pamir mountains in the Central Asian republic of Tajikistan were once the remotest frontier of the Russian Empire.
But the last Russian forces left this region on the northern borders of Afghanistan in December, and the inhabitants have been facing their first winter without any Russian assistance for the first time in more than a century.
[Photo]
Tajikistan still retains strong Russian influences
The Pamirs have been busy building new ties with the outside world, but many people still regret the end of the Russian presence, and fear it could lead to an influx of illegal drugs from Afghanistan.
The Pamirs lie at the mountainous heart of Asia where four great ranges meet like the spokes of a wheel - the Himalayas, Karakorams, Hindu Kush and Tien Shan.
Three peaks top 7000 metres (23,000 feet) and much of the region is a high-altitude plateau at nearly 4000 metres (13,100 feet), where outsiders can find breathing difficult.
The narrow River Panj, or Oxus, flows through a precipitous gorge, forming the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan.
Tajikistan has been independent since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, but Moscow had remained in charge of the border troops here. Moscow and other regional governments still fear the spread of narcotics, weapons and extremist Islam from chaotic Afghanistan just across the river.
[Photo]
Life in the frozen Pamirs
The inhabitants on both sides of the river are Tajiks, but the Russian presence in Tajikistan has ensured a very different history over the past century.
On the Tajikistan side there are roads and electricity. On the Afghan side there are donkey tracks, and few lights disturb the blackness of the long winter nights.
Drugs are a major concern here. Much of the Afghan heroin and opium which reaches Europe is now smuggled through Central Asia.
"The Afghans were afraid of the Russians," said Maram Azimmamadov, director of Volunteer, an organisation working with drug addicts in the Pamiri capital, Khorog.
"They're not afraid of the Tajik guards, and it's very easy to cross the river, especially in winter, so we're expecting an increase in the flow of drugs through here."
The Russian border guards themselves however were often accused of smuggling large quantities of drugs straight into Russia on military flights from Tajikistan.
Many local Tajiks worked as guards for the Russian-led force. They are now paid less than half of what they were paid under the Russians. Other people in Khorog say the border force will be less efficient now that it is run by the Tajiks only.
Two Tajik women selling cigarettes and snacks by the roadside outside the border force base in Khorog expressed a common view.
"The Russian officers would often help us - they'd give us some coal for heating when it was very cold, or they'd give us jobs on the base," said one woman.
"But the Tajiks don't do that. They don't employ so many local people and if they give us anything they want to be paid," she said.
Strategic position
Russian geographers, soldiers and spies first began exploring the Pamirs in the second half of the 19th century, travelling for weeks across the bleak mountain wilderness from the Ferghana valley in modern Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.
In the 1890s, at the height of the Great Game, when Russia and British India were vying for influence in the region, Moscow established military garrisons at Murghab, Ishkashim and Khorog.
One of the most poignant reminders of that adventurous era still stands in the museum in Khorog.
[Photo]
The piano carried across the passes from Russia
"This was the only piano in the Pamir," said Alvo Karamshoyeva, the museum's senior guide.
"The commander of the Russian garrison had it brought here in 1914 so his daughter could play. Ten soldiers spent two months carrying it over the mountains from Osh."
A plate fixed to the Becker piano, made in Germany in 1875, says it was bought from MK Grubesh of Moscow, suppliers to the Imperial Moscow Conservatory.
For many years, songs played on this piano on the edge of Afghanistan would remind the Russians of their homes far away across many hundreds of miles of mountains, desert and steppe.
But while ties with Russia are weakening, the Pamir region is surprisingly well connected to the outside world because of another patron.
Most Pamiris are Ismaili Muslims, whose spiritual leader is the Aga Khan. From his European base, in France, Switzerland and Britain, the Aga Khan has been working through his network of aid organisations to improve the Pamir region's local economy, making it more self-sufficient.
Filling the gap
In the grim years immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the abrupt end of subsidies from Moscow, many Pamiris faced starvation.
The Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) arranged emergency food supplies then, particularly in the difficult winter months. "The Aga Khan saved our lives," many people will tell you in Khorog.
The AKDN has been working to make agricultural improvements since then, and the region now produces 80% of its own food requirements, said Shiraz Abdulayev, of the AKDN in Khorog.
Another long-term goal is to improve regional trade, rebuilding transport links with Afghanistan, China and Pakistan which were severed by seven decades of Soviet rule.
The AKDN has already built two new bridges across the Panj river to Afghanistan.
"A group of Afghan businessmen came across the new bridge at Khorog recently to study the market here," said Mr Abdulayev, "and last summer the first tourists used it to cross to and from Afghanistan."
A new road has also been opened to western China recently, by which local traders now bring Chinese goods into Tajikistan, and a road is planned to northern Pakistan across Afghanistan's narrow Wakhan corridor.
Many local people hope that tourism might eventually make an important contribution to the local economy.
With some of Asia's most remote and spectacular mountain scenery, the Pamir could attract adventurous Western tourists if transport ties were improved.
[Photo]
Locals are worried that the border will now become more porous
In Murghab, in the high-altitude plateau of the eastern Pamir, a network of ecotourism guesthouses has been set up by the French aid organisation ACTED (Agency for Technical Co-operation and Development).
Visitors can stay in houses with local families in houses, or in summer in yurts. The cost is reasonable for most foreigners, but the income is a big help to local residents.
"Thank goodness for the foreign tourists who come here," said Yrys, a mother of three who rents two rooms to visitors in Murghab.
"I had 70 guests last year. There are no other jobs here so that money makes all the difference."
As the Pamir region slowly adapts to the realities of the post-Soviet economy, the challenges of its harsh environment have brought many difficulties.
But there is now hope that closer integration with the world will ultimately make life easier on the Roof of the World.
Pamirs, Badakshan, Wakhan area adapt to life
Pamirs, Badakshan, Wakhan area adapt to life
Last edited by Admin on Fri Sep 09, 2016 1:28 am, edited 1 time in total.
The Pamir Highway – a Journey to the Roof of the World and Back
Marco Polo once said the following of the Pamirs:
“… The plain is called Pamier, and you ride across it for twelve days together, finding nothing but a desert without habitations or any green thing, so that travellers are obliged to carry with them whatever they have need of. The region is so lofty and cold that you can not even see any birds flying. And I must notice also that because of this great cold, fire does not burn so bright, nor give out so much heat as usual….”
The Pamirs is a mountainous area in the Gorno-Badakshan Autonomous Oblast of Tajikistan - known as the Roof of the World (Krisha Mira). It’s composed of some of the most remote and untouched areas in the world, including some of the tallest peaks in Central Asia and the world.
As I was primarily based in Dushanbe for the last two months, when I got an opportunity to travel to the Pamirs for about 5 days before leaving the country, I knew I had to take it. It was going to be quite an adventure!
RECOMMENDATION: I highly recommend that you check out this 3-minute video below (in Full Screen if possible) first - it took so long to upload it! And then read the rest, if you like what you see.
VIDEO: The Pamir Highway - Journey to the Roof of the World and Back.
http://boba.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/th ... -and-back/
Marco Polo once said the following of the Pamirs:
“… The plain is called Pamier, and you ride across it for twelve days together, finding nothing but a desert without habitations or any green thing, so that travellers are obliged to carry with them whatever they have need of. The region is so lofty and cold that you can not even see any birds flying. And I must notice also that because of this great cold, fire does not burn so bright, nor give out so much heat as usual….”
The Pamirs is a mountainous area in the Gorno-Badakshan Autonomous Oblast of Tajikistan - known as the Roof of the World (Krisha Mira). It’s composed of some of the most remote and untouched areas in the world, including some of the tallest peaks in Central Asia and the world.
As I was primarily based in Dushanbe for the last two months, when I got an opportunity to travel to the Pamirs for about 5 days before leaving the country, I knew I had to take it. It was going to be quite an adventure!
RECOMMENDATION: I highly recommend that you check out this 3-minute video below (in Full Screen if possible) first - it took so long to upload it! And then read the rest, if you like what you see.
VIDEO: The Pamir Highway - Journey to the Roof of the World and Back.
http://boba.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/th ... -and-back/
High adventure: crossing Tajikistan
By Tiffany Kary
Bloomberg News
When the ululating cries broke through the night, I was seized with fear. I'd been warned against coming to Tajikistan, with its fuel and food shortages, war-torn borders, terrorists and despotic leaders.
Three male voices played off one another like predators closing in on prey. A flashlight pierced my tent. I prepared to bolt from my sleeping bag — to where, in the remote mountain terrain a day's hike from the nearest road, I had no idea.
Then the smell of fresh sheep dung and the clomp of hoofs reached me. The men were nomadic shepherds, beginning their fall migration before dawn.
Tajikistan, the poorest of Central Asia's post-Soviet republics, is surprisingly safe, despite sharing a border with Afghanistan and suffering a 2007 bombing attributed to Islamic terrorists.
Still, this certainly isn't a luxury-travel destination. Outside the capital of Dushanbe, shelter is limited to tents and "homestays," or private residences. You need letters of invitation, visas and special permits for traveling in remote regions, and visas have to be vetted upon arrival in the country — we had a two-day wait. Few guidebooks give the country, bordered by Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and China, much space, and official tourism is minimal.
The trade-off is unspoiled valleys, soaring peaks — some more than 20,000 feet tall — and ruins from Zoroastrian, Buddhist and Islamic cultures unmarred by tourist traffic or signs. The country affords a traveler the rare experience of being dwarfed by both history and nature, exploring the mountainous land known in Victorian times as "the roof of the world."
Low-budget trek
The capital city of Dushanbe, dusty and oppressive, can be seen in a day. We were blocked from photographing the presidential palace via warning whistles by plainclothes police standing every 10 meters along the main street. A phrase book of Tajik or Russian is essential, with Dushanbe's mix of Uzbeks, Russians and native Tajiks having little knowledge of English.
A Russian guide, with a porter and driver, agreed to take us for a five-day, all-inclusive trek of the Fan Mountains near the Uzbek border for $700 each. Not a bad price, considering most travel agencies that visit Tajikistan do so as part of "Silk Road Tours" costing $7,000 and up that follow the ancient trade route between China and Europe. A guide and a Jeep-type vehicle are essential for negotiating the country's unpaved roads — and the official checkpoints on the roads The Fans, though hard to get to, are worth the effort. Ascending the 11,909-foot Laudon Pass gave us views of towering mountains, topped with glaciers. Valleys of turquoise lakes shimmered below.
In the remote mountains, we lazed under a cabana of sticks and rags by the banks of Lake Kulikalon, at an elevation of 9,186 feet, with an 82-year-old woman, her daughter and two grandchildren, eating tea, bread and fried marinka, a local lake fish. The hospitality of people who have almost nothing is one of the great beauties of Tajikistan.
Flying between peaks
To reach the Pamir region in eastern Tajikistan, we caught the Dushanbe-Khorog flight, infamous for a tight passage between peaks that prevents it from flying in anything but cloudless skies. Some of the world's tallest mountains are in the Pamir range, including the 24,590-foot Ismoil Somoni peak, in what's called the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region.
While the rest of Tajikistan is Sunni, in Pamir the Ismaili Shiites — many of whom are blue-eyed blonds who claim descent from Alexander the Great — revere the Aga Khan, spiritual leader to a branch of the Shia faith, hanging photos of him in every room. In Khorog, the region's capital, the luxurious Serena Inn, owned by an Aga Khan company, was hosting a music festival. Teenagers in jeans and trendy T-shirts danced and snapped photos of a Dushanbe rock group on their cellphones.
Our four-day Pamir tour, shared with two others, was $200 each, including home stays and meals in the Whakan Valley, a wide, high-altitude corridor. Mazars, or Islamic shrines, and Zoroastrian fire temples stacked with the weathered skulls of ibex and sheep edge the road.
It was here that Marco Polo and ancient traders traveled between China and Europe. And it's through here, across a loosely guarded border with only the narrow Panj River dividing it from Afghanistan, that much of the world's heroin passes.
Exit adventures
The journey back to Dushanbe was an adventure. After our Khorog-Dushanbe flight had been canceled three days running, we caught a $30-a-person ride in a Chinese minivan for the 30-hour trip, only to find our driver drinking vodka an hour into the trip.
Thinking it wise to disembark when army officials from an unmarked car started to rough up the driver, we found another ride the rest of the way to Dushanbe just in time for our flight. What's an adventure without a good scare, anyway?
Copyright © 2009 The Seattle Times Company
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/t ... tan10.html
By Tiffany Kary
Bloomberg News
When the ululating cries broke through the night, I was seized with fear. I'd been warned against coming to Tajikistan, with its fuel and food shortages, war-torn borders, terrorists and despotic leaders.
Three male voices played off one another like predators closing in on prey. A flashlight pierced my tent. I prepared to bolt from my sleeping bag — to where, in the remote mountain terrain a day's hike from the nearest road, I had no idea.
Then the smell of fresh sheep dung and the clomp of hoofs reached me. The men were nomadic shepherds, beginning their fall migration before dawn.
Tajikistan, the poorest of Central Asia's post-Soviet republics, is surprisingly safe, despite sharing a border with Afghanistan and suffering a 2007 bombing attributed to Islamic terrorists.
Still, this certainly isn't a luxury-travel destination. Outside the capital of Dushanbe, shelter is limited to tents and "homestays," or private residences. You need letters of invitation, visas and special permits for traveling in remote regions, and visas have to be vetted upon arrival in the country — we had a two-day wait. Few guidebooks give the country, bordered by Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and China, much space, and official tourism is minimal.
The trade-off is unspoiled valleys, soaring peaks — some more than 20,000 feet tall — and ruins from Zoroastrian, Buddhist and Islamic cultures unmarred by tourist traffic or signs. The country affords a traveler the rare experience of being dwarfed by both history and nature, exploring the mountainous land known in Victorian times as "the roof of the world."
Low-budget trek
The capital city of Dushanbe, dusty and oppressive, can be seen in a day. We were blocked from photographing the presidential palace via warning whistles by plainclothes police standing every 10 meters along the main street. A phrase book of Tajik or Russian is essential, with Dushanbe's mix of Uzbeks, Russians and native Tajiks having little knowledge of English.
A Russian guide, with a porter and driver, agreed to take us for a five-day, all-inclusive trek of the Fan Mountains near the Uzbek border for $700 each. Not a bad price, considering most travel agencies that visit Tajikistan do so as part of "Silk Road Tours" costing $7,000 and up that follow the ancient trade route between China and Europe. A guide and a Jeep-type vehicle are essential for negotiating the country's unpaved roads — and the official checkpoints on the roads The Fans, though hard to get to, are worth the effort. Ascending the 11,909-foot Laudon Pass gave us views of towering mountains, topped with glaciers. Valleys of turquoise lakes shimmered below.
In the remote mountains, we lazed under a cabana of sticks and rags by the banks of Lake Kulikalon, at an elevation of 9,186 feet, with an 82-year-old woman, her daughter and two grandchildren, eating tea, bread and fried marinka, a local lake fish. The hospitality of people who have almost nothing is one of the great beauties of Tajikistan.
Flying between peaks
To reach the Pamir region in eastern Tajikistan, we caught the Dushanbe-Khorog flight, infamous for a tight passage between peaks that prevents it from flying in anything but cloudless skies. Some of the world's tallest mountains are in the Pamir range, including the 24,590-foot Ismoil Somoni peak, in what's called the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region.
While the rest of Tajikistan is Sunni, in Pamir the Ismaili Shiites — many of whom are blue-eyed blonds who claim descent from Alexander the Great — revere the Aga Khan, spiritual leader to a branch of the Shia faith, hanging photos of him in every room. In Khorog, the region's capital, the luxurious Serena Inn, owned by an Aga Khan company, was hosting a music festival. Teenagers in jeans and trendy T-shirts danced and snapped photos of a Dushanbe rock group on their cellphones.
Our four-day Pamir tour, shared with two others, was $200 each, including home stays and meals in the Whakan Valley, a wide, high-altitude corridor. Mazars, or Islamic shrines, and Zoroastrian fire temples stacked with the weathered skulls of ibex and sheep edge the road.
It was here that Marco Polo and ancient traders traveled between China and Europe. And it's through here, across a loosely guarded border with only the narrow Panj River dividing it from Afghanistan, that much of the world's heroin passes.
Exit adventures
The journey back to Dushanbe was an adventure. After our Khorog-Dushanbe flight had been canceled three days running, we caught a $30-a-person ride in a Chinese minivan for the 30-hour trip, only to find our driver drinking vodka an hour into the trip.
Thinking it wise to disembark when army officials from an unmarked car started to rough up the driver, we found another ride the rest of the way to Dushanbe just in time for our flight. What's an adventure without a good scare, anyway?
Copyright © 2009 The Seattle Times Company
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/t ... tan10.html
There is a related nice multimedia linked at:
http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/tr ... Pamir.html
December 20, 2009
Pamir Mountains, the Crossroads of History
By ANDY ISAACSON
BY 9 in the morning, the bazaar on a rocky island in the Panj River was a frenetic scene of haggling and theatrics. Afghan traders in long tunics and vests hawked teas, toiletries and rubber slippers. Turbaned fortune tellers bent over ornate Persian texts, predicting futures for the price of a dollar. Tajik women bargained over resplendent bolts of fabric. All were mingling this bright Saturday at a weekly market held throughout the year and, in one form or another, for thousands of years here in the Wakhan Valley, which divides Tajikistan and Afghanistan.
“Mousetraps, mousetraps, mousetraps, oooowww!” crooned a white-bearded Afghan in the Iranian language spoken by locals from both sides of the border.
“They don’t buy!” complained a high-heeled shoe salesman from Kabul to me, in English.
“They always start the price too high,” a Tajik woman in a blue patterned dress and headscarf whispered as she stood before bright red carpets, appearing seductive against a monochrome mountain backdrop.
As the sun rose higher, I joined the crowds — young Tajik men in sporty shirts and jeans, uniformed border guards, families — seeking shade under rainbow umbrellas to eat rice palov, served from large cauldrons. Across the market grounds, I could see three lipsticked Korean women in straw hats dispensing balloon animals to a captivated group of men and boys.
East meeting West, North meeting South: since time immemorial, the Wakhan Valley, in the Pamir Mountains, has existed at the intersection of trails trodden by nomads, peddlers, pilgrims and, at times, the soldiers and emissaries of great powers. When I’d thought about traveling to see this rugged branch of the ancient Silk Road, it had seemed like an adventure to the far-flung periphery of the world. Now, as I looked around the market, taking the long view of history, it felt more like the center.
During the last century, this long-strategic nexus of Asia, earlier crossed by Scythians, Persians, Greeks, Kushans, Hephtalites, Gokturks, Huns, Arabs and Mongol hordes, became a cul-de-sac at the command of the Russians. In 1929 Stalin’s mapmakers created the Soviet Socialist Republic of Tajikistan, a territory about the same size as New York State, 93 percent mountainous, given shape in the artificial (though politically expedient) manner in which all the Central Asian republics were drawn. A Soviet vision of a model Oriental capital was built around the market village of Dushanbe — pleasant and leafy, if dull, with a wide central avenue, pastel-colored buildings, the standard apartment blocks and some grand monuments meant to be honored from afar. (Make the innocent mistake of approaching one, as I did, and you give an underpaid policeman an excuse to seek a bribe to overlook the offense.)
The Soviets brought universal education and health care, but banned the Persian alphabet, erasing Tajiks’ literary history, and outlawed the practice of Islam. At independence in 1991, Moscow left behind an impoverished and fractured country that soon plunged into a bloody civil war. Tajikistan emerged in 1997 corrupt but safe, ailing but reasonably stable. Before long, foreign tourists began to trickle in.
