A Thousand Celestial Meadows: Kyrgyzstan

The land of the Kyrgyz actually begins hundreds of kilometres to the south, far from the Bor Dobo pass and the road to Sary Tash. The dusty unpaved road runs past sad-looking villages, while a handful of boz üy — yurts — dot the dull green slopes of the surrounding mountains, a constant reminder that we are no longer in the Tajik lands of Iran but well into the Turanian domain.

The delicate-faced Kyrgyz man in the back seat gazes into the distance with pale brown eyes, his hands occasionally slipping down his felt hat and his thinly bearded chin as we pass a crumbling nomad graveyard. A silent prayer escapes his lips. In a familiar Soviet mixture of divide-and-rule and Marxist social theory, the predominantly Kyrgyz territory of the eastern Pamir was joined to the Tajik SSR in 1924, during the national delimitation process that carved newborn Soviet nations out of an existing, overlapping blend of political, religious, tribal, regional and local identities.

Many waters have flowed down the slopes of the Tian Shan since the Kyrgyz left their ancestral pastures between Lake Baikal and the Altai and claimed the land west of the terrible Taklamakan desert and east of the fertile Fergana valley. The land we now know as Kyrgyzstan — a lacework of mountains and dry lands, lush pastures and arid hills — has always been a trans-civilisational crossroads, marking borders not only between steppe and sown, nomadic and sedentary, but also between spheres of influence: the Sinic world to the east and the predominantly Iranian world of Central Asia.

The bottleneck and its taxmen

This holds true despite the fact that until roughly the first millennium AD the oasis city-states around the Tarim basin were occupied mainly by Iranian peoples, since the flourishing of those geographically secluded settlements was possible only in direct association with the Chinese civilisation to the east. The growing volume of trade flowing through the Tarim bottleneck under the Han dynasty and westwards into the realm of the Parthian empire eventually allowed cities such as Kucha, Kashgar and Turpan to accumulate not only material wealth but also to develop as centres of culture and learning, and to become an important Buddhist stronghold in Central Asia.

From the very early stages of Eurasian trade, this inter-civilisational buffer zone came under the control of several nomadic superpowers.

The Kushans (Chinese: Yuezhi, 月氏), the Hephthalites, the Göktürks, the Uyghur Khaganate and others all profited from the inflow of goods as middlemen, tax collectors, armed escorts and mercenaries and, in times of need, as simple looters and bandits. These nomadic entities had immense influence on the very existence of the networks, which are by nature highly sensitive to geopolitical change. A wise trader or caravan leader would think twice before setting out for the perilous country outside the cities without knowing to some degree that the road was safe from marauding horsemen — road safety and stability being the core of any trade network.

And the nomadic states were anything but stable. Based on fragile networks of loyalty and tribal identity, and on varied and sometimes contradictory patterns of succession, these empires were prone to constant internal warfare and fragmentation. Whether one should defend and tax a passing camel train or simply rob it and enslave half its men was as much a question of politics as of economics — and in the world of the steppe the two were rarely distinct.

From the Yenisei to the Tian Shan

It was through exactly this pattern that the Kyrgyz came to inherit the lands that now bear their name. Originally nomads of Siberian stock dwelling in the Yenisei valley, the Kyrgyz are described in the Chinese Tang dynasty chronicles as having blue or green eyes and red hair, suggesting a possible link to a non-Turkic lineage.

Coming under the sovereignty of the powerful Uyghur Khaganate in 758 AD, the Kyrgyz eventually overran their former masters, sacking the Uyghur capital in the Orkhon valley in 840. The new Kyrgyz khanate's expansion brought its tribes west of their original homeland, and they eventually settled in their present location after submitting to the Mongols from the thirteenth century onwards, a process that ended around the fifteenth.

The jailoo

Travelling around Kyrgyzstan's mountain pastures, known as jailoo, gives a sense of how loyal the Kyrgyz remain to their nomadic past, despite decades of Soviet economic control, collectivisation and the pressures of modernity. It is true that there are almost no pure nomads left in Kyrgyzstan, as is the case elsewhere in Eurasia, and most herding families keep permanent housing alongside their traditional yurt, heading up the mountains only in summer to give their livestock a chance to fatten.

Even so, the Kyrgyz seem very proud of their nomadic heritage, a legacy that gives them a sense of common unity in the face of other ethnic groups, especially the sedentary Uzbeks who inhabit the agricultural lowlands of the Fergana valley.

A stroll through the peaceful side streets and bazaars of Osh, Jalal-Abad and Uzgen gives neither hint nor clue of the bloody ethnic violence of 1990 and 2010, when Kyrgyz and Uzbeks clashed in the streets, leaving hundreds dead and severe damage to property.

The source of the hostility lies in the prominent Uzbek position in the economy of the Fergana region, especially in relation to a largely newly arrived Kyrgyz population that suffered from a lack of proper housing and employment.

The Soviet process of nation-building, and the post-Soviet one that followed, also lent the process a tailwind, as the newly formed republics hurried to find national founding fathers to replace the fathers of socialism decorating the city squares. Towering statues of the legendary Manas, hero of the Kyrgyz national epic that bears his name, can be seen in almost every town across the Kyrgyz oblasts — a reminder of an old-young nation still struggling to find its place and identity in the troubled waters of Central Asian politics.