Travelling in the Pamir Mountains

Public transport hardly exists in Tajikistan, and travelling mostly meant taking shared taxis, waiting for a vehicle to be full of passengers before the driver would set off. In the Pamir region, these were often tiny Chinese-made minivans, into which seven passengers would be squashed, three in each of the backseat rows, and one upfront. They sometimes crammed in even more. They are not comfortable as they bump along the shoddy roads that lead up the mountain valleys. But sometimes a certain camaraderie develops among the passengers.

My first trip out from Khorog was to the Bartang Valley. I had hired a guide, but before we could leave we had to find a minivan that would take us the first part of the way. This involved hanging around the minibus station at the market, talking to drivers and trying to work out who would be going first in the direction we wanted to go. This was the main difficulty with travelling in Tajikistan. Drivers tried to persuade us to go with them, but if they did not have enough passengers it might be hours before they actually left. Travelling up the valleys in the Pamir region was a hit-and-miss affair, and I was often not sure whether I would reach my destination at all. Thank goodness for my guides on the trips I made. I am not at all sure how I would have negotiated with the minivan drivers without them. We found some other foreigners who wanted to go in the same direction as us, an Italian, two French and a German. That made six including us, so, rather than wait around, we decided to split the cost of the seventh, empty place among us. But by the time we set off, it was nearly lunchtime, so the driver decided to stop at a small eatery close to the bank of the Panj, just short of the turnoff for the Bartang Valley. It was an attractive spot, although we were plagued by midges. I ate some greasy samsas (samosas), washed down with green tea. When the bill came it was embarrassingly little.

But my fellow travellers began to have second thoughts about their destination. I wanted to go only a short distance up the Bartang, and then to set off hiking up the tributary Geisev Valley. They decided they wanted to go further up the Bartang, but our driver said that, for his little van, the road further up was too rough. They decided to try to find a four-wheel drive in Rushan, a small town just beyond the Bartang turnoff. Thankfully, our driver agreed to drop them there, and then continue up to Geisev with my guide and me. We left them haggling with the owner of a four-wheel drive. So we set off up the road to Geisev, along a fast moving river flanked by hills. We passed through the pretty little village of Yemts, and stopped by a beautiful lake to shelter from the afternoon heat.

Cable car, Bartang Valley

When we reached the beginning of the Geisev Valley, I got a little bit of a surprise. I had been expecting a suspension bridge across the Bartang; the guidebook said there was a suspension bridge. Indeed, there had been a suspension bridge, but it had been washed away. Now there was just a little cable car. More precisely, there was a little metal box, painted in the colours of the Tajikistan flag, and open on one side, there being no door, which had to be manually winched across by furiously turning a handle on the inside of the box. My guide volunteered to turn the handle. We were joined by a solo Israeli traveller. So while she and I crouched opposite the open space above the raging torrent beneath us, the guide turned the handle for all he was worth, and steadily we made it across. How refreshing it can be to be in a country where there are no health and safety inspectors.

After a couple of hours hiking up the valley, the grey slate slopes gave way to a lusher, greener landscape. And suddenly there was a man, tanned by the sun, his hands rough and gnarled from hard work. Good evening, welcome, he said, beaming and speaking passable English. He was from the first of the three little hamlets that stretch out along the Geisev, just clusters of four or five houses, as well as out buildings for animals and storage. He would be our host for the next two nights. As we relaxed with copious cups of green tea, women worked at the outdoor hearth preparing our simple supper. They produced almost all their own food here. Not only did they bake their own bread in a stone oven, but they milled the flour themselves, from wheat they grew in their own small plots. In the morning, we ate eggs from their own chickens. This was something close to subsistence living, although their incomes were now supplemented by foreigners like me staying with them.