After the three legs of my flight from New York, armed with a visa and special permit to visit the Pamir region, I arrived in Dushanbe during a stifling week last July. The Russians gave the city a rail link west to Uzbekistan, and they paved a road east, toward Kyrgyzstan, that is known today as the Pamir Highway and increasingly draws foreign mountain bikers and motorcyclists.
“Highway” is a generous classification for it. It took me 20 hours to travel the dusty 325-mile stretch from Dushanbe to the provincial center of Khorog in a shared taxi, flat-tire breaks included. The road climbs over craggy, treeless mountains and falls into tidy villages with apricot trees. It is interrupted by several checkpoints, including one in a valley through which heroin and opium are trafficked — and to which, news reports say, militants have begun returning — north from Afghanistan.
At this checkpoint, a burly man wearing fatigues and a Harley-Davidson hat introduced himself as Muhammad Ali, asked for my bag, and called for the dog. Out came a small, floppy-eared lapdog that agents practically had to drag over to sniff my backpack. “He must be starving,” Muhammad Ali joked. “Just open the bag.” I was sent on my way, wondering if those were my tax dollars at work. Last year the United States spent $1.7 million to counter narcotics in Tajikistan.
KHOROG, a relaxed town of 28,000 in the heart of the western Pamirs, sits across the Panj River from Afghanistan. Its isolation largely spared it from the civil war of the 1990s, but a humanitarian crisis crippled the area after Soviet handouts came to an end. A savior came in the form of a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad himself, the Aga Khan, a Swiss-born businessman who owns racehorses and a yacht club on Sardinia and is the spiritual leader of the Ismaili Muslim sect to which most Pamiri people have belonged for a thousand years. The community-supported charitable organization over which he presides, the Aga Khan Development Network, resuscitated Khorog, which now has two universities, new construction and a young, optimistic population.
Winters can be long and raw, but in summer the balmy air, rustling fruit trees and pedestrian bridges spanning a jade river make Khorog a nice base for exploring the Pamirs. Through an agency, I had arranged to meet a driver and translator there to guide me for a week, first south to the Wakhan Valley and then through it to Murghab, a town in the eastern Pamirs. We would sleep at a network of homestays.
The next morning we set out in a former Russian Army jeep, leaving the Pamir Highway to head south on a paved road along the Panj River, which defines much of Tajikistan’s 830-mile border with Afghanistan. Brown, gravelly slopes rise steeply from the river toward snow-capped peaks beyond view. The rustic adobe homes and donkey trails that I could see on the opposite, Afghan bank seemed suspended in a different time.
The Pamir region was renowned in antiquity for its rubies (technically, spinel) and lapis lazuli. The most famous mine, Kuh-i-Lal — though closed to the public — came into view above the road. It was the source, I later learned, of the 170-carat Black Prince’s Ruby now in the Imperial State Crown of Britain.
At a turn, the white crowns of the Hindu Kush appeared, and we entered the 85-mile-long Wakhan Valley, a fertile quilt of wheat fields along the Panj River, “situated among the snowy mountains,” as the seventh-century Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang described it.
I arrived at the Saturday bazaar, with its mousetraps and fortune-telling, by 9 a.m. and stayed until the island began to empty, in early afternoon. I talked with a blue-eyed Afghan policeman sporting Bushnell binoculars and a Leatherman toolkit and later passed a Tajik boy wearing a cap that read “Berkeley, Califopnia.” He reacted indifferently after I explained that I actually came from there. I realized that such sights are probably no more remarkable today than, say, a Chinese visitor here in the sixth century encountering Italians in silk shirts, or a Sogdian seen with the latest gadgets from the army of Alexander the Great, who crossed the Panj River in 329 B.C. At this ancient intersection, surreal juxtapositions of globalization date back for millenniums.
In the town of Ishkashim, adjacent to the market, we visited the crumbling remains of a sixth-century caravansary — an ancient motel for Silk Road travelers. Then we drove on eastward in the Wakhan Valley, passing roadside shelters decorated in pebbled mosaics conveying messages of Soviet propaganda, until we reached the remnants of a sprawling stone fortress occupying a prominent rock above the Panj. A plaque in Tajik and English explained that this was the King’s Castle, constructed in the third century B.C. by the Siah-Posh, a tribe of black-robed fire-worshipers (probably Zoroastrian), to defend the Wakhan from intruders.
I followed the small footpaths meandering among the ruins and thought of Samarkand, the fabled Silk Road oasis in Uzbekistan whose restoration has stripped much of its character, and Kashgar, China, overrun by modern Han society. The contrasting authenticity — and fragility — around me here was reflected on a plaque: “Your responsible treatment of the sites during your visiting them is appreciated as your contribution to the preservation of historical monuments.”
I spent two days exploring the detritus of history littered across the Wakhan Valley: rocks with Arabic inscriptions, petroglyphs, imposing fortresses, stones that were once arranged to determine the spring solstice and hot springs rumored to boost female fertility (I was the only man visiting these).
Small shrines to Ismaili holy men line the roadside. Each has its own legend, and is ornamented with special stones and curled ibex and sheep horns, symbols of purity under Aryan and Zoroastrian religious traditions, which predate Islam in the region.
Men, women and children strolled up and down the road between their villages and wheat fields. I offered lifts to old ladies in colorful embroidered skullcaps who showed gratitude by touching my chin and kissing their hands.
In a village called Yamg, we turned in where a sign announced a museum, and a teenager named Nasim opened the building with a key. The museum is in the home of his distant ancestor Muboraki Wakhani, Nasim explained, a little-known mystic poet, musician, astronomer and prolific Ismaili scholar of the late 19th century. Inside, artifacts from the ages were displayed, none behind glass: a tattered gold-and-blue imam’s robe, purportedly from the 12th century; 15th-century Chinese copper kettles; clay jugs from the storied Uzbek city of Bukhara; pipes, knives and yak horn cups; Stone Age beads; wooden stringed instruments carved into crude human figures.
Nasim invited me to his family’s house for lunch, and we followed him down a dirt pathway. Wheat, apricots, mulberries and dung lay on the flat roof to dry. The stone-and-plaster architecture was typical of traditional homes throughout the Pamirs, rich in symbolism that includes elements of ancient Aryan and Buddhist philosophy. For Ismailis living here, the home is itself a symbol of the universe and serves instead of a mosque as a place for prayer.
Nasim’s father, Aydar, mustached and wearing a track suit, led me into a main room divided, according to tradition, into three areas signifying the kingdoms of nature: animal, vegetable and mineral. Five supporting pillars represented the five members of the family of the prophet Muhammad and his son-in-law Ali: the one for Muhammad, left of the entrance, is traditionally where a newborn’s cradle is placed and where newly married couples sleep.
Light beamed in through a skylight framed by four concentric square wood layers, representing earth, water, air and fire. Under it Aydar’s daughter laid a spread of raisins, peanuts and berries, potato and corn soup, fresh round flatbread and salty milk tea, which is passed and received with one hand to the heart. As Marco Polo noted, the language in the Wakhan Valley is different even from the Iranian dialects spoken in other Pamir valleys. But Aydar spoke some English and Russian, which was translated for me. I asked him how long his family had lived here.
Aydar told of a legend about a hotheaded emir in the 15th century who killed an entire family save one boy, who fled north, married and had three sons. One son returned to the valley years later, and eventually the two others followed with their families; these were Aydar’s ancestors. The dates were vague, but I was awed by a family story that began 600 years ago.
After lunch, we continued on to the nearby village of Vrang, where children were tending sheep below a tiered stone stupa built on a rocky perch by sixth-century Buddhists. “Buddha, Buddha,” Somon, a local boy, said, cupping his hands in a pantomime of meditation. He volunteered to guide me up to the stupa’s ancient rocks. I sat there looking at sunset over the Pamir crest, coloring the valley from on high like light slanting through clerestory windows, at moonrise above the Hindu Kush — and at Somon, who was eager to climb down. “Homestay?” he asked sweetly, pointing to a faintly lighted house in the birches below. I followed him there.
“Having left this place, and traveled three days, always among mountains,” a man “ascends to a district which is said to be the highest in the world,” Marco Polo reported 700 years ago, describing the climb north from the Wakhan Valley to the 13,000-foot-high desert plateau in the eastern Pamir from which several major ranges — the Himalaya, Karakorum, Hindu Kush, Kunlun and Tien Shan — fan out across Asia. The same journey took us three hours in our temperamental jeep, passing Stone Age petroglyphs, a lone Soviet watchtower, two Swiss mountain bikers and (across a tributary of the Panj, demarcating the border) Afghan traders leading a caravan of double-humped Bactrian camels.
“Along this high plain, which is called Pamier, he sees neither habitation nor verdure,” Polo went on, and until late in the Soviet period, the majority Kyrgyz population that endures this extreme realm known to early Persians as the Roof of the World remained mostly nomadic. The few permanent settlements today have a weathered, frontier character: tin roofs, rusty vehicle parts, satellite dishes.
We rejoined the Pamir Highway in the Alichur Valley, a 40-mile-long thin grass steppe ringed by low, rounded mountains, where Kyrgyz families come to graze their animals, setting up summer yurt camps. “Authentic” would only lamely describe the timeless, pastoral serenity of this place, or suggest the bliss I felt on my first star-filled night there reclining on hand-woven carpets by a warm iron stove inside a yurt, dipping bread into freshly churned yak butter, listening to Kyrgyz spoken in hushed tones.
Farther east, at Besh Gumbez, we visited the domed ruins of a caravansary and later passed a caravan of Chinese trucks laden with inexpensive household goods, parked beside the road. The drivers, Uighurs from Kashgar bound for Dushanbe, crouched in the shade beside the tires with a propane tank and a box of peppers, preparing lunch. In antiquity the caravans carried exotic luxuries like silk, jade, porcelain, furs, dyes, tea and spices; what a different sense the phrase “made in China” evokes today.
We split off the Pamir Highway and spent the next four days bouncing across a stark moonscape on jeep tracks that connect remote shepherd camps. One morning we saw a family out in the open air near their adobe home, rolling damp, matted wool into felt for the walls of a yurt. Curd balls lay drying on the roof. The grandfather, Mamajan, wearing a cardigan sweater and knitted skullcap, invited me for steamed meat dumplings and tea.
“Are there places like this in America?” he asked in Russian, waving around at the craggy, mineral-stained earth.
“Yes, a place called Nevada,” I replied.
“Come inside.”
Mamajan filled and refilled cups of green tea as we dabbed warm flatbread into bowls of butter and fresh yogurt. His grandparents were from present-day Kyrgyzstan. They were rich, he said, before the Soviets took their sheep. Mamajan was a bookkeeper during the Soviet period. He switched back to farming after independence and sells wool and meat, and dung for winter fuel.
By the age of 19, Mamajan claimed, he already had nine children. “You’re 32?” he asked me. “Why aren’t you married?” No explanation I could offer would suffice.
“ALL kinds of animals abound,” Marco Polo noted here, “in particular, a species of sheep with horns of three, four, and even six palms long. The horns are heaped up in large quantities along the road, for the purpose of guiding travelers during winter.” They still are, but the world’s largest sheep — named after Polo — is now endangered. I encounter only traces: their footpaths and magnificent skulls, strewn eerily across the barren landscape. Foreign hunters, mostly American, pay $25,000 to bag one. We passed a hunting camp that is temporarily closed so that sheep numbers can rebound.
My last homestay, on the far side of Tajikistan, was at an isolated yurt pitched on the edge of an expansive valley facing a spectacular panorama of the serrated Wakhan Range, in Afghanistan. Beyond lay Pakistan and just east of me, over a lofty pass, China. There, six years earlier, on a trip across that country, I had stayed in a similar yurt with Kyrgyz hosts and was left to imagine what existed across the border. I now stitched the two experiences, years apart, into a single panoramic image.
It was here in the Pamirs where Russia’s territorial expansion confronted Britain’s defense of India during the 19th-century geopolitical rivalry known as the Great Game. Both sides dispatched players — maverick officers and ambitious explorers, often in disguise — to chart Central Asia’s wild terrain and win influence. A final flashpoint occurred over the mountain in front of me, where in August 1891 a British agent crossed paths with his Russian counterpart, who claimed it as the czar’s and threatened arrest. Four years later the powers agreed to make that narrow valley between their empires — the Wakhan Corridor — a buffer belonging to neither, and it is still part of Afghanistan, a panhandlelike eastward salient of little importance.
The Great Game came and went, part of the historical tides weathered forever here, in the romantic heart of Asia. I could hear the enduring pulse of that heart around me in the whistling wind and the calls of children corralling the sheep for the evening.
“Andy, come,” my host hollered from the yurt. “Dinner is ready.”
SHRINES AND FORTS
GETTING THERE
July and August are prime months for travel in the Pamir Mountains, although some companies will begin giving tours next year by May. A search last month for flights from John F. Kennedy Airport to Dushanbe, Tajikistan, next June found one on AirBaltic (www.airbaltic.com) through Copenhagen and Riga for 1,121 euros (about $1,620 at $1.45 to the euro) and one on Turkish Airlines (www.turkishairlines.com) through Istanbul for $1,870.
The United States Embassy in Dushanbe provides information for travelers to Tajikistan on its Web site: dushanbe.usembassy.gov/travel_routes2.html.
TOUR COMPANIES
A visa is required for United States citizens traveling to Tajikistan, and once inside the country, it is practical to travel with a guide and translator. Tours vary in price, depending on the number of travelers and the itinerary (most can be customized). Tourism is still in its infancy in Tajikistan; visitors should not expect services at Western standards, especially at homestays in the Pamir region.
Here are some companies that provide English-speaking guides and can assist travelers with letters of introduction for visa applications and special permits, including that required for the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast, the region that encompasses the Pamirs. All prices are per person, based on double occupancy, and exclude airfare.
Mountain Adventure Travel (992-372-21-1812; www.matt.tj) is offering a 10-day, 1,242-mile trip into the Pamirs next June for $2,000.
Hamsafar Travel (992-372 28-0093; www.hamsafartravel.com) has a 10-day round trip from Dushanbe to Murghab and through the Wakhan Valley for $3,500.
Dmitry Melnichkov (992-372-27-4725; [email protected]; tajikaviatour.tj/en/) leads a 12-day round trip from Dushanbe to Murghab and through the Wakhan Valley costing 2,450 euros.
Pamir Silk Tour Company (992-3522-22277 or -22299; [email protected]) has a 14-day round trip from Dushanbe to Murghab through the Wakhan Valley for $3,150.
Geographic Expeditions (800-777-8183; www.geoex.com), a United States-based operator, is leading a 22-day excursion in July through the Wakhan Corridor, from $11,875.
RESOURCES
“Central Asia Travel Guide,” by Greg Bloom, John Noble and Bradley Mayhew, published by Lonely Planet.
“Tajikistan and the High Pamirs,” by Robert Middleton and Huw Thomas, published by Odyssey Books & Guides.
Robert Middleton’s Web site, www.pamirs.org.
Steppe Magazine, www.steppemagazine.com.
ANDY ISAACSON, a writer and photographer, last appeared in the Travel section with a cover story about a train trip across the United States.
http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/tr ... Pamir.html
December 20, 2009
Pamir Mountains, the Crossroads of History
By ANDY ISAACSON
BY 9 in the morning, the bazaar on a rocky island in the Panj River was a frenetic scene of haggling and theatrics. Afghan traders in long tunics and vests hawked teas, toiletries and rubber slippers. Turbaned fortune tellers bent over ornate Persian texts, predicting futures for the price of a dollar. Tajik women bargained over resplendent bolts of fabric. All were mingling this bright Saturday at a weekly market held throughout the year and, in one form or another, for thousands of years here in the Wakhan Valley, which divides Tajikistan and Afghanistan.
“Mousetraps, mousetraps, mousetraps, oooowww!” crooned a white-bearded Afghan in the Iranian language spoken by locals from both sides of the border.
“They don’t buy!” complained a high-heeled shoe salesman from Kabul to me, in English.
“They always start the price too high,” a Tajik woman in a blue patterned dress and headscarf whispered as she stood before bright red carpets, appearing seductive against a monochrome mountain backdrop.
As the sun rose higher, I joined the crowds — young Tajik men in sporty shirts and jeans, uniformed border guards, families — seeking shade under rainbow umbrellas to eat rice palov, served from large cauldrons. Across the market grounds, I could see three lipsticked Korean women in straw hats dispensing balloon animals to a captivated group of men and boys.
East meeting West, North meeting South: since time immemorial, the Wakhan Valley, in the Pamir Mountains, has existed at the intersection of trails trodden by nomads, peddlers, pilgrims and, at times, the soldiers and emissaries of great powers. When I’d thought about traveling to see this rugged branch of the ancient Silk Road, it had seemed like an adventure to the far-flung periphery of the world. Now, as I looked around the market, taking the long view of history, it felt more like the center.
During the last century, this long-strategic nexus of Asia, earlier crossed by Scythians, Persians, Greeks, Kushans, Hephtalites, Gokturks, Huns, Arabs and Mongol hordes, became a cul-de-sac at the command of the Russians. In 1929 Stalin’s mapmakers created the Soviet Socialist Republic of Tajikistan, a territory about the same size as New York State, 93 percent mountainous, given shape in the artificial (though politically expedient) manner in which all the Central Asian republics were drawn. A Soviet vision of a model Oriental capital was built around the market village of Dushanbe — pleasant and leafy, if dull, with a wide central avenue, pastel-colored buildings, the standard apartment blocks and some grand monuments meant to be honored from afar. (Make the innocent mistake of approaching one, as I did, and you give an underpaid policeman an excuse to seek a bribe to overlook the offense.)
The Soviets brought universal education and health care, but banned the Persian alphabet, erasing Tajiks’ literary history, and outlawed the practice of Islam. At independence in 1991, Moscow left behind an impoverished and fractured country that soon plunged into a bloody civil war. Tajikistan emerged in 1997 corrupt but safe, ailing but reasonably stable. Before long, foreign tourists began to trickle in.
After the three legs of my flight from New York, armed with a visa and special permit to visit the Pamir region, I arrived in Dushanbe during a stifling week last July. The Russians gave the city a rail link west to Uzbekistan, and they paved a road east, toward Kyrgyzstan, that is known today as the Pamir Highway and increasingly draws foreign mountain bikers and motorcyclists.
“Highway” is a generous classification for it. It took me 20 hours to travel the dusty 325-mile stretch from Dushanbe to the provincial center of Khorog in a shared taxi, flat-tire breaks included. The road climbs over craggy, treeless mountains and falls into tidy villages with apricot trees. It is interrupted by several checkpoints, including one in a valley through which heroin and opium are trafficked — and to which, news reports say, militants have begun returning — north from Afghanistan.
At this checkpoint, a burly man wearing fatigues and a Harley-Davidson hat introduced himself as Muhammad Ali, asked for my bag, and called for the dog. Out came a small, floppy-eared lapdog that agents practically had to drag over to sniff my backpack. “He must be starving,” Muhammad Ali joked. “Just open the bag.” I was sent on my way, wondering if those were my tax dollars at work. Last year the United States spent $1.7 million to counter narcotics in Tajikistan.
KHOROG, a relaxed town of 28,000 in the heart of the western Pamirs, sits across the Panj River from Afghanistan. Its isolation largely spared it from the civil war of the 1990s, but a humanitarian crisis crippled the area after Soviet handouts came to an end. A savior came in the form of a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad himself, the Aga Khan, a Swiss-born businessman who owns racehorses and a yacht club on Sardinia and is the spiritual leader of the Ismaili Muslim sect to which most Pamiri people have belonged for a thousand years. The community-supported charitable organization over which he presides, the Aga Khan Development Network, resuscitated Khorog, which now has two universities, new construction and a young, optimistic population.
Winters can be long and raw, but in summer the balmy air, rustling fruit trees and pedestrian bridges spanning a jade river make Khorog a nice base for exploring the Pamirs. Through an agency, I had arranged to meet a driver and translator there to guide me for a week, first south to the Wakhan Valley and then through it to Murghab, a town in the eastern Pamirs. We would sleep at a network of homestays.
