A few days in Tashkent

Travelling up from Khujand to Tashkent proved quite straightforward. A taxi up to the border, and then a bus on to the Uzbek capital. There was a bit of a wait at the frontier. I was ultra-careful filling in the customs declaration, in two copies, before entering Uzbekistan. I had been given to believe that I should not miss off anything. I carefully listed the different kinds of pills I had – just the usual things that travellers carry, painkillers, pills for upset stomachs; also reading material, including a couple of magazines, laptop, ipod, cameras, they all got listed with their estimated values. Of course, the customs official did not know English, and I struggled to mime each of the items on the list. He was plainly irritated that I had gone into such unnecessary detail.

Next I had to change some money and find transport up to Tashkent. As I left the border post, taxi drivers descended on me, offering to take me for large sums of dollars, and assuring me there were no buses for Tashkent. But there was a bus stop not fifty metres away, sitting on the long straight main road that led away over the dusty plain towards Tashkent. At the bus stop there was also a shop, where a jolly lady exchanged some of my dollars for Soms, and told me that buses went by all the time. This was my first experience with Uzbek money. Thick wads of tatty low-value notes (there are no high-value notes), bound up with elastic bands, stuffed in envelopes. Uzbekistan is one of few countries left where there is still a black market in currency, and the rate is sufficiently better than the official rate to make changing money at official outlets highly unappealing. Soon a bus pulled up. What a difference from Tajikistan. Proper public transport. A normal, comfortable, air-conditioned bus.

Tashkent was my base during my stay in Uzbekistan. From there I set out westwards for Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva, and then eastwards to the Fergana Valley. A big sprawling city, baking hot in summer, for a short visit Tashkent does not have much to charm. The main centre of Russian Turkestan from its conquest by the Tsarist Empire in 1865, Tashkent has two faces, a modern city with monumental squares and gardens, and an older, traditional city, with dusty streets and plain walls concealing the shady courtyards and family lives behind them. It still contains a significant Russian population.

Timur, Tashkent

Much of the city was destroyed by an earthquake in 1966. In recent years, the authoritarian President, Islam Karimov, in power for more than 20 years, since before the end of the Soviet Union, has overseen the remodelling of the city centre, a testament to his own aggrandisement, with its parks, monuments and ornamental gardens. When I was there, in baking summer temperatures up into the mid-40s, it all seemed rather empty and sterile. Elsewhere, in the bazaars and the popular restaurant streets, the city was bustling, but not here in the great new centre of the capital. The central Amir Timur Square is dominated by a statue of Timur, or Tamarlane, where one of Marx had stood until 1993, and before him Stalin. Timur, whose capital was at Samarkand, is now a national hero in Uzbekistan. The square had been shaded by old plane trees until they were chopped down on Karimov’s order in 2010. Before then, apparently, old men had sat in the shade of the trees, playing chess. It must have been a cooler, pleasanter and altogether more human place. Now Timur sits alone astride his horse on the parched square, with just a few visitors briefly braving the heat to take a few snaps.

I was staying close to the sprawling Chorsu Bazaar. In among the vast galleries, filled with traders selling all kinds of fruit and vegetables, herbs and spices, I was after a very particular commodity, cash. In Tashkent, the Chorsu Bazaar was the place to buy Uzbekistan currency from black market traders. I changed money in other towns in Uzbekistan, but I found it particularly nerve-wracking in Tashkent. I had read online about how and where to change money, including official websites with dire warnings that changing money on the black market was illegal, and that stiff penalties could result if caught. What made the exercise difficult in Tashkent was the pervasive presence of policemen, in their green uniforms and little peeked caps. A police officer stood at each entrance of every metro station; more of them often loitered inside. In the market, they were all over the place, strolling around.