At home in the Geisev Valley

In this little hamlet, they were a family group, all relatives living in a cluster of houses, sharing the one hearth, living as a small, contained community. One traditional Pamiri house was for guests. My guide and I slept there that night, but our host told us that only a couple of days before there had been a wedding, and the place had been filled beyond capacity with more than 100 guests. It got chilly at night up there in the mountains, and I was grateful for the heavy eiderdown. But a couple of the children slept outside, on a kind of terrace at the entrance to their home. The house had a small solar panel on the roof, which powered an electric light. Drinking water came from a spring a few minutes walk away. As in all the mountain villages, the toilets were sheds with deep holes in the ground some distance from the houses.

Our host told us that the people who lived in the Geisev valley now were relative newcomers, their forebears having arrived only a century or so before. The people who had lived their previously had fled invaders from Afghanistan in the 19th century. The valley is fertile, but life must always have been hard. In the modern world, it is difficult to see how it could be sustainable. Children have to make the trek down to Yemts to go to school. The older ones have to board in Rushan. I met a teenage girl from one of the villages further up the valley. She spoke excellent English. She lived in Yemts, and was just visiting relatives. Our host told me that, like so many from Tajikistan, he had two brothers away working in Russia.

Tourism offers many opportunities. Our host was clearly counting on this. He had picked up English from talking with visitors to his valley, he told me. His main concern was to get a new bridge across the Bartang. The cable car was of limited use. If it were on the wrong side when someone wanted to use it, the alternative option was a little chair that could be used to pull yourself across the river. He often did that, he told us. Others would surely demur. It looked terrifying to me. And what if both were on the wrong side? There was no mobile phone signal in Geisev, so there was no chance of phoning someone to tell them. Only a few dozen people live in the Geisev Valley, so I could imagine building a new bridge would not be a priority for the local government.

The Geisev Valley

The valley is gorgeous. A meandering turquoise stream, interspersed with placid lakes surrounded by damp greenery and wild flowers, amid the rising shingle slopes, topped by snow-clad peaks. The next day we walked slowly up the valley, pausing to eat the soup, bread, yogurt and jam offered in one of the other hamlets, and to watch as an elderly man broke up dried wood to fire the bread oven.

Testing the water, Geisev Valley

Another journey, this time up the Shokh Dara valley, began in the same way, trying to find a shared taxi that would take us the first part of the way. This time my guide was a 19-year old girl doing an internship with the information centre in Khorog. I was her first client, and this was her first tour. Again, I would have been lost without her as she negotiated with the various minivan drivers. One said he was going our way, but then disappeared. We waited uncertainly, not knowing whether he would come back. Eventually we gave up and joined a van that was going part of our way, as far as the village of Roshtkala. The driver promised us he would find us a vehicle to take us the remainder of the way. But when we reached Roshtkala, there seemed to be no one headed further up the valley. We waited. An elderly man told us his son was coming, and we could go with them. Still we waited.

And then a rickety old car, packed with people and luggage pulled up. The driver was full of spirit and dressed in what looked to me like pyjamas. He assured us there was room for us too. Somehow we squashed in, my guide squeezed on to the front passenger seat together with a young man. I felt sorry for her. She suffered horribly from car sicknesses as we lurched around the bendy river valley. She and one other passenger walked the first couple of hundred metres out of the village, in case the police stopped our massively overloaded vehicle. The driver, we soon realised, was very drunk. She could smell it on his breath. He was also exhausted. This was the last leg of a journey all the way from Dushanbe. How his car had made it so far, over rough mountain roads, was a mystery, it was such a rickety old wreck. It seemed to wheeze along, always on the brink of giving up. But the passengers were in high spirits, laughing and joking all the way. At one point, as the driver seemed about to fall asleep, one of the ladies insisted that we stop so that he could splash some water in his face. And then we had arrived. The car stopped in front of an old bus, now without wheels, that had been turned into a local shop. Perhaps this bus had once carried passengers up and down the valley, at a time when the country had functioned a lot better than it does now.