The next morning we set out in a former Russian Army jeep, leaving the Pamir Highway to head south on a paved road along the Panj River, which defines much of Tajikistan’s 830-mile border with Afghanistan. Brown, gravelly slopes rise steeply from the river toward snow-capped peaks beyond view. The rustic adobe homes and donkey trails that I could see on the opposite, Afghan bank seemed suspended in a different time.
The Pamir region was renowned in antiquity for its rubies (technically, spinel) and lapis lazuli. The most famous mine, Kuh-i-Lal — though closed to the public — came into view above the road. It was the source, I later learned, of the 170-carat Black Prince’s Ruby now in the Imperial State Crown of Britain.
At a turn, the white crowns of the Hindu Kush appeared, and we entered the 85-mile-long Wakhan Valley, a fertile quilt of wheat fields along the Panj River, “situated among the snowy mountains,” as the seventh-century Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang described it.
I arrived at the Saturday bazaar, with its mousetraps and fortune-telling, by 9 a.m. and stayed until the island began to empty, in early afternoon. I talked with a blue-eyed Afghan policeman sporting Bushnell binoculars and a Leatherman toolkit and later passed a Tajik boy wearing a cap that read “Berkeley, Califopnia.” He reacted indifferently after I explained that I actually came from there. I realized that such sights are probably no more remarkable today than, say, a Chinese visitor here in the sixth century encountering Italians in silk shirts, or a Sogdian seen with the latest gadgets from the army of Alexander the Great, who crossed the Panj River in 329 B.C. At this ancient intersection, surreal juxtapositions of globalization date back for millenniums.
In the town of Ishkashim, adjacent to the market, we visited the crumbling remains of a sixth-century caravansary — an ancient motel for Silk Road travelers. Then we drove on eastward in the Wakhan Valley, passing roadside shelters decorated in pebbled mosaics conveying messages of Soviet propaganda, until we reached the remnants of a sprawling stone fortress occupying a prominent rock above the Panj. A plaque in Tajik and English explained that this was the King’s Castle, constructed in the third century B.C. by the Siah-Posh, a tribe of black-robed fire-worshipers (probably Zoroastrian), to defend the Wakhan from intruders.
I followed the small footpaths meandering among the ruins and thought of Samarkand, the fabled Silk Road oasis in Uzbekistan whose restoration has stripped much of its character, and Kashgar, China, overrun by modern Han society. The contrasting authenticity — and fragility — around me here was reflected on a plaque: “Your responsible treatment of the sites during your visiting them is appreciated as your contribution to the preservation of historical monuments.”
I spent two days exploring the detritus of history littered across the Wakhan Valley: rocks with Arabic inscriptions, petroglyphs, imposing fortresses, stones that were once arranged to determine the spring solstice and hot springs rumored to boost female fertility (I was the only man visiting these).
Small shrines to Ismaili holy men line the roadside. Each has its own legend, and is ornamented with special stones and curled ibex and sheep horns, symbols of purity under Aryan and Zoroastrian religious traditions, which predate Islam in the region.
Men, women and children strolled up and down the road between their villages and wheat fields. I offered lifts to old ladies in colorful embroidered skullcaps who showed gratitude by touching my chin and kissing their hands.
In a village called Yamg, we turned in where a sign announced a museum, and a teenager named Nasim opened the building with a key. The museum is in the home of his distant ancestor Muboraki Wakhani, Nasim explained, a little-known mystic poet, musician, astronomer and prolific Ismaili scholar of the late 19th century. Inside, artifacts from the ages were displayed, none behind glass: a tattered gold-and-blue imam’s robe, purportedly from the 12th century; 15th-century Chinese copper kettles; clay jugs from the storied Uzbek city of Bukhara; pipes, knives and yak horn cups; Stone Age beads; wooden stringed instruments carved into crude human figures.
Nasim invited me to his family’s house for lunch, and we followed him down a dirt pathway. Wheat, apricots, mulberries and dung lay on the flat roof to dry. The stone-and-plaster architecture was typical of traditional homes throughout the Pamirs, rich in symbolism that includes elements of ancient Aryan and Buddhist philosophy. For Ismailis living here, the home is itself a symbol of the universe and serves instead of a mosque as a place for prayer.
Nasim’s father, Aydar, mustached and wearing a track suit, led me into a main room divided, according to tradition, into three areas signifying the kingdoms of nature: animal, vegetable and mineral. Five supporting pillars represented the five members of the family of the prophet Muhammad and his son-in-law Ali: the one for Muhammad, left of the entrance, is traditionally where a newborn’s cradle is placed and where newly married couples sleep.
Light beamed in through a skylight framed by four concentric square wood layers, representing earth, water, air and fire. Under it Aydar’s daughter laid a spread of raisins, peanuts and berries, potato and corn soup, fresh round flatbread and salty milk tea, which is passed and received with one hand to the heart. As Marco Polo noted, the language in the Wakhan Valley is different even from the Iranian dialects spoken in other Pamir valleys. But Aydar spoke some English and Russian, which was translated for me. I asked him how long his family had lived here.
Aydar told of a legend about a hotheaded emir in the 15th century who killed an entire family save one boy, who fled north, married and had three sons. One son returned to the valley years later, and eventually the two others followed with their families; these were Aydar’s ancestors. The dates were vague, but I was awed by a family story that began 600 years ago.
After lunch, we continued on to the nearby village of Vrang, where children were tending sheep below a tiered stone stupa built on a rocky perch by sixth-century Buddhists. “Buddha, Buddha,” Somon, a local boy, said, cupping his hands in a pantomime of meditation. He volunteered to guide me up to the stupa’s ancient rocks. I sat there looking at sunset over the Pamir crest, coloring the valley from on high like light slanting through clerestory windows, at moonrise above the Hindu Kush — and at Somon, who was eager to climb down. “Homestay?” he asked sweetly, pointing to a faintly lighted house in the birches below. I followed him there.
“Having left this place, and traveled three days, always among mountains,” a man “ascends to a district which is said to be the highest in the world,” Marco Polo reported 700 years ago, describing the climb north from the Wakhan Valley to the 13,000-foot-high desert plateau in the eastern Pamir from which several major ranges — the Himalaya, Karakorum, Hindu Kush, Kunlun and Tien Shan — fan out across Asia. The same journey took us three hours in our temperamental jeep, passing Stone Age petroglyphs, a lone Soviet watchtower, two Swiss mountain bikers and (across a tributary of the Panj, demarcating the border) Afghan traders leading a caravan of double-humped Bactrian camels.
“Along this high plain, which is called Pamier, he sees neither habitation nor verdure,” Polo went on, and until late in the Soviet period, the majority Kyrgyz population that endures this extreme realm known to early Persians as the Roof of the World remained mostly nomadic. The few permanent settlements today have a weathered, frontier character: tin roofs, rusty vehicle parts, satellite dishes.
We rejoined the Pamir Highway in the Alichur Valley, a 40-mile-long thin grass steppe ringed by low, rounded mountains, where Kyrgyz families come to graze their animals, setting up summer yurt camps. “Authentic” would only lamely describe the timeless, pastoral serenity of this place, or suggest the bliss I felt on my first star-filled night there reclining on hand-woven carpets by a warm iron stove inside a yurt, dipping bread into freshly churned yak butter, listening to Kyrgyz spoken in hushed tones.
Farther east, at Besh Gumbez, we visited the domed ruins of a caravansary and later passed a caravan of Chinese trucks laden with inexpensive household goods, parked beside the road. The drivers, Uighurs from Kashgar bound for Dushanbe, crouched in the shade beside the tires with a propane tank and a box of peppers, preparing lunch. In antiquity the caravans carried exotic luxuries like silk, jade, porcelain, furs, dyes, tea and spices; what a different sense the phrase “made in China” evokes today.
We split off the Pamir Highway and spent the next four days bouncing across a stark moonscape on jeep tracks that connect remote shepherd camps. One morning we saw a family out in the open air near their adobe home, rolling damp, matted wool into felt for the walls of a yurt. Curd balls lay drying on the roof. The grandfather, Mamajan, wearing a cardigan sweater and knitted skullcap, invited me for steamed meat dumplings and tea.
“Are there places like this in America?” he asked in Russian, waving around at the craggy, mineral-stained earth.
“Yes, a place called Nevada,” I replied.
“Come inside.”
Mamajan filled and refilled cups of green tea as we dabbed warm flatbread into bowls of butter and fresh yogurt. His grandparents were from present-day Kyrgyzstan. They were rich, he said, before the Soviets took their sheep. Mamajan was a bookkeeper during the Soviet period. He switched back to farming after independence and sells wool and meat, and dung for winter fuel.
By the age of 19, Mamajan claimed, he already had nine children. “You’re 32?” he asked me. “Why aren’t you married?” No explanation I could offer would suffice.
“ALL kinds of animals abound,” Marco Polo noted here, “in particular, a species of sheep with horns of three, four, and even six palms long. The horns are heaped up in large quantities along the road, for the purpose of guiding travelers during winter.” They still are, but the world’s largest sheep — named after Polo — is now endangered. I encounter only traces: their footpaths and magnificent skulls, strewn eerily across the barren landscape. Foreign hunters, mostly American, pay $25,000 to bag one. We passed a hunting camp that is temporarily closed so that sheep numbers can rebound.
My last homestay, on the far side of Tajikistan, was at an isolated yurt pitched on the edge of an expansive valley facing a spectacular panorama of the serrated Wakhan Range, in Afghanistan. Beyond lay Pakistan and just east of me, over a lofty pass, China. There, six years earlier, on a trip across that country, I had stayed in a similar yurt with Kyrgyz hosts and was left to imagine what existed across the border. I now stitched the two experiences, years apart, into a single panoramic image.
It was here in the Pamirs where Russia’s territorial expansion confronted Britain’s defense of India during the 19th-century geopolitical rivalry known as the Great Game. Both sides dispatched players — maverick officers and ambitious explorers, often in disguise — to chart Central Asia’s wild terrain and win influence. A final flashpoint occurred over the mountain in front of me, where in August 1891 a British agent crossed paths with his Russian counterpart, who claimed it as the czar’s and threatened arrest. Four years later the powers agreed to make that narrow valley between their empires — the Wakhan Corridor — a buffer belonging to neither, and it is still part of Afghanistan, a panhandlelike eastward salient of little importance.
The Great Game came and went, part of the historical tides weathered forever here, in the romantic heart of Asia. I could hear the enduring pulse of that heart around me in the whistling wind and the calls of children corralling the sheep for the evening.
“Andy, come,” my host hollered from the yurt. “Dinner is ready.”
SHRINES AND FORTS
GETTING THERE
July and August are prime months for travel in the Pamir Mountains, although some companies will begin giving tours next year by May. A search last month for flights from John F. Kennedy Airport to Dushanbe, Tajikistan, next June found one on AirBaltic (www.airbaltic.com) through Copenhagen and Riga for 1,121 euros (about $1,620 at $1.45 to the euro) and one on Turkish Airlines (www.turkishairlines.com) through Istanbul for $1,870.
The United States Embassy in Dushanbe provides information for travelers to Tajikistan on its Web site: dushanbe.usembassy.gov/travel_routes2.html.
TOUR COMPANIES
A visa is required for United States citizens traveling to Tajikistan, and once inside the country, it is practical to travel with a guide and translator. Tours vary in price, depending on the number of travelers and the itinerary (most can be customized). Tourism is still in its infancy in Tajikistan; visitors should not expect services at Western standards, especially at homestays in the Pamir region.
Here are some companies that provide English-speaking guides and can assist travelers with letters of introduction for visa applications and special permits, including that required for the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast, the region that encompasses the Pamirs. All prices are per person, based on double occupancy, and exclude airfare.
Mountain Adventure Travel (992-372-21-1812; www.matt.tj) is offering a 10-day, 1,242-mile trip into the Pamirs next June for $2,000.
Hamsafar Travel (992-372 28-0093; www.hamsafartravel.com) has a 10-day round trip from Dushanbe to Murghab and through the Wakhan Valley for $3,500.
Dmitry Melnichkov (992-372-27-4725; [email protected]; tajikaviatour.tj/en/) leads a 12-day round trip from Dushanbe to Murghab and through the Wakhan Valley costing 2,450 euros.
Pamir Silk Tour Company (992-3522-22277 or -22299; [email protected]) has a 14-day round trip from Dushanbe to Murghab through the Wakhan Valley for $3,150.
Geographic Expeditions (800-777-8183; www.geoex.com), a United States-based operator, is leading a 22-day excursion in July through the Wakhan Corridor, from $11,875.
RESOURCES
“Central Asia Travel Guide,” by Greg Bloom, John Noble and Bradley Mayhew, published by Lonely Planet.
“Tajikistan and the High Pamirs,” by Robert Middleton and Huw Thomas, published by Odyssey Books & Guides.
Robert Middleton’s Web site, www.pamirs.org.
Steppe Magazine, www.steppemagazine.com.
ANDY ISAACSON, a writer and photographer, last appeared in the Travel section with a cover story about a train trip across the United States.
Pamirs provide an enchanting backdrop to learn about the Jamat in Tajikistan
Imamat Day celebrations on 11 July 2009 included a concert featuring traditional Pamiri music. Photo: Janet Southern
Last summer, I worked as one of four interns in the offices of Focus Humanitarian Assistance (FOCUS) in Khorog, the capital of Tajikistan’s Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast (GBAO). As an Ismaili of East African background, I had little knowledge of Central Asian culture or the Nasir Khusraw tradition of the Jamat. I saw my visit as an opportunity to experience the country and to open my eyes to an ancient culture that characterises the Ismaili community in the region.
Dominated by the Pamir mountain range, GBAO is stunningly beautiful. Majestic peaks are outlined against a sky that alternates between bright blue in the day and a star-studded pitch black at night. The Pamiri family that hosted me and my fellow interns provided more than a house to live in — they made us feel at home. They spent time teaching us their local language of Shughni, invited us along when they ran errands and took us to Imamat Day celebrations. They truly integrated us into their lives and community.
FOCUS interns Nazia Gahdia and Safiyya Devraj with the interns’ host family, the Mavjudalievs. Photo: Janet Southern
Family outings were common on the weekends, allowing us to practice our Shughni, learn more about the local culture, and explore the town and surrounding areas. We took day trips to neighbouring villages and local sights such as the high altitude botanical gardens — the second highest of their kind in the world. We would wander through the gardens and take in the breathtaking view of Khorog, noting the greens and browns scattered below — a patchwork of fields, crops, and buildings, with the Gunt and Panj rivers merging together. At lunch, we would sit in the shade and feast on delicious tarbouz (watermelon), guurda (round bread), and sok (juice). The hospitality of our hosts was unwavering — they made sure that we really got to experience life in GBAO.
Such kindness was not exclusive to our host family — it was demonstrated by everyone I met, including my co-workers at FOCUS. One of my supervisors took me and the other interns mountain climbing; others treated us to traditional local meals at their homes. Another invited me to her wedding festivities, even though we had only just met.
The four 2009 FOCUS Global Interns for Tajikistan pause for a photograph as they travel from Dushanbe to Khorog. (L to R: Nazia Gadhia, Safiyya Devraj, Janet Southern, and Samir Panjwani). Photo: Courtesy of Nazia Gadhia
The FOCUS interns came from different parts of the world. We each brought unique perspectives on culture and development, and pushed and challenged one another to think outside the box. As interns we often collaborated, but we also separated out to work within our respective teams.
I worked on a disaster preparedness programme that concentrated on increasing local capacity to prepare for and cope with the effects of natural disasters. Funded by the European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid Office (ECHO), the programme incorporates media, education, institutional capacity building, and structural mitigation initiatives. My role was in monitoring and evaluating; I observed each component of the disaster preparedness programme to assess its successes, challenges, and overall effectiveness, and made suggestions for future improvement.
This role also permitted me to go into the field to observe a project’s impact upon the local community. What I found most interesting was that entire projects were operated by the Tajiks themselves. Local professionals with backgrounds in engineering, computer science, linguistics, and law worked together to achieve the goals laid out by ECHO.
Drawing on a traditional Pamiri custom of public voluntary work known as “kiryar”, members of the community participate in the construction of a reveted wall in Khorog. Photo: Janet Southern
The wider community also took part in its implementation, connecting their participation to a traditional Pamiri custom of public voluntary work known as kiryar or hashar. The custom originally involved the building of houses for individual families by the community. Now it is being applied in different, but relevant contexts: huge groups come together to work voluntarily on structural mitigation projects — such as the reconstruction of bridges — to ensure their completion within the required timeframe.
The community’s strong commitment demonstrates self-sustainability, while also spelling the achievement of development goals for the region. During one particular site visit, a riveted wall — built to slow the impact of falling debris and snow — was in its beginning stages of construction. On my return only a few days later, I was amazed to see over half the wall completed! A co-worker explained to me that kiryar played a huge part in this progress. He connected its success to the values of the Jamat, which place importance on community responsibility and achievement.
I embarked on my journey to Tajikistan expecting to see a new place and to further my professional experience. After spending almost two months living with a traditional Pamiri family, working with the local community, and catching a glimpse of the beauty and spirituality that characterises the people and landscape of this part of the world, I came away with new friends, treasured memories, a better understanding of the traditions of the Ismaili community in that part of the world, and how tradition is woven into the wider story of our culture and history.
A statue of Nasir Khusraw with the Pamir Mountains rising behind him. Photo: Janet Southern
http://www.theismaili.org/cms/995/Pamir ... Tajikistan
Imamat Day celebrations on 11 July 2009 included a concert featuring traditional Pamiri music. Photo: Janet Southern
Last summer, I worked as one of four interns in the offices of Focus Humanitarian Assistance (FOCUS) in Khorog, the capital of Tajikistan’s Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast (GBAO). As an Ismaili of East African background, I had little knowledge of Central Asian culture or the Nasir Khusraw tradition of the Jamat. I saw my visit as an opportunity to experience the country and to open my eyes to an ancient culture that characterises the Ismaili community in the region.
Dominated by the Pamir mountain range, GBAO is stunningly beautiful. Majestic peaks are outlined against a sky that alternates between bright blue in the day and a star-studded pitch black at night. The Pamiri family that hosted me and my fellow interns provided more than a house to live in — they made us feel at home. They spent time teaching us their local language of Shughni, invited us along when they ran errands and took us to Imamat Day celebrations. They truly integrated us into their lives and community.
FOCUS interns Nazia Gahdia and Safiyya Devraj with the interns’ host family, the Mavjudalievs. Photo: Janet Southern
Family outings were common on the weekends, allowing us to practice our Shughni, learn more about the local culture, and explore the town and surrounding areas. We took day trips to neighbouring villages and local sights such as the high altitude botanical gardens — the second highest of their kind in the world. We would wander through the gardens and take in the breathtaking view of Khorog, noting the greens and browns scattered below — a patchwork of fields, crops, and buildings, with the Gunt and Panj rivers merging together. At lunch, we would sit in the shade and feast on delicious tarbouz (watermelon), guurda (round bread), and sok (juice). The hospitality of our hosts was unwavering — they made sure that we really got to experience life in GBAO.
Such kindness was not exclusive to our host family — it was demonstrated by everyone I met, including my co-workers at FOCUS. One of my supervisors took me and the other interns mountain climbing; others treated us to traditional local meals at their homes. Another invited me to her wedding festivities, even though we had only just met.
The four 2009 FOCUS Global Interns for Tajikistan pause for a photograph as they travel from Dushanbe to Khorog. (L to R: Nazia Gadhia, Safiyya Devraj, Janet Southern, and Samir Panjwani). Photo: Courtesy of Nazia Gadhia
The FOCUS interns came from different parts of the world. We each brought unique perspectives on culture and development, and pushed and challenged one another to think outside the box. As interns we often collaborated, but we also separated out to work within our respective teams.