The money changers were not hard to spot: men holding carrier bags homed in on foreigners. The transaction was not all that speedy. I had been told what the going rate should be, and usually I had to haggle briefly to get it. But the most time-consuming part was counting the great bundles of cash. Receiving wads of 100 1,000 Som notes, tied up in elastic bands, I usually counted one pile, and if it was OK, accepted the rest without counting. The amount I received was not always exactly right, a 1,000 or two either way. But more or less, it was correct. But as I counted, I was always worried that a policeman might home into view at any moment. A couple of times, as I emerged from Chorsu metro station, a money changer was there, offering me a rate, in full view of the policeman standing over the entrance. I didn’t know, but I couldn’t help wondering whether it were not some kind of entrapment, enticing me to break the rules and pay the price. I declined.

I had never before been in a place where the police were so omnipresent as Tashkent. They no longer harass foreign visitors as I had read they once did. Tourism is now encouraged. In Uzbekistan foreigners may only stay in registered hotels or guest houses, and must receive a small slip of paper at each place to prove it. As required, I carried them with me all the time. If asked, you have to be able to produce a slip for each night since you arrived in the country. And you have to present them at the airport on departure. I was only once asked to show my documents by police, at a desk inside a metro station, where they also looked through my small rucksack. They were polite and correct. But still, the sense of being always under surveillance and control was unsettling. It is a mark of the paranoia of the regime, its insecurity and fear of its own people, heightened since the Andijan massacre in 2005, when Uzbek troops fired on protesting crowds. I was only in Uzbekistan for three weeks. For the people who live there the heavy police presence is a constant reminder of the limits of freedom in their country.

Not far from the Chorsu Bazaar, by the circus, is the national food restaurant, a temple to Central Asian cooking. Entering the great big hall of a place, you pass huge cauldrons filled with different national dishes. Outside, shashlik sizzles on charcoal stoves. Gathered around a large table, a couple of dozen ladies in white overalls prepare various dishes, laughing and joking all the while. While in Tashkent, I ate there every day.

Barakhan Medressa, Tashkent

The most important surviving historical site in Tashkent is the Khast Imam complex, the centre of Uzbekistan’s Islamic community. Dominating the complex is the vast Hazrat Imam mosque, built in 2007 at the initiative of President Karimov, and flanked by two towering 54-metre minarets. But the complex also includes important historical buildings, now restored, including the 16th century Barakhan Medressa. The smaller Muyi Muborak Medressa, also built in the 16th century, is named after the ‘sacred hair’ of the Prophet Muhammad, which it is said to contain. It also houses a library of rare manuscripts, most notable of which is the 7th century Uthman Koran, believed to have belonged to Islam’s third Caliph, and to be the oldest Koran in the world. The enormous tome may have been brought to Samarkand by Timur, before being carted off to St. Petersburg by the region’s Russian conquerors. Lenin had it sent it back to Tashkent as a gesture of goodwill.

Travels in northern Tajikistan

I travelled back from Khorog to Dushanbe by the southern route, following the Panj river along the border with Afghanistan before turning north through the Kulyabi region, home region of Tajikistan President Emomali Rakhmon. The Kulyabis had emerged victorious in the civil war of the 1990s, which was more than anything a war among regional clans for power. How often did I hear from Pamiris, who were on the losing side, the resentment of the power of the Kulyabis, who had taken the fruits of their victory in jobs and opportunities? It was a long, but pleasant journey. Among the six other passengers were two English-speaking Pamiris, one of whom turned out to be the nephew of a Pamiri friend in London. We stopped, for lunch in Kala-i-Kum, a quite palatable plov (pilaf), known here as osh, and then again in the afternoon, when we gorged ourselves on juicy melons.

Istaravshan old town

After a day in Dushanbe, doing laundry, eating Indian food and drinking cappuccinos, I set off to northern Tajikistan, from where I would cross into Uzbekistan. The journey took me over mountains and then down into the Fergana Valley, where Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan meet. My first stop was a night in Istaravshan. I stopped there because it is said to have the best preserved old town in Tajikistan, a taste of what was to come during my travels in Uzbekistan, but without tourists. First of all I looked for a hotel. What I found was pretty awful; a basic room with no running water. The owner brought me a bowl of hot water to wash. Istaravshan has a vibrant market, as well as some fine historic buildings. The sprawling old town is much like so many in the Muslim world, dusty streets with blank windowless walls, hiding the life within, the courtyards, gardens, families. For the outsider strolling along these streets, there is little to see.