A Village shop, Shokh Dara Valley

We set off hiking up the valley, stopping at houses along the way to ask for directions. Invariably we were invited in for tea, but we declined. We wanted to make it to our homestay before dark. One lady told her son, a boy of no more than seven or eight, to show us the way. Silently he led us, frequently stopping to enable us to catch up. Close to the top, we reached the simple Pamiri house where we would spend the night. My guide had been fasting for Ramadan, and, although she had drunk water that day, breaking her fast, she was drained of energy. The daughter of our host had been on a tourism course in Khorog, and she wanted to work as a guide. But her lack of English let her down.

The next morning we set off early back down to the village, in the hope of finding transport back to Khorog, or at least to Roshtkala. Our host, who also had a shop in the village, asked around to see if anyone would be making the journey. And then suddenly, bumping round the bend, came a minivan driven by the man we had given up on in Khorog the previous day. Gratefully, we climbed in. Not long before Khorog, he told us he was going to take a detour to visit the house of his sister. What to do? This was quite normal in the Pamir region, my guide told me. So we left the road and bumped along a dirt track to his sister's house. We were invited to drink tea and eat bread and thick cream while the driver visited his relatives. Then, after half an hour or so, he was back, and off we went again. I found myself wondering how it would be if in Europe a bus driver were to take a detour and invite his passengers in for tea?

A Beautiful Bouquet: The Pamirs

I arrived in the Pamir region by road along the Panj River, the headstream of the Amu Darya, otherwise known as the Oxus, the greatest of Central Asia’s rivers. For earlier travellers, the Oxus was a river almost of legend. Peter Hopkirk describes in his excellent book, The Great Game, about the British-Russian rivalry in Central Asia in the 19th century, the journey of a party led by William Moorcroft, a veterinary surgeon with the British East India Company, to Bukhara, in 1824-1825. When they reached the banks of the Oxus, after a journey of many months, they were the first Englishmen ever to set foot there. For me it was a journey of a few hours by jeep along a rough road from Dushanbe.

It is a splendid journey, along the fast-moving river, hemmed in by the narrow gorge, the rocks rising sheer above us, and then opening out into fertile valleys, looking across at the mud-brick houses on the Afghan side, the lush fields, children playing in the river shallows. I reached Khorog, the principal town of the Pamir region of Gorno-Badakhshan, in the evening. It was very dark, with only a few dim lights. I felt quite lost. Thankfully, I had the phone number of a brother of someone back in London.

Gorno-Badakhsan accounts for nearly half of Tajikistan’s territory, but only 3 per cent of its population. It is a remote, mountainous region, which had few visitors until quite recently. Since Soviet times, its closeness to Afghanistan meant it was a closed area, and foreigners still need a special pass in order to go there. Its remoteness had for thousands of years protected it and its people from outside influence. Its people speak a medley of languages, they have a unique culture and religious traditions. But in the late 19th century, the region caught the covetous eyes of the great powers vying for control in the region, Russia and Britain. These two empires had been eying each other nervously across the expanses of Central Asia for decades. The fear of Russian encroachment towards India had impelled the British into disastrous invasions of Afghanistan.

Pamiri shrines, Bartang Valley and Wakhan Valley

By the end of the 19th century, it was the mountain passes leading into India through the northwest frontier that most worried the British authorities in Delhi. British and Russian expeditions spent months at a time mapping the region. In 1889, a young British officer, Francis Younghusband, met and dined with the Russian Captain Gromchevsky and a party of Cossacks. Gromchevsky was a generous host, and as the vodka flowed, he expounded on his confidence that before long Russia would invade India. But the two parted as friends. On a later expedition, in 1891, Younghusband met a large party of Cossacks led by a Colonel Yanov. Again, they got on famously, and Younghusband was impressed by the lavishness of the Russian hospitality. However, the Englishman was disturbed to be told that the Russians claimed the whole Pamir region as their own, including territory that the British considered to be Afghan or Chinese, as well as territory they considered to be within their own sphere. Again they parted as friends, even when three days later the Russian returned and told Younghusband he had been ordered to leave Russian territory. Yanov expressed his embarrassment at having to carry out such a disagreeable order, and Younghusband assured him he bore him no personal grudge. As with many episodes in the Great Game, British and Russian adversaries did not let their rivalry get in the way of fellowship and mutual respect.