I worked on a disaster preparedness programme that concentrated on increasing local capacity to prepare for and cope with the effects of natural disasters. Funded by the European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid Office (ECHO), the programme incorporates media, education, institutional capacity building, and structural mitigation initiatives. My role was in monitoring and evaluating; I observed each component of the disaster preparedness programme to assess its successes, challenges, and overall effectiveness, and made suggestions for future improvement.
This role also permitted me to go into the field to observe a project’s impact upon the local community. What I found most interesting was that entire projects were operated by the Tajiks themselves. Local professionals with backgrounds in engineering, computer science, linguistics, and law worked together to achieve the goals laid out by ECHO.
Drawing on a traditional Pamiri custom of public voluntary work known as “kiryar”, members of the community participate in the construction of a reveted wall in Khorog. Photo: Janet Southern
The wider community also took part in its implementation, connecting their participation to a traditional Pamiri custom of public voluntary work known as kiryar or hashar. The custom originally involved the building of houses for individual families by the community. Now it is being applied in different, but relevant contexts: huge groups come together to work voluntarily on structural mitigation projects — such as the reconstruction of bridges — to ensure their completion within the required timeframe.
The community’s strong commitment demonstrates self-sustainability, while also spelling the achievement of development goals for the region. During one particular site visit, a riveted wall — built to slow the impact of falling debris and snow — was in its beginning stages of construction. On my return only a few days later, I was amazed to see over half the wall completed! A co-worker explained to me that kiryar played a huge part in this progress. He connected its success to the values of the Jamat, which place importance on community responsibility and achievement.
I embarked on my journey to Tajikistan expecting to see a new place and to further my professional experience. After spending almost two months living with a traditional Pamiri family, working with the local community, and catching a glimpse of the beauty and spirituality that characterises the people and landscape of this part of the world, I came away with new friends, treasured memories, a better understanding of the traditions of the Ismaili community in that part of the world, and how tradition is woven into the wider story of our culture and history.
A statue of Nasir Khusraw with the Pamir Mountains rising behind him. Photo: Janet Southern
http://www.theismaili.org/cms/995/Pamir ... Tajikistan
[Colors of Pamir] Images from the second Pamir Festival
http://pamirtimes.net/2010/07/17/colors ... -festival/
Images: Zulfiqar Ali Khan
The second Pamir Festival kicked-off in Khorog, the capital city of Gorno-Badakhshan region of Tajikistan. The event is being organized by Aga Khan Foundation in collaboration with other organization.
Artists from the mountains of Tajikistan, China, Afghanistan, Pakistan (Chitral) and Kirghisitan presented mosaics of traditional dances and folk songs on first day of the two-day festivities.
The stalls staged alongside the musical program also display colorful handicrafts from Tajik and Afghan Badakhshan.
http://pamirtimes.net/2010/07/17/colors ... -festival/
Images: Zulfiqar Ali Khan
The second Pamir Festival kicked-off in Khorog, the capital city of Gorno-Badakhshan region of Tajikistan. The event is being organized by Aga Khan Foundation in collaboration with other organization.
Artists from the mountains of Tajikistan, China, Afghanistan, Pakistan (Chitral) and Kirghisitan presented mosaics of traditional dances and folk songs on first day of the two-day festivities.
The stalls staged alongside the musical program also display colorful handicrafts from Tajik and Afghan Badakhshan.
Matthieu Paley: Journey to the Roof of the World
Photographs at:
http://simerg.com/historical-photograph ... the-world/
PORTRAITS OF THE ISMAILIS
“Far, in a remote land, after days of travels, you get dropped off and then you start walking. You isolate yourself to find loneliness, to give a stronger meaning to human relations. You roam at the edges of a world you can only pass by but not live in. Yet, it lures you again and again, giving you the strength only freedom can deliver.”
Matthieu Paley
Matthieu Paley is an award winning photographer. His most recent exhibition was "An Ethereal World - Journeys to the edges of Asia."
Matthieu Paley is an intrepid explorer and an award winning photographer. He says he has been working along side Ismailis in Northern Pakistan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan for several years now. He says these regions are his favorite places in the world. Simerg is deeply indebted to him for sending us a collection of his photos for publication on this Web site.
Once you have viewed the photos on this page, please visit his Web site Paley Photo, where he says many of the portraits in the stories Pamiristan I, The End of the Corridor, and Hunza – A World Away are those of the Ismailis. For the last 10 years, Matthieu’s assignments have taken him all over Asia, resulting in worldwide publications in magazines such as National Geographic Adventure, Geo, Geographical, Discovery etc. He has published book on Siberia and Mongolia. He is a regular lecturer for the Asia Society and the Royal Geographical Society.
Recently, he expanded into the world of fine art, finding the elements that unify his work. To inquire about purchasing limited editions, archival prints on paper or canvas, please contact info(at)paleyphoto.com. Photos of his most recent exhibition, An Ethereal World – Journeys to the edges of Asia can be viewed at Ethereal World as well as on his Website, click on the “Fine art Print” link. Additionally, to find out more about his guiding services in this remote parts of Asia, please visit www.pamirknot.com
THE PAMIRS
Map of Tajikistan. Credit: Lonelyplanet.com
IMPORTANT NOTE: Please click photos for enlargement.
“HAPPY ISMAILI PEOPLE”
The first photo shown below by Matthieu Paley was taken in Alichur (shown on map, above), a village at an altitude of 4000 metres which is comprised mainly of Ismailis. It is located on the Pamir Highway south of Murghab in the Gorno Badakshan Autonomous Region of Southeastern Tajikistan. The photo was taken during Didar (Invitation) – a celebration that takes place on 28th of May every year to commemorate the anniversary of the Aga Khan’s visit to the village in the 1990s. During the celebrations the villagers dress up, dance outdoors to the accordion and drums and sing ginane (religious songs), which tell of him being their Noor (light). The photograph was taken as these girls, dressed in bright atlas silk fabric with crowns on their heads, were going out to dance. In this region, as in other parts of the world, Ismailis hold a deep reverence for their Imam, the direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad (SAWS). Pictures of the 49th Imam adorn most Ismaili homes. The Aga Khan and his Imamat Institutions and Agencies play a key role in the community’s survival and development throughout the world.
Ismaili girls proudly display a decorated frame holding a photo of their beloved 49th Imam, His Highness the Aga Khan. See story above. Click for enlargement. Photo: Matthieu Paley. Copyright.
Ismaili women in the Pamirs. Note the Golden Jubilee head band on the woman on the right. Click for enlargement. Photo: Matthieu Paley. Copyright.
Pamiri Ismaili youth enjoying their time outdoors at the Roof of the World music festival, taking place in Khorog, Tajikistan.Photo: Matthieu Paley. Copyright.
WAKHAN
A sad reality - an opium aaddict in a rehabilitation clinic in the Wakhan corridor of Afghanistan (shown on map above). Opium is a big issue that the Aga Khan Foundation is trying to solve . Photo: Matthieu Paley. Copyright.
Portrait of an Ismaili girl in Wakhan. Click for enlargement. Photo: Matthieu Paley. Copyright
HUNZA
Map of Hunza and Neighbouring regions. Credit: logcluster.org
An Ismaili woman crossing a rope bridge in the Hunza valley. Photo: Matthieu Paley. Copyright.
Powerful portraits of Ismaili women in Hunza. Please click for enlargement. Photo: Matthieu Paley. Copyright
Baltit Fort in Hunza. Photo: Matthieu Paley. Copyright.
Article publication date: August 15, 2010
_____________
Matthieu Paley’s Web site: Click Paley Photo.
Also, visit the Simerg Home page. For links to all articles posted on this Web site since its launch in March 2009, please click What’s New.
To submit feedback, please complete the REPLY box below (we won’t publish your email address). Comments may be moderated and edited for language, style and taste. They are published at the discretion of the editor.
Photographs at:
http://simerg.com/historical-photograph ... the-world/
PORTRAITS OF THE ISMAILIS
“Far, in a remote land, after days of travels, you get dropped off and then you start walking. You isolate yourself to find loneliness, to give a stronger meaning to human relations. You roam at the edges of a world you can only pass by but not live in. Yet, it lures you again and again, giving you the strength only freedom can deliver.”
Matthieu Paley
Matthieu Paley is an award winning photographer. His most recent exhibition was "An Ethereal World - Journeys to the edges of Asia."
Matthieu Paley is an intrepid explorer and an award winning photographer. He says he has been working along side Ismailis in Northern Pakistan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan for several years now. He says these regions are his favorite places in the world. Simerg is deeply indebted to him for sending us a collection of his photos for publication on this Web site.
Once you have viewed the photos on this page, please visit his Web site Paley Photo, where he says many of the portraits in the stories Pamiristan I, The End of the Corridor, and Hunza – A World Away are those of the Ismailis. For the last 10 years, Matthieu’s assignments have taken him all over Asia, resulting in worldwide publications in magazines such as National Geographic Adventure, Geo, Geographical, Discovery etc. He has published book on Siberia and Mongolia. He is a regular lecturer for the Asia Society and the Royal Geographical Society.
Recently, he expanded into the world of fine art, finding the elements that unify his work. To inquire about purchasing limited editions, archival prints on paper or canvas, please contact info(at)paleyphoto.com. Photos of his most recent exhibition, An Ethereal World – Journeys to the edges of Asia can be viewed at Ethereal World as well as on his Website, click on the “Fine art Print” link. Additionally, to find out more about his guiding services in this remote parts of Asia, please visit www.pamirknot.com
THE PAMIRS
Map of Tajikistan. Credit: Lonelyplanet.com
IMPORTANT NOTE: Please click photos for enlargement.
“HAPPY ISMAILI PEOPLE”
The first photo shown below by Matthieu Paley was taken in Alichur (shown on map, above), a village at an altitude of 4000 metres which is comprised mainly of Ismailis. It is located on the Pamir Highway south of Murghab in the Gorno Badakshan Autonomous Region of Southeastern Tajikistan. The photo was taken during Didar (Invitation) – a celebration that takes place on 28th of May every year to commemorate the anniversary of the Aga Khan’s visit to the village in the 1990s. During the celebrations the villagers dress up, dance outdoors to the accordion and drums and sing ginane (religious songs), which tell of him being their Noor (light). The photograph was taken as these girls, dressed in bright atlas silk fabric with crowns on their heads, were going out to dance. In this region, as in other parts of the world, Ismailis hold a deep reverence for their Imam, the direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad (SAWS). Pictures of the 49th Imam adorn most Ismaili homes. The Aga Khan and his Imamat Institutions and Agencies play a key role in the community’s survival and development throughout the world.
Ismaili girls proudly display a decorated frame holding a photo of their beloved 49th Imam, His Highness the Aga Khan. See story above. Click for enlargement. Photo: Matthieu Paley. Copyright.
Ismaili women in the Pamirs. Note the Golden Jubilee head band on the woman on the right. Click for enlargement. Photo: Matthieu Paley. Copyright.
Pamiri Ismaili youth enjoying their time outdoors at the Roof of the World music festival, taking place in Khorog, Tajikistan.Photo: Matthieu Paley. Copyright.
WAKHAN
A sad reality - an opium aaddict in a rehabilitation clinic in the Wakhan corridor of Afghanistan (shown on map above). Opium is a big issue that the Aga Khan Foundation is trying to solve . Photo: Matthieu Paley. Copyright.
Portrait of an Ismaili girl in Wakhan. Click for enlargement. Photo: Matthieu Paley. Copyright
HUNZA
Map of Hunza and Neighbouring regions. Credit: logcluster.org
An Ismaili woman crossing a rope bridge in the Hunza valley. Photo: Matthieu Paley. Copyright.
Powerful portraits of Ismaili women in Hunza. Please click for enlargement. Photo: Matthieu Paley. Copyright
Baltit Fort in Hunza. Photo: Matthieu Paley. Copyright.
Article publication date: August 15, 2010
_____________
Matthieu Paley’s Web site: Click Paley Photo.
Also, visit the Simerg Home page. For links to all articles posted on this Web site since its launch in March 2009, please click What’s New.
To submit feedback, please complete the REPLY box below (we won’t publish your email address). Comments may be moderated and edited for language, style and taste. They are published at the discretion of the editor.
In pictures: Tajikistan's remote Pamir mountains
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-11096230
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-11096230
Videos from Tajikistan Adventures
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55x551xuC9Q
"A beautiful day in downtown Khorog. the botanicla gardens were restored and expanded with funds form the Aga Khan, the spiritual leader of Ismaili muslims and most people in the Pamir. Khorog is on the Panj River, across the border form Tajikistan. there is a market on the bridge every week with traders from both sides."
"Tajikistan Pamirs"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gw4EytaDy0
"View over 6000m and 7000m peaks of the Pakistani and Afghan Hindu Kush, seen from summit of Pik Leningrad University (6222m, SW Pamir, Tajkistan). The peaks close-by at the end are Pik Tajikistan (6565m), Pik Karl Marx (6726m)and Pik Engels (6510m), all located in the Tajik SW Pamirs."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjISes1VY4Y
"Murghab is a far flung outpost in Tajikistan in the easter Pamirs, 'THe roof of the world'. I travelled there with Peregrine Adventures. of all the places we visited this was the most far out, though very close to the chinese border."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kefNXJrhKB8
"Along the Panj river"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWV3f1CqVpw
"Wakhan Valley village staging a music, singing and dancing show"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL2CutnzDbc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55x551xuC9Q
"A beautiful day in downtown Khorog. the botanicla gardens were restored and expanded with funds form the Aga Khan, the spiritual leader of Ismaili muslims and most people in the Pamir. Khorog is on the Panj River, across the border form Tajikistan. there is a market on the bridge every week with traders from both sides."
"Tajikistan Pamirs"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gw4EytaDy0
"View over 6000m and 7000m peaks of the Pakistani and Afghan Hindu Kush, seen from summit of Pik Leningrad University (6222m, SW Pamir, Tajkistan). The peaks close-by at the end are Pik Tajikistan (6565m), Pik Karl Marx (6726m)and Pik Engels (6510m), all located in the Tajik SW Pamirs."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjISes1VY4Y
"Murghab is a far flung outpost in Tajikistan in the easter Pamirs, 'THe roof of the world'. I travelled there with Peregrine Adventures. of all the places we visited this was the most far out, though very close to the chinese border."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kefNXJrhKB8
"Along the Panj river"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWV3f1CqVpw
"Wakhan Valley village staging a music, singing and dancing show"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL2CutnzDbc
Social and Economic Change in the Pamirs (Gorno-Badakhshan, Tajikistan): Translated from German by Nicola Pacult and Sonia Guss with support of Tim Sharp [Hardcover]
Product Description
Since Olufsen and Schulz published their monographs on the Pamirs in 1904 and 1914, respectively, this is the first book to deal with the history, anthropology and recent social and economic development of the Pamiri people in Gorno-Badakhshan, Eastern Tajikistan. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, such high mountain areas were more or less forgotten and people would have suffered severely from their isolation if an Aga Khan Foundation project in 1993 to 1994 had not afforded broader support. The reader will be confronted by an almost surrealistic world: Pamiri income and living conditions after 1991 dropped to the level of a poor Sahelian country. Former scientists, university professors and engineers found themselves using ox-ploughs to plant potatoes and wheat for survival. On the other hand, 100% literacy and excellent skills proved to be an enormous human capital resource for economic recovery. The first sign of this was an increase in agricultural production, something that had never occurred during Soviet times.
About the Author
Frank Bliss is Profesor for Development Anthropology at Hamburg University and partner of Bliss & Gaesing - Associated Consultants, planning and evaluating participatory development programs.
http://www.amazon.com/Social-Economic-C ... 0415308062
Product Description
Since Olufsen and Schulz published their monographs on the Pamirs in 1904 and 1914, respectively, this is the first book to deal with the history, anthropology and recent social and economic development of the Pamiri people in Gorno-Badakhshan, Eastern Tajikistan. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, such high mountain areas were more or less forgotten and people would have suffered severely from their isolation if an Aga Khan Foundation project in 1993 to 1994 had not afforded broader support. The reader will be confronted by an almost surrealistic world: Pamiri income and living conditions after 1991 dropped to the level of a poor Sahelian country. Former scientists, university professors and engineers found themselves using ox-ploughs to plant potatoes and wheat for survival. On the other hand, 100% literacy and excellent skills proved to be an enormous human capital resource for economic recovery. The first sign of this was an increase in agricultural production, something that had never occurred during Soviet times.
About the Author
Frank Bliss is Profesor for Development Anthropology at Hamburg University and partner of Bliss & Gaesing - Associated Consultants, planning and evaluating participatory development programs.
http://www.amazon.com/Social-Economic-C ... 0415308062
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Ismailis and the Pamiri Home
In earlier posts, we made mention of the Ismailis and their Pamiri houses, to which we are so frequently invited for a modest cup of tea (which is short for a very extensive luncheon with never ending spreads of local foods, always accompanied by hot tea).
The traditional Pamiri home (huneuni chid) consists of a large, five pillared room with raised areas around four sides of what can only be described as a central “pit”. In the winter, this pit contains a wooden stove which is warming the room and keeps the tea- and soup pots boiling. Apart from the main room, there is an entrance area (leave your shoes here, you always enter on your socks) and ,often, a private, smaller living space and hallway; the main room is where all the activities take place. This is where the extended family (and their honored guests) sleeps, eats, studies, watches television and entertains.
There are few, if any, windows. Illumination comes through an artfully designed skylight in the roof (the chimney of the wooden stove also leads through this roof-window) and consists of four concentric squares, representing the elements of fire, earth, air and water.
Along the raised sides, carpets and mattresses take the place of our furniture (good luck sitting cross legged through a three hour dinner with your stiff western limbs); carpets are colorful and plenty and also serve as decoration along with panels of photographs, the most prominent of which is almost always a portrait of the Aga Khan.
We have been told on numerous occasions, that the vertical pillars (5) symbolize the five members of Ali’s family (Fatima, Ali, Mohammed, Hassan and Hussein for who is interested) as well as the Five Pillars of Islam.
Some say, that these pillars also go back to the five deities of the Zoroastrianism religion (the structure of the Pamiri house goes back over 2500 years). In a further act of symbolism, the number of often beautifully decorated roof beams relates to the seven imams and six prophets of Ismailism. The most prominent place of the house is next to the Hassan pillar where the guest of honor will be seated (this can be the religious village leader for instance) so you have to be pretty careful where to put down your behind.
We have found the corners of the houses pretty comfortable (this is where you can stretch your legs the easiest) but you have to be careful around the "dastarkhon" (the table cloth spread on the floor which serves as the table). There are many forms of etiquette that we had to learn quickly. A lot of nevers. Never blow your nose (extremely rude), never place bread upside down or give food to animals, never step on or over the table cloth, this is especially a deadly sin (if you don’t have enough room, tuck your feet under the cloth).
The Ismailis are the second largest branch of the Shiites; they consider the family of Mohammed as divinely chosen, infallible and guided by God to lead the Islamic community, a belief that distinguishes them from the majority Sunni branch of Islam.
The Ismailis get their name from their acceptance of Ismail (ibn Jafar) as the appointed spiritual successor (Imam) to Jafar as Sadiq (this with thanks to Google, the BBC and Lonely Planet, I couldn’t remember these early theology lessons).
We find the Ismailis extremely pleasant; they don’t carry their religion on their sleeves, pray at home (no mosques) or in their community centers, drink modestly if they want to (the Russians left a legacy of vodka here of course). Most of the women wouldn’t look out of place in Paris, Rome or London and we wonder how they walk so elegantly through the snow with their high heels and stiletto boots. It’s easy to engage in discussions about religion if you want to, although the concept of atheism is not really understood.