Abdullatif Sultan Medressa, Istaravshan

At the Hazrat-i-Shah mosque I saw for the first time the wooden pillars and bright, intricately painted ceilings that I would see in mosques around the region, in Khujand, Khiva, Kokand and Andijan. The beautiful designs appear to represent Islam as a joyful religion, so different from the harsh austerity that often appears to epitomise Islam in much of today’s world. As worshippers poured out of the mosque after prayers, one of them stopped to talk to me. He told me how Istaravshan was the most historical town in Tajikistan, with more important monuments than nearby, larger Khujand. He pointed out the monumental gate on the nearby hill, overlooking and dominating the town. The gate had only been built a decade before, to mark two and a half millennia since the town’s founding. The hill is the site of an ancient Sogdian fortress, which was stormed by Alexander the Great. Alexander named the city Cyropol. In the midst of the old town is the 15th century Abdullatif Sultan Medressa. Well restored, the high blue-domed building, covered with intricate mosaics, is typical of the region. Still a working medressa, there was no one about as I wandered around.

From Istaravshan, I headed north on the short journey to Khujand. This is Tajikistan’s second city, and its most developed and most prosperous. My hotel had a good bathroom and internet access. Known as Leninabad during the Soviet period, much of Tajikistan’s Soviet-era elite came from here, although the city has an Uzbek majority. It also has a reputation as a centre of intellectual life.

Sheikh Massal as-Din Mosque, Khujand

During my stay, Khujand was impossibly hot, in the mid-40s. Walking outside in the heat of the afternoon was almost unbearable. Khujand is an old city. It is the site of Cyropolis, founded by Cyrus the Great of Persia, and of Alexandria Eschate, the easternmost outpost of Alexander the Great’s empire. At the heart of the city are the remains of the earthen walls of the tenth-century citadel. At the other end of the town centre is an impressive bazaar, with a vast 1950s hall fronted by an ornate arch whose style echoes that of numerous medressas in the region, an apparent attempt to adapt the religious architectural heritage to the secular communist state. Across a wide open, sun-drenched piazza is a mosque, mausoleum and medressa complex, in the process of being expanded; the religious heritage is making a comeback. Again I was struck by the beautifully carved wooden pillars and the brightly painted ceilings.

As I struggled on through the fearsome heat, to my great surprise I came across a statue of a she-wolf suckling two little boys, Romulus and Remus surely. But what could they be doing in Khujand. I later read that a painting of the wolf and children had been found at an archaeological site near Istaravshan, with a Latin inscription, apparently a link with the classical past going back to Alexander the Great’s conquest.

The Wakhan Valley and Eastern Pamir

Despite its remoteness, the impressive remains of ancient fortresses strung out along the Wakhan Valley suggest that it had once been important, worth holding, worth defending. By the late 19th century, this strip of land jutting out between the Pamir mountains and the Hindu Kush had assumed strategic importance in the last phase of the Great Game between the Russian and British Empires. The agreement they reached divided the valley, so that nowadays its northern slopes are in Tajikistan, while the southern side is in Afghanistan. The river that forms the border between the two countries broadens out in this wide valley, its shifting streams meandering around islands in the middle. It is a sparsely populated region, most of its people on both sides of the border speaking Wakhi, one of the Pamiri languages.

I started my journey along the Wakhan Valley in Iskashim, a small town on the Panj river. There was a particularly good guesthouse there, by the standards of the region. It was simple, the rooms very basic (one of the other guests complained of bed bugs, which thankfully I was spared). The best thing was that there were nice, modern bathrooms, with clean showers and running water all day, with good water pressure. Also the food was good. There were a dozen or so guests the night I spent there. We sat and chatted after dinner, over green tea. Many were adventurous souls. A couple of teenage Americans had cycled from Bishkek, in Kyrgyzstan, travelling the Pamir Highway from Osh, and then down the Wakhan. Their hair was long and unkempt, their faces burned and ruddy from the sun. But they were very cheerful. They were planning to cross over into Afghanistan. Others too were planning to cross the border. That part of northern Afghanistan, the Wakhan Valley and Badakhshan, was reckoned to be pretty safe, free from Taliban.