The incident with Colonel Yanov prompted the British to adopt a more assertive stance, issuing a strong protest to St. Petersburg and moving up forces to bring local rulers to heal. The British were particularly concerned about a narrow tongue of territory between Afghanistan and China, the so-called Pamir Gap, in the Wakhan valley, which was not claimed by any state. If the Russians took this, it would bring them to the very gateway of British India. The British tried to persuade both China and Afghanistan to stake their claim to the territory. Finally, in 1895, an agreement was reached with Moscow which gave the bulk of the Pamir region to Russia, while the Pamir Gap went to Afghanistan. To this day it juts out from Afghanistan to the Chinese border, forming a wedge between Tajikistan and Pakistan. The agreement meant that at no point did Russia and British India share a common frontier. For the British it meant that a definitive limit had been placed on Russia’s advance towards India.

But when the British and the Russians carved up the Pamir region, no one thought to consider the people who actually lived there. The Pamiris are a distinct people. They speak a variety of related languages, a branch of the wider Iranian language group. These languages are quite distinct from Tajik, which is a variant of Persian, a separate branch of the Iranian language tree. In Gorno-Badakhshan, the valleys leading up to the high Pamir plateau have their own languages and dialects. They are not all mutually intelligible. Shugni, spoken in Khorog, is quite different from Wakhi, spoken in the Wakhan Valley. Apart from Gorno-Badakhshan, in Tajikistan, Pamiris also live across the Panj, in Afghan Badakhshan, as well as smaller numbers in adjacent regions of Pakistan and China. None of the Pamiri languages are spoken by more than a few tens of thousands of people, and some by only a few thousand. All are endangered. Pamiris in both Tajikistan and Afghanistan mostly also speak Tajik. Travelling in the Wakhan Valley, my Shugni-speaking driver communicated with the locals in Tajik.

I asked a Pamiri in Khorog whether he was not worried about the future of the Pamir languages, with their small numbers of speakers, that some of them might before long disappear? In a world of satellite television (even houses in the most remote mountain villages I visited have satellite dishes), internet and international travel, what chance would such small languages have? Might it not perhaps be better to standardise them, to sacrifice some of the diversity in an attempt to preserve at least something, as had been done in several other places? Not at all, he said. In their diversity, the Pamiri languages are like a beautiful bouquet. He described efforts to agree on an alphabet for Shugni, to give it a more secure future as a written language. In Afghanistan, he said, some were already writing Shugni in the Persian alphabet. But in Tajikistan, few Shugni speakers were familiar with that, being used to reading and writing Russian and Tajik in Cyrillic. He proposed that all should agree to write Shugni in the Latin alphabet, with which many in both Tajikistan and Afghanistan were already familiar.

Since the end of the Soviet Union, the position of Pamiris within Tajikistan has been thorny. During Tajikistan’s civil war in the 1990s, most Pamiris supported the United Tajik Opposition. In 1992, Gorno-Badakhshan declared independence, later rescinded. The Pamiri region was placed under blockade by government forces, and Pamiris in Dushanbe and other parts of Tajikistan were among groups targeted in massacres and ethnic cleansing by pro-government supporters. Resentment, to a greater or lesser degree, remains widespread. More than once during my stay I heard Pamiris objecting to the fact that, in the government offices in Khorog, people were required to speak Tajik, even though they were almost all Pamiris. A common refrain among Pamiris is that they would like the notional autonomy of Gorno-Badakhshan to be real, in practice.

The tensions between Pamiris and the Tajikistan authorities exploded again one year before my visit, in July 2012. A friend in Khorog sent me anguished emails about the situation, about how the town had been cut off by government forces, whose snipers had been shooting into the town from the surrounding hills. The fighting was sparked by the stabbing in Iskhashim, a small town south of Khorog, of Abdullo Nazarov, the head in Gorno-Badakhshan of the GKNB, the successor of the KGB in Tajikistan. Nazarov was brought to Khorog, where he died a few hours later. Tajikistan’s military were brought in to try to arrest those accused of the killing, above all Tolib Ayombekov, who had been a leader of the opposition forces in Gorno-Badakhshan during the civil war.