The current Aga Khan is the 49th Imam (successor) and it is his job to interpret the Ismaili religion to its current day and times. Thus, the Koran is not followed literally but explained in the context of the 21st century.
According to our Canadian friend and co-volunteer Rod (a firm sceptic) anybody with a grain of sense would wish the Aga Khan (he refers to Him as one Cool Dude) as the chief of his or her religion. He lives in Switzerland, married several times, is a good skier and enjoys life to the fullest it seems. He is interested in the elimination of the world’s poverty, the advancement of women and gives most of his (considerable stacks of) money to good causes of which we are indirect beneficiaries (we work for one of his many foundations) so what’s not to like about him …..
http://christineandjelte.blogspot.com/2 ... -home.html
Ismailis and the Pamiri Home
In earlier posts, we made mention of the Ismailis and their Pamiri houses, to which we are so frequently invited for a modest cup of tea (which is short for a very extensive luncheon with never ending spreads of local foods, always accompanied by hot tea).
The traditional Pamiri home (huneuni chid) consists of a large, five pillared room with raised areas around four sides of what can only be described as a central “pit”. In the winter, this pit contains a wooden stove which is warming the room and keeps the tea- and soup pots boiling. Apart from the main room, there is an entrance area (leave your shoes here, you always enter on your socks) and ,often, a private, smaller living space and hallway; the main room is where all the activities take place. This is where the extended family (and their honored guests) sleeps, eats, studies, watches television and entertains.
There are few, if any, windows. Illumination comes through an artfully designed skylight in the roof (the chimney of the wooden stove also leads through this roof-window) and consists of four concentric squares, representing the elements of fire, earth, air and water.
Along the raised sides, carpets and mattresses take the place of our furniture (good luck sitting cross legged through a three hour dinner with your stiff western limbs); carpets are colorful and plenty and also serve as decoration along with panels of photographs, the most prominent of which is almost always a portrait of the Aga Khan.
We have been told on numerous occasions, that the vertical pillars (5) symbolize the five members of Ali’s family (Fatima, Ali, Mohammed, Hassan and Hussein for who is interested) as well as the Five Pillars of Islam.
Some say, that these pillars also go back to the five deities of the Zoroastrianism religion (the structure of the Pamiri house goes back over 2500 years). In a further act of symbolism, the number of often beautifully decorated roof beams relates to the seven imams and six prophets of Ismailism. The most prominent place of the house is next to the Hassan pillar where the guest of honor will be seated (this can be the religious village leader for instance) so you have to be pretty careful where to put down your behind.
We have found the corners of the houses pretty comfortable (this is where you can stretch your legs the easiest) but you have to be careful around the "dastarkhon" (the table cloth spread on the floor which serves as the table). There are many forms of etiquette that we had to learn quickly. A lot of nevers. Never blow your nose (extremely rude), never place bread upside down or give food to animals, never step on or over the table cloth, this is especially a deadly sin (if you don’t have enough room, tuck your feet under the cloth).
The Ismailis are the second largest branch of the Shiites; they consider the family of Mohammed as divinely chosen, infallible and guided by God to lead the Islamic community, a belief that distinguishes them from the majority Sunni branch of Islam.
The Ismailis get their name from their acceptance of Ismail (ibn Jafar) as the appointed spiritual successor (Imam) to Jafar as Sadiq (this with thanks to Google, the BBC and Lonely Planet, I couldn’t remember these early theology lessons).
We find the Ismailis extremely pleasant; they don’t carry their religion on their sleeves, pray at home (no mosques) or in their community centers, drink modestly if they want to (the Russians left a legacy of vodka here of course). Most of the women wouldn’t look out of place in Paris, Rome or London and we wonder how they walk so elegantly through the snow with their high heels and stiletto boots. It’s easy to engage in discussions about religion if you want to, although the concept of atheism is not really understood.
The current Aga Khan is the 49th Imam (successor) and it is his job to interpret the Ismaili religion to its current day and times. Thus, the Koran is not followed literally but explained in the context of the 21st century.
According to our Canadian friend and co-volunteer Rod (a firm sceptic) anybody with a grain of sense would wish the Aga Khan (he refers to Him as one Cool Dude) as the chief of his or her religion. He lives in Switzerland, married several times, is a good skier and enjoys life to the fullest it seems. He is interested in the elimination of the world’s poverty, the advancement of women and gives most of his (considerable stacks of) money to good causes of which we are indirect beneficiaries (we work for one of his many foundations) so what’s not to like about him …..
http://christineandjelte.blogspot.com/2 ... -home.html
Tajikistan Tourism Is An Adventure
The Tajik people shine
By Scott Weller
Tajikistan Tourism Is An Adventure
Photos by Scott Weller
The rain began as a cordial drizzle, but steadily thickened, soaking us through the rotten soft shell of the Russian jeep as we bounced along in second gear. Across the river border, Afghan mule trains animated an otherwise stark mountainside, clinging to ancient trails along the Panj River, and drawing contrast with Tajikistan’s Soviet legacies, including the Pamir Highway itself. Leaving its dilapidated asphalt behind, we took to dirt and veered into the sweeping Bartang Valley beneath a corridor of 17,000-foot peaks. Here in this sparsely populated corner of southeastern Tajikistan, I was beginning to discover a fascinating confluence of landscape, culture and history.
Tucked between Afghanistan and the western reaches of China, Tajikistan is a little-known Central Asian gem. Convening at the doorstep of its legendary Pamir Range is a who’s who of the world’s greatest mountain ranges: Himalaya, Hindu Kush, Karakoram, Kunlun, and Tien Shan. While the eastern Pamir Range contains a vast high-altitude plateau reminiscent of the nearby Tibetan plateau, the Bartang Valley is a classic specimen of the western Pamir: a contortion of steep river gorges sculpted by glacial whitewater. Tajikistan’s rugged terrain provided a measure of insulation from the major political and military events throughout Central Asia’s early history, allowing the Tajiks to retain their Persian heritage in a region dominated by Turkic influence.
Entering the Bartang Valley, we were now several hours north of Khorog, the provincial hub that serves as a sort of gateway between the eastern and western Pamir. From Khorog, about a two-day drive from Tajikistan’s capital city of Dushanbe, the Pamir Highway separates from the river border with Afghanistan and tracks east onto the desolate plateau inhabited by yurt-dwelling Kyrgyz. The plateau eventually leads to China’s western Xinjiang province. But before continuing east, I was intent on exploring one last feature of the western Pamir: the Bartang Valley.
Tajikistan TourismMy driver spoke the Indo-Iranian languages of Pamiri and Tajik, then Russian, and fragments of English. His anxiety was unspoken but palpable, being well acquainted with the effect that rain has on the scree slopes of the Bartang Valley. Soon we encountered our first major landslide, a sluggish effluence of mud and rocks several feet deep. A Russian minibus full of local families joined us at the bottleneck, and soon men from a nearby village appeared to help clear the path, shovel by shovel. Well accustomed to arduous overland travel, the Pamiris approach such adventures with a lively spirit of camaraderie.
Darkness descended as we progressed up-canyon on desperate allowances of road flanking the swift and icy Bartang River. We stopped briefly in a small village to visit with the driver’s extended family, who rushed in from nearby fields to stoke their woodstove and prepare hot tea. The hosts being wet and muddy from their daily chores tending goats, ourselves wet and muddy from clearing landslides, we took mutual pleasure in the comfort of a dry home. After warming up with tea and conversation, we resumed our journey having acquired several goats, which joined me in the front seat with tethered hooves. Beyond the last remnants of twilight, we arrived in the village of Basid, where my driver graciously arranged for me to stay with his brother’s family, and I began to experience the remarkable hospitality of the Pamiri people.
At first light, I awoke on a bed of richly decorated carpets. The Pamiri home is simple and cozy, with each element steeped in Aryan, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, or Islamic symbolism. The skylight and its concentric squares represent earth, water, air and fire, known locally as the “four houses.” Surrounding the skylight, five supporting pillars stand for Muhammad, Ali, Fatima, Hasan, and Husayn, as well as the Five Pillars of Islam.
The Pamiris are predominantly Ismaili Muslims, whose geographic nexus occurs in this historic region of Badakhshan, extending from southeastern Tajikistan into northern Afghanistan and Pakistan. At the core of Ismailism is Prince Aga Khan IV, the imam whose religious leadership provides a living interpretation of the Koran. The Aga Khan’s embrace of women’s rights and education has fostered a uniquely progressive orientation among the Ismailis, whose peaceful communities constitute a foundation of stability in one of the world’s most polarized regions.
My hosts greeted me with a pot of black tea, a warm loaf of bread, and a heaping plate of potatoes. A sunny morning was not to be taken for granted, so after breakfast I hurried out to explore the village with my camera. Clusters of mud-walled homes were interspersed within fields of wheat and apricot orchards. Women in colorful full-length dresses and headscarves led their sheep and goats to pastures on the opposite side of the Bartang River, navigating a precarious “bridge” of two cables overlaid with brittle sticks, and a conspicuous lack of anything else to prevent a plunge into the swirling rapids below. For the moment, I was content not to attempt it myself, as the scenery alone captivated my attention, and I quickly developed an admiration for life in this mountain paradise.
Tajikistan TourismAfter a few days in Basid, I recruited my jeep driver to take me deeper into the Bartang Valley, to a hamlet known as Bardara. Similar to its neighboring villages, Bardara is perched atop a giant alluvial fan spilling down from precipitous peaks and spanning the width of the river canyon. As we puttered up to the edge of the alluvium on switchbacks, over 40 villagers amassed to usher me through their maze of turf pathways, gurgling water canals, and bursting apple blossoms. It was simply the loveliest place I had ever visited. But it was soon apparent that the warm nature of Bardara’s residents easily surpassed the appeal of its physical beauty. To accept each household’s invitation for tea would have consumed weeks; at last, I embraced their hospitality, staying five days with one family, and having tea with many others.
My first morning in Bardara, the children eagerly gathered to show me the village sights. Bardara is an unlikely place for thousand-year-old juniper trees, although it claims three of them, in linear alignment and perfectly equidistant. Legend has it that Nasir Khusraw, the Persian poet and missionary who established Ismailism in greater Badakhshan, planted the trees. The middle tree contains the village shrine, Farmon, memorializing a religious communication to Bardara from Aga Khan III, the late grandfather of the current imam. Farmon also boasts an impressive collection of spiraling Marco Polo sheep horns, whose significance in Pamiri tradition as symbols of purity concern Aryan and Zoroastrian philosophy, pre-dating Islam in the region.
Later, we set out on foot for Bardara’s alpine summer pasture, which provides seasonal grazing for livestock, although it’s too lofty and temperamental a place to support fruit trees. A half dozen families reside in this final node of civilization, nestled at the foot of a series of peaks reaching nearly 20,000 feet. Life here occurs on the margin, and they utilize nature’s resources to the brink, including a hydro-powered wheat mill and small hydroelectric generator to power a few light bulbs. The Pamiris have finely tuned their self-reliance, particularly since the abrupt cessation of communist sponsorship in 1991. Many here recollect the Soviet era with a sense of yearning. Visiting in the summer, it’s easy to overlook the rigors of a long winter in the heart of the Pamir Range.
My last night in Bardara, we slaughtered a goat to celebrate newfound friendship. Sleep escaped me that night as I reflected on my growing affection for the people of the Bartang Valley. The initial perception I recalled having of this inhospitable backwater of Central Asia only weeks before now seemed foreign. Here I acquainted a people, a religion, a story completely unknown to me. Here I experienced a way of life remarkably unaffected by the world from which I had come. Here I found a landscape so serene, it was to imprint my memory forever.
Here in the Pamir Range, I felt at home.
http://www.marinmagazine.com/Marin-Maga ... ajikistan/
The Tajik people shine
By Scott Weller
Tajikistan Tourism Is An Adventure
Photos by Scott Weller
The rain began as a cordial drizzle, but steadily thickened, soaking us through the rotten soft shell of the Russian jeep as we bounced along in second gear. Across the river border, Afghan mule trains animated an otherwise stark mountainside, clinging to ancient trails along the Panj River, and drawing contrast with Tajikistan’s Soviet legacies, including the Pamir Highway itself. Leaving its dilapidated asphalt behind, we took to dirt and veered into the sweeping Bartang Valley beneath a corridor of 17,000-foot peaks. Here in this sparsely populated corner of southeastern Tajikistan, I was beginning to discover a fascinating confluence of landscape, culture and history.
Tucked between Afghanistan and the western reaches of China, Tajikistan is a little-known Central Asian gem. Convening at the doorstep of its legendary Pamir Range is a who’s who of the world’s greatest mountain ranges: Himalaya, Hindu Kush, Karakoram, Kunlun, and Tien Shan. While the eastern Pamir Range contains a vast high-altitude plateau reminiscent of the nearby Tibetan plateau, the Bartang Valley is a classic specimen of the western Pamir: a contortion of steep river gorges sculpted by glacial whitewater. Tajikistan’s rugged terrain provided a measure of insulation from the major political and military events throughout Central Asia’s early history, allowing the Tajiks to retain their Persian heritage in a region dominated by Turkic influence.
Entering the Bartang Valley, we were now several hours north of Khorog, the provincial hub that serves as a sort of gateway between the eastern and western Pamir. From Khorog, about a two-day drive from Tajikistan’s capital city of Dushanbe, the Pamir Highway separates from the river border with Afghanistan and tracks east onto the desolate plateau inhabited by yurt-dwelling Kyrgyz. The plateau eventually leads to China’s western Xinjiang province. But before continuing east, I was intent on exploring one last feature of the western Pamir: the Bartang Valley.
Tajikistan TourismMy driver spoke the Indo-Iranian languages of Pamiri and Tajik, then Russian, and fragments of English. His anxiety was unspoken but palpable, being well acquainted with the effect that rain has on the scree slopes of the Bartang Valley. Soon we encountered our first major landslide, a sluggish effluence of mud and rocks several feet deep. A Russian minibus full of local families joined us at the bottleneck, and soon men from a nearby village appeared to help clear the path, shovel by shovel. Well accustomed to arduous overland travel, the Pamiris approach such adventures with a lively spirit of camaraderie.
Darkness descended as we progressed up-canyon on desperate allowances of road flanking the swift and icy Bartang River. We stopped briefly in a small village to visit with the driver’s extended family, who rushed in from nearby fields to stoke their woodstove and prepare hot tea. The hosts being wet and muddy from their daily chores tending goats, ourselves wet and muddy from clearing landslides, we took mutual pleasure in the comfort of a dry home. After warming up with tea and conversation, we resumed our journey having acquired several goats, which joined me in the front seat with tethered hooves. Beyond the last remnants of twilight, we arrived in the village of Basid, where my driver graciously arranged for me to stay with his brother’s family, and I began to experience the remarkable hospitality of the Pamiri people.
At first light, I awoke on a bed of richly decorated carpets. The Pamiri home is simple and cozy, with each element steeped in Aryan, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, or Islamic symbolism. The skylight and its concentric squares represent earth, water, air and fire, known locally as the “four houses.” Surrounding the skylight, five supporting pillars stand for Muhammad, Ali, Fatima, Hasan, and Husayn, as well as the Five Pillars of Islam.
The Pamiris are predominantly Ismaili Muslims, whose geographic nexus occurs in this historic region of Badakhshan, extending from southeastern Tajikistan into northern Afghanistan and Pakistan. At the core of Ismailism is Prince Aga Khan IV, the imam whose religious leadership provides a living interpretation of the Koran. The Aga Khan’s embrace of women’s rights and education has fostered a uniquely progressive orientation among the Ismailis, whose peaceful communities constitute a foundation of stability in one of the world’s most polarized regions.
My hosts greeted me with a pot of black tea, a warm loaf of bread, and a heaping plate of potatoes. A sunny morning was not to be taken for granted, so after breakfast I hurried out to explore the village with my camera. Clusters of mud-walled homes were interspersed within fields of wheat and apricot orchards. Women in colorful full-length dresses and headscarves led their sheep and goats to pastures on the opposite side of the Bartang River, navigating a precarious “bridge” of two cables overlaid with brittle sticks, and a conspicuous lack of anything else to prevent a plunge into the swirling rapids below. For the moment, I was content not to attempt it myself, as the scenery alone captivated my attention, and I quickly developed an admiration for life in this mountain paradise.
Tajikistan TourismAfter a few days in Basid, I recruited my jeep driver to take me deeper into the Bartang Valley, to a hamlet known as Bardara. Similar to its neighboring villages, Bardara is perched atop a giant alluvial fan spilling down from precipitous peaks and spanning the width of the river canyon. As we puttered up to the edge of the alluvium on switchbacks, over 40 villagers amassed to usher me through their maze of turf pathways, gurgling water canals, and bursting apple blossoms. It was simply the loveliest place I had ever visited. But it was soon apparent that the warm nature of Bardara’s residents easily surpassed the appeal of its physical beauty. To accept each household’s invitation for tea would have consumed weeks; at last, I embraced their hospitality, staying five days with one family, and having tea with many others.
My first morning in Bardara, the children eagerly gathered to show me the village sights. Bardara is an unlikely place for thousand-year-old juniper trees, although it claims three of them, in linear alignment and perfectly equidistant. Legend has it that Nasir Khusraw, the Persian poet and missionary who established Ismailism in greater Badakhshan, planted the trees. The middle tree contains the village shrine, Farmon, memorializing a religious communication to Bardara from Aga Khan III, the late grandfather of the current imam. Farmon also boasts an impressive collection of spiraling Marco Polo sheep horns, whose significance in Pamiri tradition as symbols of purity concern Aryan and Zoroastrian philosophy, pre-dating Islam in the region.
Later, we set out on foot for Bardara’s alpine summer pasture, which provides seasonal grazing for livestock, although it’s too lofty and temperamental a place to support fruit trees. A half dozen families reside in this final node of civilization, nestled at the foot of a series of peaks reaching nearly 20,000 feet. Life here occurs on the margin, and they utilize nature’s resources to the brink, including a hydro-powered wheat mill and small hydroelectric generator to power a few light bulbs. The Pamiris have finely tuned their self-reliance, particularly since the abrupt cessation of communist sponsorship in 1991. Many here recollect the Soviet era with a sense of yearning. Visiting in the summer, it’s easy to overlook the rigors of a long winter in the heart of the Pamir Range.
My last night in Bardara, we slaughtered a goat to celebrate newfound friendship. Sleep escaped me that night as I reflected on my growing affection for the people of the Bartang Valley. The initial perception I recalled having of this inhospitable backwater of Central Asia only weeks before now seemed foreign. Here I acquainted a people, a religion, a story completely unknown to me. Here I experienced a way of life remarkably unaffected by the world from which I had come. Here I found a landscape so serene, it was to imprint my memory forever.
Here in the Pamir Range, I felt at home.
http://www.marinmagazine.com/Marin-Maga ... ajikistan/
Ask the Expert: how to visit Tajikistan
John Henzell
Oct 28, 2011
I have just finished reading The Great Game, Peter Hopkirk's gripping account of the 19th century skirmishes between Tsarist Russia and Victorian England for supremacy in Central Asia. Now I have a burning desire to go there but, as the book demonstrates, it has never been the most stable part of the world. What do you recommend?
It is true that Central Asia is not for the fainthearted but there are options for intrepid travellers, who'll find the effort to get there is more than rewarded.
Afghanistan is clearly not a good place to go to at present, even though the north is much safer than the Pashtun areas along the Pakistani border. The disputed Kashmir region split between Pakistan and India is also given do-not-travel status by almost every government.
But the Karakorum Highway is still open, linking northern Pakistan to Kashgar, the famous trading post in what is now far western China. The highway itself is often closed by rockfalls as it winds up a series of gorges on the Pakistani side, while on the Chinese side, a series of restrictions means you can't get very close to the border with Tajikistan.