Just up the road from Iskashim there is a bridge across the river, an official border crossing. I had hoped to make a quick foray across myself. There is a weekly market across the bridge, in the middle of the river, but on the Afghan side. Visitors can go to the market without the need of an Afghan visa, just leaving their passports with the police on the Tajikistan side. Unfortunately the market was closed while I was there. There were lots of rumours as to why. One was that Taliban had been there, unlikely in Tajik-dominated north-east Afghanistan. The more probable explanation was a typhus outbreak. Disappointed, I headed off up the Wakhan.

Khaakha fortress, Wakhan Valley

For this journey I had decided to hire a car and driver for a few days, a nifty little Niva. There were lots of places to stop along the way, and using the Chinese minivans would have been impractical. First stop were the sprawling ruins of Khaakha fortress, thought to date from the third century BC. The much eroded walls and turrets blend in with the brown dust and rock of the hills, but still manage to look impressive, standing on the slopes above the river, looking over to Afghanistan. I had read that soldiers were based there, supposedly to counter drug smugglers, and that visitors should be wary of taking pictures. Travellers in recent years had written of bad experiences, of being shaken down at gunpoint and robbed. But I was all alone as I explored the ancient fortifications. There were signs of recent inhabitation, paths marked out with stones and what looked like it might have been a parade ground. I walked gingerly up to the highest point of the fortress, where there was a small cluster of recent buildings. But they were all empty.

Yamchun fortress, Wakhan Valley

That night we stayed at the home of the guide who had earlier taken me up the Bartang Valley (he was travelling with a group up to Kyrgyzstan). First we went to bathe in the Bibi Fatima hot spring, named after the daughter of Mohammed. Men and women used the spring alternately, in half-hour shifts. A little cave has been built into the rock face, holding the hot spring water which streams down from above. It is said to be popular with women hoping to become pregnant. Nearby is the Yamchun fortress, the best preserved in the region, sitting high above the valley, with splendid views across the Wakhan to the snow-capped Hindu Kush mountains beyond. It is only a short distance across the narrow strip of Afghan territory in the Wakhan to the border with Pakistan.

Across the Wakhan Valley

Back at the homestay, my host, the father of my former guide, pointed to the village across the broad river on the Afghan side, telling me its name, as well as those of other villages up and down the river. The people there speak our language, he told me. I asked if he knew them? Yes, we know them, he replied. Do you go over there and visit them, I asked? No, it is an international frontier. We’d be shot. He explained that when the river was low, they would go down to the banks and shout across to each other. A century ago this had been one community. These people would have traded with each other, married each other and shared each other’s celebrations. But by an agreement between Russia and Britain, about which they were not consulted in the least, an international frontier sliced through their land, cutting them off from each other.

Travelling east along the Wakhan Valley, we stopped at a museum dedicated to the 19th century Ismaili mystic, Mubarak i Wakhani, housed in the sage’s reconstructed home. His tomb is on the hill above. A little further on, above the village of Vrang, is a Buddhist stupa. The 12 year-old who showed me the way up spoke excellent English. Where had he learned to speak so well? In his school, he told me. He could also speak Tajik and Russian, as well as his native Wakhi. As we approached the monument, he showed me how to pick up a handful of pebbles to place there, an example of the easy-going approach to religion among the Muslims of the region. In the rock faces around the site there were numerous hermit caves, now unoccupied.