The civil war was brought to an end by a UN-sponsored agreement in 1997, with Russia standing behind it. Opposition figures were brought into government. Ayombekov became a local head of the border agency. Over subsequent years, such opposition figures were sidelined and removed, but not in Gorno-Badakhshan. Some saw the crackdown in 2012 as an overdue settling of accounts, seeing the murder of Nazarov as just an excuse for an operation that had been planned in advance. Conspiracy theories abounded in Khorog. Why, people asked, was there a delay in taking Nazorov to hospital? Some told me that Nazarov’s death was due to a dispute over drug smuggling. Tajikistan is one of the principal conduits for drugs being trafficked out of Afghanistan. The authorities in Dushanbe had also accused Ayombekov of involvement.

The clashes reportedly left dozens dead, including many soldiers. I was told by people who were there that local people, women prominently among them, had demonstrated in the streets, hampering the military operation. The government called off the operation. The following month, Ayombekov surrendered, and was placed under house arrest, although he continued to move freely around Khorog. Announcing his surrender, which came shortly before a visit to Khorog by President Emomalii Rahmon, Ayombekov made complimentary statements about the benefits the president had brought to Gorno-Badakhshan, fuelling speculation about a deal.

During my visit, Khorog appeared calm and normal, although I was told that tension continued to simmer beneath the surface. But Pamiris themselves are divided about their feelings towards Tajikistan. Some, notably those I had met abroad, in the diaspora, appeared wholly negative towards a country with which they did not identify at all. But for many more, for good or ill, Tajikistan is their country, and they have to make the most of it. A teacher in Khorog, notwithstanding his gripes about the position of Pamiris, told me he could not imagine Gorno-Badakhshan outside of Tajikistan. A young man now living in Dushanbe, back in Khorog on a visit to his home town, expressed annoyance at people, especially those who lived comfortably abroad, who created difficulties for their fellow Pamiris, including those living in Dushanbe, with their opposition to life in Tajikistan. For him it was natural that people working in the government offices in Khorog should have to speak Tajik, the official language of the state.

Feeling neglected by the distant, resented government in Dushanbe, Pamiris have relied on the Aga Khan, the leader of the Ismaili branch of Shia Islam to which most Pamiris adhere (most Tajiks, by contrast, are Sunni). Like many people from Britain, I had known of the Aga Khan principally as a fabulously wealthy racehorse owner. Among Pamiris he is revered, frequently referred to as His Highness Aga Khan IV. His Aga Khan Foundation has projects in different parts of Tajikistan, but it is his own people, the Ismaili Shias, that have been the greatest beneficiaries. Thanks to his assistance, they staved off hunger under the government blockade during the civil war. He established a branch of the Central Asian University in Khorog, which among other things offers courses in tourism. Pamiri students have received grants enabling them to study abroad. In almost every Pamiri house I visited a portrait of the Aga Khan was prominently displayed. In the village of Langar, on the Tajikistan side of the Wakhan Valley, the local Khalifa, the religious leader of the village, pointed out to me a smart little building which he told me had been specially built for the visit of the Aga Khan.

A Pamiri house, Bartang Valley

The Pamiris have esoteric religious practices. There are no mosques as such, but rather meeting houses, where people meet to pray. Sometimes these are in peoples’ private homes. In Langar, I was taken to the meeting house by the Khalifa, who was also the owner of the guesthouse where I spent the night. Colourfully painted on the outside, its interior was laid out like a traditional Pamiri house of the sort I stayed in in several homestays in the mountain villages. These apparently simple houses have raised, carpet-covered platforms around a central square. There is usually no furniture, people sitting and eating on the platforms. At night thin mattresses and eiderdowns are laid out for sleeping.