For that reason, the Pamirs region of Tajikistan is possibly the best way to get up close to the area where the old empires of India, Russia and China used to meet. That's not because the Pamirs are deliberately open to tourists: more that it's too disorganised to do much to stop them.
Access is not simple. From the UAE, the best option is to fly to Dushanbe, the Tajik capital. Tajik Air (Tajikair.tj) flies every Wednesday from Sharjah for €200 (Dh1,017). In Dushanbe, you'll need to get a permit to visit the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast, which covers the Pamirs. You'll need a letter of invitation to get the permit. Stantours (www.stantours.com) can arrange everything for a USD$40 (Dh147) fee.
You can then hire a 4x4 for the journey to Khorog, which can probably be done in one very long day. There's a daily flight but it's cancelled more often than it flies.
If that sounds like more trouble that it's worth, the rewards justify it. The road beside the Panj River separating Tajikistan from Afghanistan is spectacular and the people are absurdly friendly.
One of the nicest parts of the experience is the network of Community Based Tourism homestays in the Pamirs. Local Ismaili families host travellers in traditional Pamiri homes, which feature five pillars in the reception room, representing both the five main prophets and the five tenets of the faith, below a ceiling featuring four layers to represent earth, water, fire and air.
The Pamir Military Highway was built in the 1930s to allow quick access if the country was invaded. While it hasn't been maintained, it gets you close enough to what was an important Cold War boundary to see the observation towers, many some of which are still staffed by soldiers. The road reaches 4,600m high, and features stark but stunningly beautiful scenery.
And if you have a hankering to visit Afghanistan, there is a safe option to do so by attending the Ishkashim market, held at a village about three hours from Khorog. Every second Saturday, villagers from the Tajik side can meet their Afghan counterparts at an open-air market just on the Afghan side of the Panj. You can't go further into Afghanistan without a visa and there are heavily-armed soldiers to make sure everything stays peaceful.
Do you have travel questions or queries? Email them to us at [email protected]
http://www.thenational.ae/lifestyle/tra ... tajikistan
John Henzell
Oct 28, 2011
I have just finished reading The Great Game, Peter Hopkirk's gripping account of the 19th century skirmishes between Tsarist Russia and Victorian England for supremacy in Central Asia. Now I have a burning desire to go there but, as the book demonstrates, it has never been the most stable part of the world. What do you recommend?
It is true that Central Asia is not for the fainthearted but there are options for intrepid travellers, who'll find the effort to get there is more than rewarded.
Afghanistan is clearly not a good place to go to at present, even though the north is much safer than the Pashtun areas along the Pakistani border. The disputed Kashmir region split between Pakistan and India is also given do-not-travel status by almost every government.
But the Karakorum Highway is still open, linking northern Pakistan to Kashgar, the famous trading post in what is now far western China. The highway itself is often closed by rockfalls as it winds up a series of gorges on the Pakistani side, while on the Chinese side, a series of restrictions means you can't get very close to the border with Tajikistan.
For that reason, the Pamirs region of Tajikistan is possibly the best way to get up close to the area where the old empires of India, Russia and China used to meet. That's not because the Pamirs are deliberately open to tourists: more that it's too disorganised to do much to stop them.
Access is not simple. From the UAE, the best option is to fly to Dushanbe, the Tajik capital. Tajik Air (Tajikair.tj) flies every Wednesday from Sharjah for €200 (Dh1,017). In Dushanbe, you'll need to get a permit to visit the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast, which covers the Pamirs. You'll need a letter of invitation to get the permit. Stantours (www.stantours.com) can arrange everything for a USD$40 (Dh147) fee.
You can then hire a 4x4 for the journey to Khorog, which can probably be done in one very long day. There's a daily flight but it's cancelled more often than it flies.
If that sounds like more trouble that it's worth, the rewards justify it. The road beside the Panj River separating Tajikistan from Afghanistan is spectacular and the people are absurdly friendly.
One of the nicest parts of the experience is the network of Community Based Tourism homestays in the Pamirs. Local Ismaili families host travellers in traditional Pamiri homes, which feature five pillars in the reception room, representing both the five main prophets and the five tenets of the faith, below a ceiling featuring four layers to represent earth, water, fire and air.
The Pamir Military Highway was built in the 1930s to allow quick access if the country was invaded. While it hasn't been maintained, it gets you close enough to what was an important Cold War boundary to see the observation towers, many some of which are still staffed by soldiers. The road reaches 4,600m high, and features stark but stunningly beautiful scenery.
And if you have a hankering to visit Afghanistan, there is a safe option to do so by attending the Ishkashim market, held at a village about three hours from Khorog. Every second Saturday, villagers from the Tajik side can meet their Afghan counterparts at an open-air market just on the Afghan side of the Panj. You can't go further into Afghanistan without a visa and there are heavily-armed soldiers to make sure everything stays peaceful.
Do you have travel questions or queries? Email them to us at [email protected]
http://www.thenational.ae/lifestyle/tra ... tajikistan
Olivier Galibert: Ismaili Portraits from Tajikistan
Olivier Galibert of France spent three weeks in Tajikistan in July 2010 to participate in a caving expedition in the Pamir and visited Rangkul Skaja, the 5th highest cave in the world at 4600 m. He met many people along the way in the Wakhan corridor, the Panj valley and Murghab, and took their portrait photos with his D700 nikon + 28-70 F2,8 – “no models, just people I met on the street.” Simerg, with his kind permission, is pleased to publish a selection of his portraits that are specifically of Ismailis.
http://simerg.com/historical-photograph ... ajikistan/
Olivier Galibert of France spent three weeks in Tajikistan in July 2010 to participate in a caving expedition in the Pamir and visited Rangkul Skaja, the 5th highest cave in the world at 4600 m. He met many people along the way in the Wakhan corridor, the Panj valley and Murghab, and took their portrait photos with his D700 nikon + 28-70 F2,8 – “no models, just people I met on the street.” Simerg, with his kind permission, is pleased to publish a selection of his portraits that are specifically of Ismailis.
http://simerg.com/historical-photograph ... ajikistan/
Pamir Mountains June 17-27, Part 2. Khorog
Posted on 03/07/2012 by Nancy
Pamir Mountains, Part 2 — Khorog
http://nancystan.wordpress.com/2012/07/ ... -2-khorog/
Posted on 03/07/2012 by Nancy
Pamir Mountains, Part 2 — Khorog
http://nancystan.wordpress.com/2012/07/ ... -2-khorog/
Ramble While You Ramble
Just another WordPress.com site
A Week in the Pamirs: Part Two, Murgab to Langar
http://ramblewhileyouramble.wordpress.c ... to-langar/
Just another WordPress.com site
A Week in the Pamirs: Part Two, Murgab to Langar
http://ramblewhileyouramble.wordpress.c ... to-langar/
Pamir Mountains and the Wakhan Corridor June-July 2012 w/ Wild Frontiers
http://jos-travel-blog.blogspot.ca/2012 ... ridor.html
http://jos-travel-blog.blogspot.ca/2012 ... ridor.html
Pamir Mulberry
Tajikistan
There still exist pristine places without industry and pollution where people live in harmony with their environment. One of them is the autonomous province of Gorno-Badakhshan in Tajikistan. Though its area (about 65,000 sq km) extends over half the country, only 3% is habitable. Gorno-Badakhshan is located among the Pamir Mountains or “Roof of the World”. The few villages are situated in valleys beside rivers and the population cultivates every patch of available land.
Introduced from China via the Silk Route, the mulberry is perfectly adapted to the difficult mountain environment, where it grows between 1100 and 2400 meters above sea level, replacing crops such as wheat and barley, which cannot grow at these altitudes. An important food resource particularly during times of crisis, the bushes are cultivated on small plots of land and the elderly producers say that some are over a hundred years old.
There are more than 60 varieties of mulberry in the Pamir region, the result of centuries of natural selection and adaptation. They can be eaten raw or transformed into jams and syrups; the berries can also be eaten dried, whole or ground, and made into pikht, which is generally mixed with other seeds and cereals to make a traditional sweet food. Pikht is used as a sweetener in tea, fermented milk or sour cream or alternatively mixed with ricotta cheese as an ingredient in cake fillings.
Mulberries are mainly harvested for family consumption: In summer families put as many as 20-30 sacks of dried mulberry aside as a reserve for the winter.
In the local culture the mulberry tree and fruit are associated with beauty: Berries were traditionally given to a couple to make their life sweeter, and before starting to build a new house, a mulberry tree would be planted.
During the Second World War and the extended civil war which afflicted the country until 1997, mulberry played a crucial role in providing the main source of nutrition for the local population.
Presidium
Producers
Info & contacts
The community of Khorog mulberry producers which formed the Presidium has been part of the Terra Madre network since 2004.
The Presidium—created in collaboration with Bioversity International—currently comprises 23 producers from four districts in the autonomous province of Gorno-Badakhshan, organized into groups of 5 or 6 people.
Its main objective is to defend the Pamir tradition of eating mulberry, which has significantly decreased in recent years with the spread of industrial products. Shoista Mubalieva, a mulberry expert from the Pamir Biological Institute of the Tajikistan Academy of Sciences, is carrying out work to classify and catalog local varieties, and is selecting those most suitable for promotion.
The Presidium will provide the producers with the equipment required to gather, dry and preserve the berries.
Production Area
Districts of Shugnan, Rushan, Yazgulyam and Vanch, Autonomous Province of Gorno-Badakhshan
http://www.slowfoodfoundation.com/pagin ... o?-id=2437
Technical Partners
Bioversity International
Pamir Biological Institute, GBAO, Tajikistan
Mamadiyev Khudonazar, Navruzmamadova Noziya,
Barushan village, Rushan region
Chuponova Gulbakht, Burbonmamadova Maysara, Dovutova Sakina, Ruzadorova Sabdavlat, Shakarmamadova Tamara, Barosebova Xayotbegim, Arabmoyeva Zukhal,
Dehrushan village, Rushan region
Ismatulloyev Avsotorbek, Rustamova Gulbakhor, Gulova Gulchezra, Nurova Mukaddas, Murodova Parinamo, Orzuyeva Tozagul
Motravn village, Vanch region
Erkos Daler, Khuronova Farida, Davlatova Gulbakhar, Iskandarova Nargiye, Khuronova Shabnam
Markazi village, Vanch region
Kodirova Usnoro
Porshinev village, Shugnan region
Coordinator
Mohira Rahimjonova
Tel. +992 93 503 27 99, +992 35 22 24161
[email protected]
Coordinator
Shoista Mubalieva
Tel. +992935229542 +992352228009
[email protected]
Tajikistan
There still exist pristine places without industry and pollution where people live in harmony with their environment. One of them is the autonomous province of Gorno-Badakhshan in Tajikistan. Though its area (about 65,000 sq km) extends over half the country, only 3% is habitable. Gorno-Badakhshan is located among the Pamir Mountains or “Roof of the World”. The few villages are situated in valleys beside rivers and the population cultivates every patch of available land.
Introduced from China via the Silk Route, the mulberry is perfectly adapted to the difficult mountain environment, where it grows between 1100 and 2400 meters above sea level, replacing crops such as wheat and barley, which cannot grow at these altitudes. An important food resource particularly during times of crisis, the bushes are cultivated on small plots of land and the elderly producers say that some are over a hundred years old.
There are more than 60 varieties of mulberry in the Pamir region, the result of centuries of natural selection and adaptation. They can be eaten raw or transformed into jams and syrups; the berries can also be eaten dried, whole or ground, and made into pikht, which is generally mixed with other seeds and cereals to make a traditional sweet food. Pikht is used as a sweetener in tea, fermented milk or sour cream or alternatively mixed with ricotta cheese as an ingredient in cake fillings.
Mulberries are mainly harvested for family consumption: In summer families put as many as 20-30 sacks of dried mulberry aside as a reserve for the winter.
In the local culture the mulberry tree and fruit are associated with beauty: Berries were traditionally given to a couple to make their life sweeter, and before starting to build a new house, a mulberry tree would be planted.
During the Second World War and the extended civil war which afflicted the country until 1997, mulberry played a crucial role in providing the main source of nutrition for the local population.
Presidium
Producers
Info & contacts
The community of Khorog mulberry producers which formed the Presidium has been part of the Terra Madre network since 2004.
The Presidium—created in collaboration with Bioversity International—currently comprises 23 producers from four districts in the autonomous province of Gorno-Badakhshan, organized into groups of 5 or 6 people.
Its main objective is to defend the Pamir tradition of eating mulberry, which has significantly decreased in recent years with the spread of industrial products. Shoista Mubalieva, a mulberry expert from the Pamir Biological Institute of the Tajikistan Academy of Sciences, is carrying out work to classify and catalog local varieties, and is selecting those most suitable for promotion.
The Presidium will provide the producers with the equipment required to gather, dry and preserve the berries.
Production Area
Districts of Shugnan, Rushan, Yazgulyam and Vanch, Autonomous Province of Gorno-Badakhshan
http://www.slowfoodfoundation.com/pagin ... o?-id=2437
Technical Partners
Bioversity International
Pamir Biological Institute, GBAO, Tajikistan
Mamadiyev Khudonazar, Navruzmamadova Noziya,
Barushan village, Rushan region
Chuponova Gulbakht, Burbonmamadova Maysara, Dovutova Sakina, Ruzadorova Sabdavlat, Shakarmamadova Tamara, Barosebova Xayotbegim, Arabmoyeva Zukhal,
Dehrushan village, Rushan region
Ismatulloyev Avsotorbek, Rustamova Gulbakhor, Gulova Gulchezra, Nurova Mukaddas, Murodova Parinamo, Orzuyeva Tozagul
Motravn village, Vanch region
Erkos Daler, Khuronova Farida, Davlatova Gulbakhar, Iskandarova Nargiye, Khuronova Shabnam
Markazi village, Vanch region
Kodirova Usnoro
Porshinev village, Shugnan region
Coordinator
Mohira Rahimjonova
Tel. +992 93 503 27 99, +992 35 22 24161
[email protected]
Coordinator
Shoista Mubalieva
Tel. +992935229542 +992352228009
[email protected]
Prayer Houses of Badakhshan, Tajikistan, Through the Lens of Muslim Harji
http://simergphotos.com/2015/08/29/pray ... lim-harji/
http://simergphotos.com/2015/08/29/pray ... lim-harji/
Review Essays
Journal of Persianate Studies
Symposium: Shrine Traditions, Human Ecology and Identity in the Pamir
Jo-Ann Gross, Introduction
Karim-Aly S. Kassam, Umed Bulbulshoev, Morgan Ruelle, Ecology of Time: Calendar of the Human Body in the Pamir Mountains
Villagers in the Pamir Mountains of Afghanistan and Tajikistan integrated the human body into the seasons and rhythms of their ecological relations to generate “calendars of the human body.” These calendars illustrate that culture does not exist outside of its ecological foundation (i.e. nature), but is firmly situated within it. Farmers undertook agro-pastoral and hunting activities using their own bodies not only for labor, but as a measure of the changing tempo of the seasons. Their bodies both interacted with life on the land and acted as organic clocks to mark the passage of time. While these calendars are no longer widely used, memory of their usage survives, and words from the calendars marking specific ecological events in local languages are still in use. This paper (1) investigates the historical presence and human ecological significance of a calendar of the human body; (2) illustrates the diversity of these calendars based on the specific context of their use from valley to valley in the region; (3) demonstrates the complex connectivity of the users (agro-pastoralists) within their habitat; and, (4) explores the efficacy of this calendar in developing anticipatory capacity among villagers in order to reduce anxiety associated with climate change. The calendar of the human body not only measures time, but gives it meaning.
*****
John Mock, Shrine Traditions of Wakhan Afghanistan
This study, based on field work from 2004 to 2010, describes the religious, social and historical context of shrines in Wakhan District of Badakhshan Province, Afghanistan. Scholarly analysis of the significance of the shrines is balanced with the perspective of the people of Wakhan for whom the shrine traditions are part of a living landscape. Translated excerpts from interviews conducted in the Wakhi language at the shrines bring the Wakhi voice to the study, which focuses on one shrine (the shrine of the miracle of Nāser Khosrow in Yimit village) as an exemplar of shrine traditions. The study draws comparisons between documented shrine traditions in adjacent Wakhan Tajikistan and in Hunza-Gojal of Pakistan, locates the traditions within Pamir Ismaʿilism, and suggests outlines of a broader Pamir interpretive community.
******
Till Mostowlansky, Paving the Way: Ismaʿili Genealogy and Mobility along Tajikistan’s Pamir Highway
This article is an ethnographic study of Ismaʿili communities along the Pamir Highway. “The road,” as it is referred to locally, links Southern Kyrgyzstan with settlements in the eastern part of Tajikistan; its construction traces back to Soviet modernization policy. However, the highway’s construction in the course of the twentieth century led not only to a physical, but also a social transformation of the region. Labor migration of Ismaʿili Tajiks to various settlements along the road resulted in ethnically and confessionally mixed communities. Thus, the Pamir Highway as an ethnographic point of reference provides an entry to discussion of topics such as genealogy, identity, diaspora, and the notion of an Ismaʿili heartland.
http://www.brill.com/sites/default/file ... ochure.pdf
Journal of Persianate Studies
Symposium: Shrine Traditions, Human Ecology and Identity in the Pamir
Jo-Ann Gross, Introduction
Karim-Aly S. Kassam, Umed Bulbulshoev, Morgan Ruelle, Ecology of Time: Calendar of the Human Body in the Pamir Mountains
Villagers in the Pamir Mountains of Afghanistan and Tajikistan integrated the human body into the seasons and rhythms of their ecological relations to generate “calendars of the human body.” These calendars illustrate that culture does not exist outside of its ecological foundation (i.e. nature), but is firmly situated within it. Farmers undertook agro-pastoral and hunting activities using their own bodies not only for labor, but as a measure of the changing tempo of the seasons. Their bodies both interacted with life on the land and acted as organic clocks to mark the passage of time. While these calendars are no longer widely used, memory of their usage survives, and words from the calendars marking specific ecological events in local languages are still in use. This paper (1) investigates the historical presence and human ecological significance of a calendar of the human body; (2) illustrates the diversity of these calendars based on the specific context of their use from valley to valley in the region; (3) demonstrates the complex connectivity of the users (agro-pastoralists) within their habitat; and, (4) explores the efficacy of this calendar in developing anticipatory capacity among villagers in order to reduce anxiety associated with climate change. The calendar of the human body not only measures time, but gives it meaning.
*****
John Mock, Shrine Traditions of Wakhan Afghanistan
This study, based on field work from 2004 to 2010, describes the religious, social and historical context of shrines in Wakhan District of Badakhshan Province, Afghanistan. Scholarly analysis of the significance of the shrines is balanced with the perspective of the people of Wakhan for whom the shrine traditions are part of a living landscape. Translated excerpts from interviews conducted in the Wakhi language at the shrines bring the Wakhi voice to the study, which focuses on one shrine (the shrine of the miracle of Nāser Khosrow in Yimit village) as an exemplar of shrine traditions. The study draws comparisons between documented shrine traditions in adjacent Wakhan Tajikistan and in Hunza-Gojal of Pakistan, locates the traditions within Pamir Ismaʿilism, and suggests outlines of a broader Pamir interpretive community.