Continuing along the valley, we passed the remains of another ruined fortress by the bank of the river on the Afghan side. Perhaps Marco Polo looked upon this fortress as he passed that way in the 13th century. Then there was another of the roadside shrines, as usual adorned with the great curling ibex horns, and with rocks placed in the niches, the offerings of passers-by. A little further on I made the steep, strenuous climb up to the fortress of Abrashim Qala, the Silk Fortress. According to legend it had been covered in silk. The views from the fortress across the valley and the mountains beyond are stupendous. As I arrived, a group of children minding some sheep ran to greet me. A couple of boys were very eager to show me the fort. One of them tried to sell me some stones he claimed were rubies. I was often offered rubies by children in the Wakhan Valley. I was once offered one for 20 Somoni, around three Euros. On this occasion, the supposed rubies were not even red, just common rock crystal. The boy seemed slightly crestfallen when I pointed this out. But the Pamir region has been renowned for its rubies since ancient times. We had driven by the Koh-i-Lal ruby mine, near Iskashim.

Our journey up the Wakhan ended with a night in Langar, before we headed up over the 4,344 metre Khargush Pass. Opposite the meeting house in Langar is the mazar (mausoleum) of Shoh Kambari Oftab, who is said to have introduced Ismailism to Langar. It is a simple building, with inscriptions in Persian and a profusion of ibex horns. Afterwards, I drank beer with the Khalifa, the spiritual leader of the village, who spoke a little English, and a few other local men. Especially welcome, because it was unexpected, was the hot shower at the Khalifa’s house. It was a terrible shower. The water pressure was minimal; it was necessary to crouch down as low as possible in the grotty, rusty old bath tub. But it felt wonderful.

Salt lake, Eastern Pamir

After Langar we left the Wakhan Valley and continued up the Pamir river. It was a very different landscape, dry and sparse, with little vegetation. At one point, we passed camels across the river on the Afghan side, watched over by a couple of men. Below the Khargush Pass was a military checkpoint, which we passed without difficulty. And then we were in the uplands of the eastern Pamirs. For me this was one of the most striking landscapes I have seen, very different from the damp fertile valleys of western Pamir, and beautiful in a very different way. Dry, bleached plains, crusted with salt; bare lakes set off against snow-covered peaks, devoid of vegetation except for little clumps of colourful plants that cling on, squeezing whatever little bit of moisture they can out of the parched ground. And a profusion of birdlife.

We crossed over the Pamir Highway, the Soviet-era military road, built in the 1930s, linking Osh, in Kyrgyzstan, with Khorog, via the plateau of Eastern Pamir. Then we reached the village of Bulunkul, a dry, dusty wind-swept little place, a different world from the villages where I had stayed in the Wakhan Valley. Here, many people, men as well as women, covered their faces with scarves, not because of their Islamic faith, but to protect them from the swirling, throat-clogging dust. This is a Tajik-speaking village, and our hosts here were as hospitable as any I visited in Pamir, to the extent of their meagre resources. The supper was simple, but what was most exciting for me was that I was offered yak yoghurt, thick, rich and delicious. There were a couple of buckets of it in the corner of the room where I slept. Unfortunately I did not see any yaks, although my driver assured me they were around.

The climate up here was much different from what I had experienced in western Pamir, the temperature dropping close to zero at night. It was a small house. The family, three generations of them, all stayed in one room, snug and toasty with a wood fire and a television. My driver opted to spend the night with them. I had the other room to myself, and it was cold. This was the one night during my stay in Pamir when I snuggled into my sleeping bag, in addition to the provided eiderdowns piled up on top. It didn’t matter. I went to bed early, and was up at dawn to go for a wander in the beautiful early morning light. Before I went to bed, I sat outside the house and watched a group of village boys play volley ball, cheered on enthusiastically by the girls (cheered is hardly the word; it was more like a joyful screaming, finishing in fits of laughter).

