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.
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.
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.
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.
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