******
Till Mostowlansky, Paving the Way: Ismaʿili Genealogy and Mobility along Tajikistan’s Pamir Highway
This article is an ethnographic study of Ismaʿili communities along the Pamir Highway. “The road,” as it is referred to locally, links Southern Kyrgyzstan with settlements in the eastern part of Tajikistan; its construction traces back to Soviet modernization policy. However, the highway’s construction in the course of the twentieth century led not only to a physical, but also a social transformation of the region. Labor migration of Ismaʿili Tajiks to various settlements along the road resulted in ethnically and confessionally mixed communities. Thus, the Pamir Highway as an ethnographic point of reference provides an entry to discussion of topics such as genealogy, identity, diaspora, and the notion of an Ismaʿili heartland.
http://www.brill.com/sites/default/file ... ochure.pdf
Tajikistan: Highlights of Pamir & Wakhan – Bibi Fatima Springs, Ishkashim and more
Travelling the Wakhan Valley in Tajikistan
BY EUGENE ANGJAN 20, 2016
Tajikistan is known for its rugged landscape and majestic mountains, which will be especially evident if you pay a visit to its most famous mountain range, the Pamirs. Dramatic snow-capped peaks, breathtaking views of its valleys, as well as sparsely-inhabited towns and villages are all part of what you can see there.
Yamchun Fortress. (Photo credit: Daisuke Ikei)
Located in a region called Kohistani Badakhshan, though most people still refer to it by its Soviet-era abbreviation, GBAO (Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast), the Pamirs lie in the most remote area of what is already a very remote country.
In this article, I will briefly describe some of the highlights of my journey through the Tajik side of the Wakhan Valley, which I undertook in July 2015.
Ishkashim
If you are travelling to the Wakhan Valley from Khorog, Ishkashim will be the first town you will encounter. Do spend some time wandering around this small town, for the local children are very friendly. I spent quite a while with a group of boys who were perpetually screaming for me to take their photos!
The Pamiris are renowned for their hospitality and it is normal for travelers to be invited for tea and snacks. Even though there will most certainly a language barrier if you don’t speak Russian or Tajik, the experience will still be very enriching. I am always heartened to observe how people can be so warm and hospitable to total strangers, even when they themselves do not have much.
From the left: Inside a traditional Pamiri house with its distinctive skylight; Enthusiastic boys wanting their photos taken; Mountains in Afghanistan as seen from Ishkashim. (Photo credit: Daisuke Ikei)
You can get some good glimpses of the mountains on the Afghan side of the Wakhan Valley too if you venture out of Ishkashim, which is really easy since the town is really quite small. That said, the area near the Panj River, which demarcates the Tajik-Afghan border, is forbidden to foreigners.
Bibi Fatima Springs
About 1km further uphill from the Yamchun Fortress are the Bibi Fatima Springs. Named after the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, the waters of the springs are believed to increase a woman’s fertility. As a result, the hot springs are a popular destination for Tajik women. There are two different rooms in the compound of the hot springs—men and women alternate between them at regular intervals.
The Bibi Fatima hot springs are the vermilion-coloured buildings (right). (Photo credit: Daisuke Ikei)
Thanks to renovation works by the Aga Khan Foundation, the Bibi Fatima Springs are said to be the most nicely-furnished in the region. There are three guesthouses near the hot springs and I chose to stay in the one closest to the entrance of the springs. Although there are no showers in the guesthouse I stayed in, the hot springs definitely more than made up for it!
Langar
Langar is located near where the Pamir and Wakhan Rivers converge to form the Panj River, which demarcates virtually the entirety of the Tajik-Afghan border westwards of the town. The children of the town are also very friendly. Somehow, they all seem to know at least two English words: “photo” and “homestay.”
While wandering around the town, two boys also brought it upon themselves to lead us to a peaceful and beautiful shrine-garden. It commemorates the man said to have introduced Ismailism (a branch of Shia Islam) to Langar, at least according to Lonely Planet.
Langar: View from the petroglyphs. (Photo credit: Daisuke Ikei)
In any case, the short five days I spent in the Wakhan Valley itself has not only been a feast for the eyes, but a banquet for the soul. After all, the Pamirs is not a place where one can make firm plans well in advance; neither is it a place packed with the conveniences of a well-established tourism infrastructure. As such, travelling the Pamirs demands a certain mindset: a submission, a letting-go.
But in return, it guarantees a definite experience: a harkening to a lost pureness, perhaps, or even more evocatively, a transcendence of time and space. It is certainly a place where you have to surrender yourself to the imperceptible passage of the days and the unbounded vastness of its lands—and therein lies its sheer beauty.
Source: Go Beyond | Travelling Wakhan Valley Tajikistan
https://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2016/ ... -and-more/
Travelling the Wakhan Valley in Tajikistan
BY EUGENE ANGJAN 20, 2016
Tajikistan is known for its rugged landscape and majestic mountains, which will be especially evident if you pay a visit to its most famous mountain range, the Pamirs. Dramatic snow-capped peaks, breathtaking views of its valleys, as well as sparsely-inhabited towns and villages are all part of what you can see there.
Yamchun Fortress. (Photo credit: Daisuke Ikei)
Located in a region called Kohistani Badakhshan, though most people still refer to it by its Soviet-era abbreviation, GBAO (Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast), the Pamirs lie in the most remote area of what is already a very remote country.
In this article, I will briefly describe some of the highlights of my journey through the Tajik side of the Wakhan Valley, which I undertook in July 2015.
Ishkashim
If you are travelling to the Wakhan Valley from Khorog, Ishkashim will be the first town you will encounter. Do spend some time wandering around this small town, for the local children are very friendly. I spent quite a while with a group of boys who were perpetually screaming for me to take their photos!
The Pamiris are renowned for their hospitality and it is normal for travelers to be invited for tea and snacks. Even though there will most certainly a language barrier if you don’t speak Russian or Tajik, the experience will still be very enriching. I am always heartened to observe how people can be so warm and hospitable to total strangers, even when they themselves do not have much.
From the left: Inside a traditional Pamiri house with its distinctive skylight; Enthusiastic boys wanting their photos taken; Mountains in Afghanistan as seen from Ishkashim. (Photo credit: Daisuke Ikei)
You can get some good glimpses of the mountains on the Afghan side of the Wakhan Valley too if you venture out of Ishkashim, which is really easy since the town is really quite small. That said, the area near the Panj River, which demarcates the Tajik-Afghan border, is forbidden to foreigners.
Bibi Fatima Springs
About 1km further uphill from the Yamchun Fortress are the Bibi Fatima Springs. Named after the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, the waters of the springs are believed to increase a woman’s fertility. As a result, the hot springs are a popular destination for Tajik women. There are two different rooms in the compound of the hot springs—men and women alternate between them at regular intervals.
The Bibi Fatima hot springs are the vermilion-coloured buildings (right). (Photo credit: Daisuke Ikei)
Thanks to renovation works by the Aga Khan Foundation, the Bibi Fatima Springs are said to be the most nicely-furnished in the region. There are three guesthouses near the hot springs and I chose to stay in the one closest to the entrance of the springs. Although there are no showers in the guesthouse I stayed in, the hot springs definitely more than made up for it!
Langar
Langar is located near where the Pamir and Wakhan Rivers converge to form the Panj River, which demarcates virtually the entirety of the Tajik-Afghan border westwards of the town. The children of the town are also very friendly. Somehow, they all seem to know at least two English words: “photo” and “homestay.”
While wandering around the town, two boys also brought it upon themselves to lead us to a peaceful and beautiful shrine-garden. It commemorates the man said to have introduced Ismailism (a branch of Shia Islam) to Langar, at least according to Lonely Planet.
Langar: View from the petroglyphs. (Photo credit: Daisuke Ikei)
In any case, the short five days I spent in the Wakhan Valley itself has not only been a feast for the eyes, but a banquet for the soul. After all, the Pamirs is not a place where one can make firm plans well in advance; neither is it a place packed with the conveniences of a well-established tourism infrastructure. As such, travelling the Pamirs demands a certain mindset: a submission, a letting-go.
But in return, it guarantees a definite experience: a harkening to a lost pureness, perhaps, or even more evocatively, a transcendence of time and space. It is certainly a place where you have to surrender yourself to the imperceptible passage of the days and the unbounded vastness of its lands—and therein lies its sheer beauty.
Source: Go Beyond | Travelling Wakhan Valley Tajikistan
https://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2016/ ... -and-more/
Andrew Quilty: Down the Wakhan Corridor
Viewed on a map, the Wakhan Corridor seems a peculiar territory, a narrow strip of northeast Afghanistan that stretches between Pakistan to the south and Tajikistan to the north and ends on the Chinese border. Politically, it is an invention of the Great Game, a buffer zone between old empires, but there is a geographic reality to it. The Corridor is exactly that, a long and nearly impenetrable valley flanked by some of the tallest peaks of the Pamirs (including Afghanistan’s highest—Noshaq at 24,580 feet). To this day, it remains one of the few regions of the country that the Taliban have failed to step foot in.
In Afghanistan, security is a rare luxury. With everything else that the Wakhan has to offer to travelers, its tranquility is still one of its most appealing traits. It was certainly an added bonus when I was asked by the Aga Khan Foundation, which conducts development programs in the Wakhan and throughout the north of the country, to accompany a small team into the Corridor. Not having to watch my back was a relief that is rarely afforded in the parts of Afghanistan my work usually takes me to.
https://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2016/ ... -corridor/
Viewed on a map, the Wakhan Corridor seems a peculiar territory, a narrow strip of northeast Afghanistan that stretches between Pakistan to the south and Tajikistan to the north and ends on the Chinese border. Politically, it is an invention of the Great Game, a buffer zone between old empires, but there is a geographic reality to it. The Corridor is exactly that, a long and nearly impenetrable valley flanked by some of the tallest peaks of the Pamirs (including Afghanistan’s highest—Noshaq at 24,580 feet). To this day, it remains one of the few regions of the country that the Taliban have failed to step foot in.
In Afghanistan, security is a rare luxury. With everything else that the Wakhan has to offer to travelers, its tranquility is still one of its most appealing traits. It was certainly an added bonus when I was asked by the Aga Khan Foundation, which conducts development programs in the Wakhan and throughout the north of the country, to accompany a small team into the Corridor. Not having to watch my back was a relief that is rarely afforded in the parts of Afghanistan my work usually takes me to.
https://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2016/ ... -corridor/
Afghanistan’s enigmatic food secret
At the centre of one of the Earth’s harshest environments, on the border of Afghanistan and Tajikistan, two cookbook authors have found “a profoundly human place”.
By Rowena Henley
29 July 2016
In May 2016, a cookbook on one of the most remote and enigmatic cultures in the world won the title of Best Cookbook Of The Year at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards.
This surprising accolade paid tribute to the Pamir region on the border of Afghanistan and Tajikistan, an ominous environment of steep cliffs, deep valleys, remote villages and harsh weather. It seems an unlikely place to source award-winning recipes – but With Our Own Hands is far more than just a recipe book.
100 recipes are explored through the eyes of the Pamiri people and the history of their homeland (Credit: Jamila Haider)
The ambitious project began in 2009, when PhD student Jamila Haider and her co-author, Dutch ethno-botanist Fredrik van Oudenhoven, met while working in Tajikistan. They instantly discovered a mutual love for the Pamir region and a mutual anxiety for its future. While working on development projects, both scientists had seen the erosion of Pamiri traditions firsthand, with foreign food being favoured over ancestral recipes and young people leaving the mountains without plans to return.
The day after their first meeting, the two scientists came across an elderly grandmother while exploring the village of Mun in the Ghund Valley of the Tajik Pamirs. The woman recounted the recipes of her childhood and explained the importance they held for her and the Pamiri people. These recipes had only ever been passed down orally from generation to generation.
The cookbook is full of vibrant photography and local legends (Credit: Jamila Haider)
“The woman asked us to write down her recipes. That way, she said, she could leave them for her children and grandchildren,” Haider said. “The real need for the book became very clear.”
Each of the book’s 100 recipes is explored through the eyes of the Pamiri people and the history of their homeland, with spellbinding stories of local legends, opium addiction and Soviet influence. Readers will learn that time can be recorded without a clock and that “enough” can be a form of measurement. They will pick up practical tips: how to store meat without a refrigerator, for example, or how to turn plants into medicine.
The Pamir region is full of cultural riches and one of a kind recipes (Credit: Frederik Van Oudenhoven)
Special care is taken to explain the relationship between the land and what it produces, and how this remote, hostile landscape is unpredictably perfect for delicious, unique ingredients to grow. Rush-kakht, for example, a type of red wheat used to make Baht (a thick porridge) for Baht Ayom, the Persian New Year, only grows in very specific microclimates in the upper reaches of the Bartang Valley.
“It has a very high sugar content,” Haider explained, “and releases its sweetness slowly, creating a distinct, rich and much beloved taste.”
The book itself is as vibrant as the people and recipes it describes, with exquisite, intimate photography decorating almost every page. The text is presented in three languages, with Dari (in Arabic script) and Tajik (in Cyrillic) sitting alongside the English. Although the translation process was tough (with Haider's translator having to recruit a “small army” of students to help), the authors knew just how essential it was for the Pamiri people to see their recipes written in their mother tongues.
The cookbook came full circle when the authors returned to the village to distribute copies (Credit: Fredrik van Oudenhoven)
Five years after meeting the grandmother, Haider and Oudenhoven returned to the region with 1,700 books to distribute to the local people – and finally saw their hard work pay off.
“At first, people liked looking through the photographs, and finding people and landscapes that they knew,” Haider said. “But when they started reading it, and realising that these were the names of local dishes and crops, which they had never seen in print before, some of them started to laugh in disbelief! One man told us, ‘you have captured our knowledge that before only existed in our hands.’”
Haider recounted how one woman believed the book was so precious that she sewed a bag to protect it in, and keeps it next to her Quran.
"This remote, hostile landscape is unpredictably perfect for delicious, unique ingredients to grow" (Credit: Jamila Haider)
“When we hear of Afghanistan or see images of it in the news, we see bombs, and barren deserts with tanks and Talib fighters, or we hear stories of female oppression and inequality,” Haider said.
She hopes that this book will help change perceptions of the villages, towns and cities of Tajikistan and Afghanistan, focussing instead on the many cultural riches – and delicious dishes – to be found.
If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called “If You Only Read 6 Things This Week”. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Earth, Culture, Capital, Travel and Autos, delivered to your inbox every Friday.
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/2016072 ... travel_rss
At the centre of one of the Earth’s harshest environments, on the border of Afghanistan and Tajikistan, two cookbook authors have found “a profoundly human place”.
By Rowena Henley
29 July 2016
In May 2016, a cookbook on one of the most remote and enigmatic cultures in the world won the title of Best Cookbook Of The Year at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards.
This surprising accolade paid tribute to the Pamir region on the border of Afghanistan and Tajikistan, an ominous environment of steep cliffs, deep valleys, remote villages and harsh weather. It seems an unlikely place to source award-winning recipes – but With Our Own Hands is far more than just a recipe book.
100 recipes are explored through the eyes of the Pamiri people and the history of their homeland (Credit: Jamila Haider)
The ambitious project began in 2009, when PhD student Jamila Haider and her co-author, Dutch ethno-botanist Fredrik van Oudenhoven, met while working in Tajikistan. They instantly discovered a mutual love for the Pamir region and a mutual anxiety for its future. While working on development projects, both scientists had seen the erosion of Pamiri traditions firsthand, with foreign food being favoured over ancestral recipes and young people leaving the mountains without plans to return.
The day after their first meeting, the two scientists came across an elderly grandmother while exploring the village of Mun in the Ghund Valley of the Tajik Pamirs. The woman recounted the recipes of her childhood and explained the importance they held for her and the Pamiri people. These recipes had only ever been passed down orally from generation to generation.
The cookbook is full of vibrant photography and local legends (Credit: Jamila Haider)
“The woman asked us to write down her recipes. That way, she said, she could leave them for her children and grandchildren,” Haider said. “The real need for the book became very clear.”
Each of the book’s 100 recipes is explored through the eyes of the Pamiri people and the history of their homeland, with spellbinding stories of local legends, opium addiction and Soviet influence. Readers will learn that time can be recorded without a clock and that “enough” can be a form of measurement. They will pick up practical tips: how to store meat without a refrigerator, for example, or how to turn plants into medicine.
The Pamir region is full of cultural riches and one of a kind recipes (Credit: Frederik Van Oudenhoven)
Special care is taken to explain the relationship between the land and what it produces, and how this remote, hostile landscape is unpredictably perfect for delicious, unique ingredients to grow. Rush-kakht, for example, a type of red wheat used to make Baht (a thick porridge) for Baht Ayom, the Persian New Year, only grows in very specific microclimates in the upper reaches of the Bartang Valley.
“It has a very high sugar content,” Haider explained, “and releases its sweetness slowly, creating a distinct, rich and much beloved taste.”
The book itself is as vibrant as the people and recipes it describes, with exquisite, intimate photography decorating almost every page. The text is presented in three languages, with Dari (in Arabic script) and Tajik (in Cyrillic) sitting alongside the English. Although the translation process was tough (with Haider's translator having to recruit a “small army” of students to help), the authors knew just how essential it was for the Pamiri people to see their recipes written in their mother tongues.
The cookbook came full circle when the authors returned to the village to distribute copies (Credit: Fredrik van Oudenhoven)
Five years after meeting the grandmother, Haider and Oudenhoven returned to the region with 1,700 books to distribute to the local people – and finally saw their hard work pay off.
“At first, people liked looking through the photographs, and finding people and landscapes that they knew,” Haider said. “But when they started reading it, and realising that these were the names of local dishes and crops, which they had never seen in print before, some of them started to laugh in disbelief! One man told us, ‘you have captured our knowledge that before only existed in our hands.’”
Haider recounted how one woman believed the book was so precious that she sewed a bag to protect it in, and keeps it next to her Quran.
"This remote, hostile landscape is unpredictably perfect for delicious, unique ingredients to grow" (Credit: Jamila Haider)
“When we hear of Afghanistan or see images of it in the news, we see bombs, and barren deserts with tanks and Talib fighters, or we hear stories of female oppression and inequality,” Haider said.
She hopes that this book will help change perceptions of the villages, towns and cities of Tajikistan and Afghanistan, focussing instead on the many cultural riches – and delicious dishes – to be found.
If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called “If You Only Read 6 Things This Week”. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Earth, Culture, Capital, Travel and Autos, delivered to your inbox every Friday.
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/2016072 ... travel_rss
Peace but extreme poverty in isolated region of Afghanistan
http://wivb.com/2016/09/07/peace-but-ex ... ghanistan/
Peace but extreme poverty in isolated region of Afghanistan
The Associated Press Published: September 7, 2016, 2:04 pm
WAKHAN, Afghanistan (AP) — Saeed Beg and his family live in a two-room mud house with no electricity or running water, no bathroom, no kitchen and no furniture apart from a few threadbare rugs and a couple of thin mattresses.
With his mother, wife and five children aged from 8 months to 14 years sitting alongside, he describes life in the Sarkand valley of Afghanistan’s far northeastern Wakhan corridor as “very difficult.” As he talks, the face of a child laying kindling on the roof to dry appears in the pentagonal hole in the ceiling — typical of the homes of Ismaili Muslims, supported by five pillars. The hole lets in the fading evening light, and when Beg’s wife Azalma sets a fire, the smoke curls up toward the velvety-blue, starlit sky.
Beg describes how he exchanges his sheep and goats for food — rice, cooking oil, salt — in the barter system that is the main form of financial transaction here in the shadow of the Hindu Kush.
“We do it because there is no money,” he says. “We don’t have any income, and if we don’t do it, my kids will go hungry. We’ll all be hungry all the time.”
He looks at his boys, snotty-nosed but healthy, their clothes dirty but enough to keep them warm as they tend the livestock after school. Beg wants them to grow up to work for the government “so then they can feed me.”
The Wakhan corridor, which has been named Afghanistan’s second national park, is the country’s most — perhaps only — peaceful region. But it is so poor, even for Afghanistan, that people get food on credit or barter for it, and children go barefoot during the long, harsh winters. The Ismaili Shiite Muslim community here also fears being targeted by the nearby Sunni Taliban — so much that many women in Iskashim, the town at the mouth of the valley, have started to wear the all-covering burqa.