Bulunkul

The village of Bulunkul is set at one end of a wide plain, surrounded by bare brown hills. Walking away across this plain, the dry ground of the village soon gave way to green, marshy land, scattered with reed-surrounded ponds. Little birds with long bills nest in the reeds, diving and swooping around after insects, or, as I approached, holding themselves stationary in mid-air as they shrieked out a loud, harsh warning. I had to choose my path carefully. A wrong turn, and I was quickly surrounded by impassable bog, and had to retrace my steps. The next morning I skirted around the edge of the boggy plain in order to approach the lake at the opposite end from the village. As I came closer, I discovered what was perhaps the reason why the village was at the dry, dusty end of the plain, and not nearer to the water. Close to the lake I endured an attack from some of the most aggressive, determined mosquitos I have encountered. The lake was picturesque, the surrounding hills shimmering in its reflection, and birdlife all around. But it was hard even to raise my hands to take a photo, as swarms of insects immediately attacked the exposed skin.

Leaving Bulunkul, we re-joined the Pamir Highway, following the Gunt Valley back to Khorog. The fast-moving river, surrounded by snow-covered mountains, is more inhabited in its lower reaches. Just before Khorog is a monument to the building of the highway, the first ever vehicle to make the trip.

Gunt Valley

Strung out along the Gunt River, hemmed in by mountains, Khorog was my base during my stay in the Pamirs, from where I set out on my tours of the region, and where I rested in the relative comforts of the modern world, hot showers and flush toilets, internet cafes and ATM machines. I found Khorog a pleasant enough little place. The shady central park, renovated with the help of the Aga Khan Foundation, and overlooking the river, had a pleasant café and was a relaxing place to while away an afternoon. Khorog is the administrative centre of Gorno-Badakhshan. It has government buildings, banks, universities, and hospitals. It also has a rather good little museum. I was given a personal tour by the lady who sold me my entry ticket. Exhibits included the first piano to be brought into the Pamirs, lugged over the mountains by Russian soldiers a century ago for the daughter of the garrison commander. It was the Russians who made Khorog the regional centre it is today. The museum has many old photos of Russian soldiers fraternising with local people.

Unfortunately, I spent some of my time in Khorog visiting a Pamiri friend who had come down with tuberculosis since returning to her home country. The hospital was depressing testimony to the hardships of living in a poor country, squalid, shabby and rather smelly. There was only one lavatory on a floor with several dozen patients, and no shower. Thanks to the Aga Khan Foundation, it had the medicines my friend needed to get better, although she had very little faith in the ability or qualifications of the doctors. The Pamirs are a beautiful region, and no doubt burgeoning tourism will being greater prosperity, even despite the corruption and dismal governance that undermine even the meagre advantages Tajikistan possesses. For the visitor, experiencing the quirks of the local transport, the basic conditions of so many homes, the poor roads, it can all seem rather picturesque. But a visit to the hospital in Khorog was a reminder of how hard, how humiliating it can be for those who cannot leave, for whom poverty and poor facilities are their day-to-day life.

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.

Magical Cappadocia

Turkey boasts an extraordinary array of different landscapes, from the Mediterranean coast to the mountainous interior, from parched brown plains, to the damp mountains of the northeast, enveloped in mist and carpeted with wild flowers. Among the most spectacular is the otherworldly landscape of Cappadocia, with its fairy chimneys, caused by the continual erosion of the soft, volcanic tuff rock, soaring up into the sky. With its lush, verdant valleys carving through the brown moonscape surface, Cappadocia is one of the most magical places.

Fairy chimneys, Cappadocia

Humans have also played their part in shaping the landscape. For Cappadocia is another of those regions of Turkey where the ghostly remnants of past civilisations, of people who are no longer there, are all around, images of a world that is no more. Wandering around the valleys that crisscross the hilly terrain, one repeatedly comes across little chapels carved into the rock, and occasionally substantial churches with vaulted ceilings and arches. There are hundreds of them, dating back a thousand years and more. Some are in poor condition now, the continual erosion gouging out gaping holes in their ceilings. Or else they have been damaged by later occupiers of this land who have adapted them for other uses, often as pigeon coops. Altars and little niches have been shaped out of the soft stone. In many, painted designs are still visible, often simple, primitive, drawn on to the bare rock. But others are much more sophisticated, with intricate, vivid frescoes painted by the masters of their day.