Apart from a doorway, light comes only through a skylight in the centre of the ceiling. But the layout of these houses is full of religious symbolism. My guide when I went trekking in the Bartang Valley explained it to me before bedtime in the Pamiri House where we stayed. Five pillars represent the family of Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed, and, for Shias, the first Imam. One represents Mohammed himself, a second is for his daughter and Ali’s wife, Fatima, a third is for Ali, and the other two are for their sons, Hassan and Hussein. The pillars are also said to represent the five pillars, or principles, of Islam. Some suggest they may even pre-date the Pamiris’ conversion to Islam and go back to the five key deities of the Zoroastrian faith. In the meeting house in Langar, the pillars were also decorated with the pagan symbol of the sun, a symbol I also saw in the Pamiri house in the Bartang Valley, on the cross beam between the Hassan and Hussein pillars. The beams across the ceiling represent the first seven Imams of Ismailism (Ismailis differ from other Shias in that they recognise Ismail Ibn Jafal as the seventh Imam, and are also known as Seveners) and the six prophets revered in Islam, including Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus, as well as Mohammed.

Pamiri religious practices are unorthodox in other ways, in addition to the pagan symbols in their houses. Contrary to the usual Moslem prohibition on human likenesses being displayed in mosques, the meeting house in Langar contained representation of Imam Ali and the Aga Khan. Then there are the roadside shrines decked out with huge ibex horns. The first I saw of these was in the Bartang Valley. The driver of the minivan I and my guide had hired to drive us asked if we could stop a little while so he could pray. I hung back while the two of them carried out their devotions, and then had a look. Like others I saw later in the Wakhan Valley, it was a walled enclosure, with ibex horns sitting atop the walls. Within was a small, simple building at the base of a rock face, with pictures of Ali and the Aga Khan above the entrance. Inside the building was a kind of grotto, with holes in the rock where offerings had been left. As with other shrines in the Pamir region, the holes in the rock must have had some spiritual significance to the people, which had somehow come to be overlaid with Islam, a very thin veneer for the folk religion of the people who went there.

In Langar, the Khalifa demonstrated the kind of music he played during the prayer meetings, accompanying his singing with a stringed instrument. He told me that in Pamiri meeting houses, men and women prayed together, not separately as is usual in most Moslem countries. When I pointed out how unusual it was that there were pictures of people in a Moslem place of prayer, he did not appear to know what I was getting at. He was flexible about his religion. Of all the places I stayed in throughout my travels in Gorno-Badakhshan, his was the only house where I was offered alcohol. The Khalifa drank it himself. Travelling back to Dushanbe, a couple of Pamiris returning to the capital after a summer holiday in their home region told me that the religious practices of the Pamiris were frowned upon by other Ismaili Shias. They urged me to go to the Ismaili centre in Dushanbe to get a better impression.

Tourism is just beginning to take off in Gorno-Badakhshan, visitors drawn to the unspoiled beauty of the mountain landscapes. For now it is small-scale and still rather rough and ready. But guest houses and homestays are starting to proliferate, as well as travel agencies. Barring further instability like that seen in 2012, further development of the tourism industry seems assured. Young Pamiris learn English, as well as other European languages, looking for careers as guides. The money is very good by local standards. The question is whether the distinctiveness of Pamiri culture can survive the onslaught of modernisation and rising prosperity? Will not people from other parts of Tajikistan be drawn in by the opportunities presented by the newly buoyant tourism? The isolation that has protected the Pamiris for so long is almost certainly coming to an end.

Dushanbe and the Tajik heritage

Arriving at Dushanbe airport, I was prepared for an ordeal. I had read the blogs of other travellers. The travel agency that had wanted to charge 70 Dollars to help me get through the airport formalities had warned me that it would be difficult and time-consuming without them. My friend from Tajikistan had told me to expect chaos and confusion, and officials seeking bribes to allow me through. I was ready for it to take hours. But the reality turned out to be not too bad. The main problem was that the terminal building was too small, so that it was difficult to form orderly queues. I filled in the immigration form, and waited patiently. When I got to the passport control desk, the police were polite, spoke English, and I was through fairly quickly. Picking up my luggage, I nervously went through customs, but the officials were too busy looking through the things of some homebound Tajiks. I was through. And there was the man with the sign with my name on it, ready to take me to my comfortable, if rather over-priced guesthouse. It had all gone well.