Wakhan, in Badakhshan province, is an aberration of 19th century geopolitics, split east to west in 1873 to create a buffer between the Russian and British empires. Afghanistan confirmed the new border 20 years later, and Wakhan has been mostly forgotten ever since. Ask any Afghan where it is, and they make a fist with their thumb protruding like a hitchhiker; the thumb represents a landlocked peninsula that ends at a 76-km (47-mile) closed border with China, sandwiched between Tajikistan to the north and Pakistan to the south.
An unmade road cuts along the southern bank of the Amu Darya river that divides Afghanistan from Tajikistan. The valley is overlooked by perpetually snow-capped peaks that ensure punishing winds and night-time temperatures close to zero even during the short summer.
On the Tajik side, the road is sealed, and electricity lines feed villages with bright yellow satellite dishes on the rooftops. On the Afghan side, the region is home to around 17,000 Ismailis, followers of the Aga Khan, one of the world’s wealthiest men and their hereditary spiritual leader for 49 generations. For the past century, the Aga Khans have been better known in the West for their glamorous lifestyles, including a penchant for marrying models and movie stars, a love of horse racing, and a custom of receiving their body weight in gold as annual tribute from their impoverished followers.
Here in Wakhan — where the largely Tajik people are known as Wakhis and speak a Pamiri dialect called Wakhi — paper money is almost useless. Villagers measure their wealth in livestock, and grow wheat for bread and oats for their animals. This year a blight has turned the wheat ears red and the bread black, forcing people to use more livestock to barter for food. It’s a long and arduous drive for truckers bringing in rice, so the price is triple that in the capital, Kabul, almost 400 kilometers (250 miles) southwest.
The main street of Wakhan’s administrative center of Khandood is lined with shops — wooden shacks on stilts, most padlocked shut. A few young men, most wearing salwar khameez and plastic shoes, hang around, as there’s not much else to do. Some ride by on donkeys.
Mohammad Ayub took over his shop from his father; it’s been in the family for 50 years, he says. He sells biscuits, cigarettes, brake fluid, 50-kilogram sacks of rice from Kazakhstan, and locally-grown red onions — or he would if he had any customers.
Even people who have jobs are not paid regularly, he says. So he gives them what they need on credit — which means he has to shop on credit too.
“No one has any money,” he says. “Everyone here owes everyone else. Sometimes I’ll accept produce, like sheep, rice, flour, tea, sugar, whatever people have.”
Fatima Roshan is conducting a basic necessities survey in 18 of the 42 villages in the Wakhan corridor for the World Conservation Society. She’s been into the homes of people who never eat meat, don’t know what clean water is and go months without washing.
Many men in the corridor marry, she says, “three, four, five times, one woman after another because their wives die in childbirth.” For their part, the women fear pregnancy, thinking they will die during or after giving birth.
While the level of poverty here is breathtaking, things have improved in recent years. Foreign governments and organizations have funded bridges, irrigation channels, reforestation projects, schools and a clinic. The list of donors only emphasizes the Wakhan’s almost complete reliance on the largesse of the outside world.
For lack of any other opportunities, many young Wakhi men join the armed forces, according to Shah Ismail, whose ancestors have represented the Aga Khan for hundreds of years.
“The people here feel ignored, isolated and hopeless,” he says. “There are no human rights, equality or justice for the people of the Wakhan.”
The local authorities are trying to change things. Two years ago, the Kabul government named the Wakhan a national park. According to district governor Nasratullah Nayel, many locals were concerned the declaration meant their land would be taken away. So this month officials are travelling through the valley to convince people that the national park will attract tourists and create jobs.
Nayel concedes that with only 100 tourists a year, it will be a long time before any economic benefits start to flow.
In the meantime, he says, his administration is dealing with other consequences of poverty, including rising opium addiction. Opium production, worth up to $3 billion a year, helps fund the Taliban insurgency. As opium gradually makes its way into the Wakhan, the number of addicts is growing, Nayel said.
He is hoping the Taliban-led insurgency that has reached Badakhshan does not come to the valley too. Just 30 kilometers (18 miles) from Ishkashim, the town at the entrance to the valley, the Taliban and other criminal groups control the world’s oldest lapis lazuli mines, in Warduj district. According to mining officials, the Taliban make millions of dollars each year in protection money paid by the gangs who smuggle the rare blue stone to Pakistan.
The presence of the Taliban so nearby has further isolated the valley by making the road between Ishkashim and the rest of the country impassable. It has also instilled a fear that insurgents may target villagers simply because they are followers of the Ismaili branch of Shiite Islam, widely considered a cult by other Muslims.
Shah Langar, uncle of Shah Ismail, says an influx of foreign tourists may attract the Taliban’s attention. Sipping salted tea in his wooden house in Qazideh village, he says the Tajik government closed the border bazaars, where traders from both countries could meet for business, more than 10 months ago amid security concerns.
“It generally hasn’t had a huge effect on us because the people here don’t have anything anyway, we often go without tea, rice, sugar,” he said. “The government never does anything for us. We are in a forgotten corner of Afghanistan.”
Peace but extreme poverty in isolated region of Afghanistan
The Associated Press Published: September 7, 2016, 2:04 pm
WAKHAN, Afghanistan (AP) — Saeed Beg and his family live in a two-room mud house with no electricity or running water, no bathroom, no kitchen and no furniture apart from a few threadbare rugs and a couple of thin mattresses.
With his mother, wife and five children aged from 8 months to 14 years sitting alongside, he describes life in the Sarkand valley of Afghanistan’s far northeastern Wakhan corridor as “very difficult.” As he talks, the face of a child laying kindling on the roof to dry appears in the pentagonal hole in the ceiling — typical of the homes of Ismaili Muslims, supported by five pillars. The hole lets in the fading evening light, and when Beg’s wife Azalma sets a fire, the smoke curls up toward the velvety-blue, starlit sky.
Beg describes how he exchanges his sheep and goats for food — rice, cooking oil, salt — in the barter system that is the main form of financial transaction here in the shadow of the Hindu Kush.
“We do it because there is no money,” he says. “We don’t have any income, and if we don’t do it, my kids will go hungry. We’ll all be hungry all the time.”
He looks at his boys, snotty-nosed but healthy, their clothes dirty but enough to keep them warm as they tend the livestock after school. Beg wants them to grow up to work for the government “so then they can feed me.”
The Wakhan corridor, which has been named Afghanistan’s second national park, is the country’s most — perhaps only — peaceful region. But it is so poor, even for Afghanistan, that people get food on credit or barter for it, and children go barefoot during the long, harsh winters. The Ismaili Shiite Muslim community here also fears being targeted by the nearby Sunni Taliban — so much that many women in Iskashim, the town at the mouth of the valley, have started to wear the all-covering burqa.
Wakhan, in Badakhshan province, is an aberration of 19th century geopolitics, split east to west in 1873 to create a buffer between the Russian and British empires. Afghanistan confirmed the new border 20 years later, and Wakhan has been mostly forgotten ever since. Ask any Afghan where it is, and they make a fist with their thumb protruding like a hitchhiker; the thumb represents a landlocked peninsula that ends at a 76-km (47-mile) closed border with China, sandwiched between Tajikistan to the north and Pakistan to the south.
An unmade road cuts along the southern bank of the Amu Darya river that divides Afghanistan from Tajikistan. The valley is overlooked by perpetually snow-capped peaks that ensure punishing winds and night-time temperatures close to zero even during the short summer.
On the Tajik side, the road is sealed, and electricity lines feed villages with bright yellow satellite dishes on the rooftops. On the Afghan side, the region is home to around 17,000 Ismailis, followers of the Aga Khan, one of the world’s wealthiest men and their hereditary spiritual leader for 49 generations. For the past century, the Aga Khans have been better known in the West for their glamorous lifestyles, including a penchant for marrying models and movie stars, a love of horse racing, and a custom of receiving their body weight in gold as annual tribute from their impoverished followers.
Here in Wakhan — where the largely Tajik people are known as Wakhis and speak a Pamiri dialect called Wakhi — paper money is almost useless. Villagers measure their wealth in livestock, and grow wheat for bread and oats for their animals. This year a blight has turned the wheat ears red and the bread black, forcing people to use more livestock to barter for food. It’s a long and arduous drive for truckers bringing in rice, so the price is triple that in the capital, Kabul, almost 400 kilometers (250 miles) southwest.
The main street of Wakhan’s administrative center of Khandood is lined with shops — wooden shacks on stilts, most padlocked shut. A few young men, most wearing salwar khameez and plastic shoes, hang around, as there’s not much else to do. Some ride by on donkeys.
Mohammad Ayub took over his shop from his father; it’s been in the family for 50 years, he says. He sells biscuits, cigarettes, brake fluid, 50-kilogram sacks of rice from Kazakhstan, and locally-grown red onions — or he would if he had any customers.
Even people who have jobs are not paid regularly, he says. So he gives them what they need on credit — which means he has to shop on credit too.
“No one has any money,” he says. “Everyone here owes everyone else. Sometimes I’ll accept produce, like sheep, rice, flour, tea, sugar, whatever people have.”
Fatima Roshan is conducting a basic necessities survey in 18 of the 42 villages in the Wakhan corridor for the World Conservation Society. She’s been into the homes of people who never eat meat, don’t know what clean water is and go months without washing.
Many men in the corridor marry, she says, “three, four, five times, one woman after another because their wives die in childbirth.” For their part, the women fear pregnancy, thinking they will die during or after giving birth.
While the level of poverty here is breathtaking, things have improved in recent years. Foreign governments and organizations have funded bridges, irrigation channels, reforestation projects, schools and a clinic. The list of donors only emphasizes the Wakhan’s almost complete reliance on the largesse of the outside world.
For lack of any other opportunities, many young Wakhi men join the armed forces, according to Shah Ismail, whose ancestors have represented the Aga Khan for hundreds of years.
“The people here feel ignored, isolated and hopeless,” he says. “There are no human rights, equality or justice for the people of the Wakhan.”
The local authorities are trying to change things. Two years ago, the Kabul government named the Wakhan a national park. According to district governor Nasratullah Nayel, many locals were concerned the declaration meant their land would be taken away. So this month officials are travelling through the valley to convince people that the national park will attract tourists and create jobs.
Nayel concedes that with only 100 tourists a year, it will be a long time before any economic benefits start to flow.
In the meantime, he says, his administration is dealing with other consequences of poverty, including rising opium addiction. Opium production, worth up to $3 billion a year, helps fund the Taliban insurgency. As opium gradually makes its way into the Wakhan, the number of addicts is growing, Nayel said.
He is hoping the Taliban-led insurgency that has reached Badakhshan does not come to the valley too. Just 30 kilometers (18 miles) from Ishkashim, the town at the entrance to the valley, the Taliban and other criminal groups control the world’s oldest lapis lazuli mines, in Warduj district. According to mining officials, the Taliban make millions of dollars each year in protection money paid by the gangs who smuggle the rare blue stone to Pakistan.
The presence of the Taliban so nearby has further isolated the valley by making the road between Ishkashim and the rest of the country impassable. It has also instilled a fear that insurgents may target villagers simply because they are followers of the Ismaili branch of Shiite Islam, widely considered a cult by other Muslims.
Shah Langar, uncle of Shah Ismail, says an influx of foreign tourists may attract the Taliban’s attention. Sipping salted tea in his wooden house in Qazideh village, he says the Tajik government closed the border bazaars, where traders from both countries could meet for business, more than 10 months ago amid security concerns.
“It generally hasn’t had a huge effect on us because the people here don’t have anything anyway, we often go without tea, rice, sugar,” he said. “The government never does anything for us. We are in a forgotten corner of Afghanistan.”
An ancient route through the clouds
By Pascal Mannaerts3 October 2016
Once part of the legendary Silk Road, Central Asia’s Pamir Mountains might be the world’s last true adventure.
Photo Gallery:
http://www.bbc.com/travel/gallery/20160 ... he-clouds-
Highlight:
A distinct heritage
Since the area is so isolated, the Pamiri people have a strong cultural identity that is markedly different from the rest of Tajikistan. The Pamiris are mostly Ismaili and thus belong to the Shia branch of Islam, while most Tajiks are Sunni Muslims. They also have their own languages as well handicrafts, jewellery and distinctive music and dancing traditions.
Every July, the capital town of Khorog hosts the Roof of the World Festival, where dancers and artisans from across the Pamir region – as well as other mountain communities along the historical Silk Road – come together. The festival has not only become a platform for cultural integration, but ensures the protection of the area’s unique heritage
By Pascal Mannaerts3 October 2016
Once part of the legendary Silk Road, Central Asia’s Pamir Mountains might be the world’s last true adventure.
Photo Gallery:
http://www.bbc.com/travel/gallery/20160 ... he-clouds-
Highlight:
A distinct heritage
Since the area is so isolated, the Pamiri people have a strong cultural identity that is markedly different from the rest of Tajikistan. The Pamiris are mostly Ismaili and thus belong to the Shia branch of Islam, while most Tajiks are Sunni Muslims. They also have their own languages as well handicrafts, jewellery and distinctive music and dancing traditions.
Every July, the capital town of Khorog hosts the Roof of the World Festival, where dancers and artisans from across the Pamir region – as well as other mountain communities along the historical Silk Road – come together. The festival has not only become a platform for cultural integration, but ensures the protection of the area’s unique heritage
This Remote Pakistani Village Is Nothing Like You’d Expect
Over the years, a mountainous region in Pakistan has become my second home. I’ve seen firsthand how global events have hurt locals’ livelihoods and how technology has challenged the meaning of tradition.
Above the village of Passu, a teenager checks his Facebook. Many residents here are Ismaili, followers of a moderate branch of Islam. A sign on the mountain slope commemorates the time in 1987, when the Ismaili imam, the Aga Khan, visited the remote region.
PASSU, Pakistan—Sajid Alvi is excited. He just got a grant to study in Sweden.
“My Ph.D. is about friction in turbo jet engines,” Alvi says. “I will work on developing new aerospace materials—real geeky stuff!”
Alvi’s relatives have come to bid him farewell as he prepares to leave his mountain village and study in a new country, some 3,000 miles away.
“We will see you again,” one of them says as they hang out in the potato field in front of Alvi’s house. “You know you won’t get far with a long beard like that. You look like Taliban!”
Alvi, dressed in low-hanging shorts and a Yankees cap, is far from a fundamentalist: He’s Wakhi, part of an ethnic group with Persian origins. And like everyone else here, he is Ismaili—a follower of a moderate branch of Islam whose imam is the Aga Khan, currently residing in France. There are 15 million Ismailis around the world, and 20,000 live here in the Gojal region of northern Pakistan.
Nice photographs at:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016 ... tan-islam/
Over the years, a mountainous region in Pakistan has become my second home. I’ve seen firsthand how global events have hurt locals’ livelihoods and how technology has challenged the meaning of tradition.
Above the village of Passu, a teenager checks his Facebook. Many residents here are Ismaili, followers of a moderate branch of Islam. A sign on the mountain slope commemorates the time in 1987, when the Ismaili imam, the Aga Khan, visited the remote region.
PASSU, Pakistan—Sajid Alvi is excited. He just got a grant to study in Sweden.
“My Ph.D. is about friction in turbo jet engines,” Alvi says. “I will work on developing new aerospace materials—real geeky stuff!”
Alvi’s relatives have come to bid him farewell as he prepares to leave his mountain village and study in a new country, some 3,000 miles away.
“We will see you again,” one of them says as they hang out in the potato field in front of Alvi’s house. “You know you won’t get far with a long beard like that. You look like Taliban!”
Alvi, dressed in low-hanging shorts and a Yankees cap, is far from a fundamentalist: He’s Wakhi, part of an ethnic group with Persian origins. And like everyone else here, he is Ismaili—a follower of a moderate branch of Islam whose imam is the Aga Khan, currently residing in France. There are 15 million Ismailis around the world, and 20,000 live here in the Gojal region of northern Pakistan.
Nice photographs at:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016 ... tan-islam/
French Article
http://www.ara.cat/suplements/diumenge/ ... 30502.html
Per les muntanyes del Tadjikistan
És un dels països més misteriosos i poc coneguts de l’Àsia central, amb una història que remet a les gestes d’Alexandre el Gran, dels grans poetes sufís i, fa menys, del comunisme soviètic
Text i fotografies: XAVIER MORET Actualitzada el 27/11/2016 00:00
Google translate:
The mountains of Tajikistan
It is one of the most mysterious and little known in Central Asia, with a story that refers to the exploits of Alexander the Great, the great Sufi poets and less, of Soviet communism
http://www.ara.cat/suplements/diumenge/ ... 30502.html
Per les muntanyes del Tadjikistan
És un dels països més misteriosos i poc coneguts de l’Àsia central, amb una història que remet a les gestes d’Alexandre el Gran, dels grans poetes sufís i, fa menys, del comunisme soviètic
Text i fotografies: XAVIER MORET Actualitzada el 27/11/2016 00:00
Google translate:
The mountains of Tajikistan
It is one of the most mysterious and little known in Central Asia, with a story that refers to the exploits of Alexander the Great, the great Sufi poets and less, of Soviet communism
A LIFE OF FREEDOM
Inside the remote regions of Afghanistan where vicious Taliban thugs have NEVER been able to impose their brutal rule
The Afghan Pamir is a region of delicate peace located in the stunning but harsh mountains and valleys of northeastern Afghanistan
These stunning pictures reveal the region and its inhabitants in all their glory as they work land comprising beautiful rolling valleys and mountains.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2341701/i ... utal-rule/
Inside the remote regions of Afghanistan where vicious Taliban thugs have NEVER been able to impose their brutal rule
The Afghan Pamir is a region of delicate peace located in the stunning but harsh mountains and valleys of northeastern Afghanistan
These stunning pictures reveal the region and its inhabitants in all their glory as they work land comprising beautiful rolling valleys and mountains.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2341701/i ... utal-rule/
Tajikistan: with Yak and bag in the Pamirs
Tajikistan is wild and wonderful, a blank spot on the tourist map. A team from Globetrotter went on a tour to the Pamir Mountains and returned delighted. In 2017, the Globetrotter Academy will organise another trip – and four GM readers can take part for free.
“A terrific, almost pristine landscape and friendly, welcoming people – that is how I experienced Tajikistan”, explains Globetrotter manager Andreas Bartmann. Last summer, he travelled through the Central Asian mountain region with his friends Kay Rittmeister, Holger Moths and Thomas Lipke. Usually, they work together: Kay has supported Globetrotter for many years as a lawyer, Holger as an architect and Thomas was the CEO until recently. Every couple of years the old mates plan a special tour, and after a canoe trip through Canada and a dog sled expedition on Spitzbergen, they then wanted to go on a “journey into the unknown”. Leave the comfort zone, discover something new, broaden the horizon.
More...
http://globetrotter-magazin.de/magazina ... bag-pamirs
Tajikistan is wild and wonderful, a blank spot on the tourist map. A team from Globetrotter went on a tour to the Pamir Mountains and returned delighted. In 2017, the Globetrotter Academy will organise another trip – and four GM readers can take part for free.
“A terrific, almost pristine landscape and friendly, welcoming people – that is how I experienced Tajikistan”, explains Globetrotter manager Andreas Bartmann. Last summer, he travelled through the Central Asian mountain region with his friends Kay Rittmeister, Holger Moths and Thomas Lipke. Usually, they work together: Kay has supported Globetrotter for many years as a lawyer, Holger as an architect and Thomas was the CEO until recently. Every couple of years the old mates plan a special tour, and after a canoe trip through Canada and a dog sled expedition on Spitzbergen, they then wanted to go on a “journey into the unknown”. Leave the comfort zone, discover something new, broaden the horizon.
More...
http://globetrotter-magazin.de/magazina ... bag-pamirs