Dark Church, Göreme

The most splendid of these rock churches are now properly looked after, and visitors must pay to enter. The Göreme Open Air Museum is a monastery complex including numerous little chapels, the finest of which are very fine indeed. Their original names are frequently unknown, and the names by which they are identified today are often taken from prominent frescoes inside. Most impressive of all is the 11th century Dark Church, so-called because there is only one very small window, letting little natural light inside, which helped to preserve the frescoes. After centuries as a pigeon coop, the bird droppings were scraped away to reveal the best preserved frescoes in all Cappadocia.

In a forerunner of the high-rise dwellings of the 20th century, Cappadocia’s residents hollowed out the towering rocks for their dwellings. Holes in the rocks reveal the windows and doors that once led into peoples’ homes. In Göreme some of these rock houses are still in use, wooden doors and glass windows fitted into the entrances. Some hotels have cave rooms. Most spectacular are the huge rocks that once contained whole communities, living in warrens of tunnels and cave dwellings. The immense rock of Üçhisar, not far from Göreme, dominates the landscape for miles around, giving me a bearing on my hikes. The tunnels and caves of the rock itself have now been abandoned, the population living in houses clustered around its base. Similar great rock villages are found at Çavuşin and Ortahisar, also abandoned.

Üçhisar

Troglodyte inhabitants of the past also built vast underground towns, elaborate mazes of narrow tunnels and chambers, sometimes opening out into broad, high caverns, here a church, there a schoolroom, a winery, stables. I visited the underground city of Derinkuyu, creeping along the passageways, hunching over at times in order to fit through the narrow passages. In some places great circular doors stand to the side of the tunnel that in times gone by could have been rolled across to seal off different levels from each other, for defence.

At ground level in Derinkuyu there stands a great Christian basilica, a remnant of more recent Christian inhabitants who only left Cappadocia less than a century ago. By the 12th century, Cappadocia had come under the rule of the Seljuk Turks, and after them the Ottomans. Over subsequent centuries, many of the Christians of Cappadocia adopted the Turkish language, written in the Greek alphabet. Others who continued to speak Greek spoke a dialect heavily influenced by Turkish, known as Cappadocian Greek. As part of the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey, Cappadocia’s Christians had to leave their ancestral home and settle in Greece. The newly arrived settlers quickly adopted the modern Greek language, but some third-generation descendants of those original settlers continue to speak Cappadocian Greek in a number of places in Greece.

Bruce Clark writes in his fascinating book Twice a Stranger, about the population exchange, how things very nearly turned out differently for the Cappadocian Christians. In September 1922, a congress was held in Kayseri, in Cappadocia, of a new, self-proclaimed Turkish Orthodox Church. Its main advocate was a pro-Turkish Orthodox priest known as Papa Eftim. His ambition seems to have been to supplant the Orthodox Patriarchate in Constantinople. For some in the Turkish government, the idea of a distinct Turkish Christian community, speaking Turkish and loyal to Turkey, and with its own Turkish Church hierarchy, had some appeal. Had it come about, it might have given greater substance to the idea of Turkey as a modern secular state, in which different religions could coexist. Turkey might have been a different kind of state. And the Cappadocians might have been able to stay in their homes, as most would almost certainly have preferred, having been largely spared the horrors of war that many other Greek communities in Anatolia had suffered. But it was not to be. In the end, there was not enough support at the Lausanne Peace Conference for leaving the Cappadocian Christians be, and so they were packed off to Greece along with the rest.

Bruce Clark writes how attachment to the old homeland remains especially strong among the Greeks of Cappadocian origin, and that nowhere else in Turkey are Greek visitors as welcomed by Turks, especially if they are of Cappadocian stock. It is a uniquely beautiful land, and the Christians who lived there for nearly two millennia left a powerful imprint. Today, Muslim Turkish guides show around nominally Christian European visitors, explaining to them the significance of the icons, the theology, the Orthodox Christian belief system. Today, after long neglect, the ancient churches are cared for, the cultural heritage of the people who are no longer there valued and preserved. That is cause for hope.