Ismail Samani monument, Dushanbe

Like other Central Asian capitals, Dushanbe has been planted with monuments to heroes of the past, designed to buttress the sense of nationhood for a new country. Most prominent is Ismail Samani, on the spot where a statue of Lenin once stood. Modern Tajikistan traces its origins to the Persian Samanid Empire of the 9th and 10th centuries, whose capital was in Bukhara, nowadays in neighbouring Uzbekistan. The country’s currency, the Somoni, is named after the great medieval ruler. Standing out among the mainly Turkic peoples of former Soviet Central Asia, the Tajiks speak a variant of Persian, their origins stretching back to the heyday of medieval Persian dominion in the region, before the Turkic migrations that altered the ethnic make-up of Central Asia. In a nearby park is a similarly extravagant and kitsch monument to Rudaki, the great medieval Persian poet who was patronised by the Samanid rulers.

Rudaki monument, Dushanbe

The importance of Ismail Samani and Rudaki for Tajikistan indicates an incongruity between Tajik history and the modern state. Its greatest historical and cultural figures were Persian, and their capital was a city that is not part of modern Tajikistan. The great centres of Tajik culture and history, Bukhara and Samarkand, are next door in Uzbekistan. This injustice, in Tajik eyes, was also on display at the brand new National Museum of Tajikistan, which had opened only the month before my visit. An inscription next to a historical map lamented the loss. Dushanbe had been hardly more than a village a century earlier, notable only for its weekly market. It could not substitute for the loss of the finest cities in central Asia, among the greatest historical centres of culture and learning in the Islamic world. Even today, Bukhara and Samarkand are still largely Tajik speaking.

A few weeks later, I spent an evening with a father and son at my local chaikhana (eatery) in Samarkand, drinking green tea and eating soup and shashlyk. They were Tajik, the son told me. Were they content that their city was in Uzbekistan, I asked? We are not interested in politics, replied the father. The son looked awkward. In Tajikistan, people consider Samarkand should be part of their country, I persisted. The father dismissed the notion with an extravagant gesture. Yet it is not only Tajikistan that claims the heritage of Samarkand and Bukhara. Visiting Bukhara, I strolled through the old town in the company of a couple of Iranian visitors. They saw Persian influence and architecture all around. They were keen to visit the Ismail Samani mausoleum. For them, the Samanids were a Persian dynasty, which had revived Persian culture after the rolling back of the Arab conquerors. The Ismail Samani mausoleum was an important testament to the former greatness of Persia. The mausoleum itself, built at the beginning of the tenth century, is modest in size, but exquisite in the simplicity of its design.

Ismail Samani mausoleum, Bukhara

In the Soviet Union, new national republics were carved out of a region where identity had never been based on ethnicity. Tajikistan was initially a mere autonomous republic of Uzbekistan. In 1929 it was granted the status of a full republic, but without Samarkand and Bukhara. In the last years of the Soviet Union, appeals were made to Moscow to put right this historical grievance, but to no avail. The way the Soviets divided up the region was full of anomalies. For sure, carving out national states in a part of the world where different peoples lived cheek by jowl, and where clean ethnic boundaries did not exist, was bound to be messy. But the results appeared more than haphazard, as if the Soviet cartographers had deliberately left chunks of population stranded in the republics of other nations. Thus while Tajik-speaking Bukhara and Samarkand went to Uzbekistan, Uzbek-majority Khujand, in the Fergana Valley, went to Tajikistan. Perhaps it was thought that it would not matter, as they would all be part of the great, brotherly Soviet Union. But for the independent states of post-Soviet Central Asia the Soviet carve up stored up mountains of bitterness. For many Tajiks, the territorial loss is a lasting wound.