Poking Around in Central Asia: May 2015

Poking Around in Central Asia: May 2015
Trip 3 - Part 2
Bishkek to Tokmok
by Craig Mains

Sunday, May 17, 2015 - Bishkek

After breakfast, Chain-Wen, Corbin, and I met with Jane who introduced us to our guide, Ramil, and our driver, Marat. We would be generally heading east along the south shore of Lake Issyk Kul. Issyk Kul is something of a regional resort area for Bishkek and Almaty. The southern shore however is mostly undeveloped and has more natural areas.

I had asked Jane to put together a tour that included a mixture of cultural and natural features. We had four days of traveling around, ending back at Asia Mountains at the end of the fourth day. I had chosen to spend most of our time in Kyrgyzstan because it was less expensive than Kazakhstan and more open than Tajikistan. We didn't have to worry about checking in with local authorities every few days. There were some places that I would have liked to have visited but Jane had told me it was too early and they would still be snowed in.

Corbin at the front entrance of Asia Mountains just before departing. I liked Asia Mountains; it was clean, pleasant, the staff was friendly, and the food was good. By US standards though it would probably be considered to be in a weird mixed-use neighborhood. A railroad ran right by the hotel so you heard frequent long freight trains going by, which I enjoyed but I'm not sure everyone else did. There were also some small, noisy industrial shops nearby (lots of clanging), at least one encampment of homeless people, and numerous buildings in deteriorating condition.

Our first stop was at the Burana Tower, one of the most well-known sites in Kyrgyzstan. It was built in the 10th or 11th century and is about all that remains of the ancient city of Balasagun, at least on the surface. Much of the ancient city lies buried. Balasagun was founded by the Sogdians, who were related to the modern day Iranians and Tajiks.

By the 10th century, Balasagun became the capital of an area ruled by the Kara-Khanids, a Turkic people. It was a major regional economic center and also a stop on the Silk Road for caravans. The city reportedly covered about 10 to 12 square miles, which seems huge to me. I wondered if all of that area was built up or whether some of it was open space within the walls for Silk Road caravans to safely rest for a while. The Kara-Khanid empire covered most of modern-day Central Asia.

The Kara-Khanid empire was later absorbed by the Qara-Khitai. There doesn't seem to be much historical information about exactly who the Qara Khitai were. Some people think the name means "Black Chinese," and they were thought to be nomads who had adopted some of the trappings of Chinese culture. In 1218 Balasagun was captured by the Mongols who defeated an army of 30,000 Qara Khitai. The city was less prosperous under the Mongols and by the 1400s Balasagun was mostly abandoned.

Above is a closer view of the tower against cloudy skies showing the geometric pattern of the brick work. The entrance is not through the base of the tower but by way of an external metal spiral staircase (definitely not part of the original structure) that brings you to an opening about one-quarter way up. There is then a narrow internal spiral staircase that brings you to the top.

The current Burana Tower is just a remnant of the original tower, which was about 140 feet tall. The current tower is only about 80 feet tall. Due to occasional earthquakes most of the tower had collapsed. The tower today is a result of a restoration project conducted in the 1970s. The restorers soon realized that over the years many of the bricks had been carried away and incorporated into the houses and stables of the local people. They used only the remaining original bricks until they ran out.

The tower had three functions--as a minaret to call Muslims to prayer, as a beacon to guide caravans to the city, and as a lookout tower.

Corbin on the upper part of the internal staircase. The lower part of the inside staircase was pitch black and disorienting at first. We had to feel our way up the stairs until the first opening where some light came in.

A view of the Chu River plains from the top of the tower. This is probably one of the biggest expanses of flat land in Kyrgyzstan, which is almost entirely mountainous. More than half of the country is above 8,200 feet in elevation. Less than one eighth is lower than 5000 feet.

The bumpy hillocks in the bottom third of the picture are the remains of the inner walls of the city. The walls--there was at least one outer set as well--were built of unbaked clay and as our guide Ramil said, "they melted back into the earth."

I can't imagine what it felt like to stand on the tower and watch a horde of mounted warriors riding across these plains on their way to sack the city. It happened multiple times.

A view of the balbal field from the top of the tower. More remnants of the old wall are visible just before the near row of trees.

The area around the tower now served as an indoor/outdoor museum.

Balbals are ancient memorials to honor dead warriors. The practice was common across a wide area of Eurasia by different people but the balbals of Kyrgyzstan were left behind by nomadic Turkic peoples. They were scattered across the Chu River plains and were rapidly disappearing into private collections so the government gathered them in one place to preserve those that were left.

It's not obvious because of the loss of detail due to weathering but most of the balbals show the arms holding different items. The arms were not realistically proportional to the size of the head. Often they are holding a glass or a goblet in one arm and a sword or dagger in the other. These are interpreted as being clues to their social status. The word "balbal" comes from the word for "grandfather" or "ancestor."

Many of the balbals were originally found surrounded by a varying number of smaller, uncarved rocks. These were thought to represent the number of enemies the person had killed during their lifetime and who would serve the person in the afterlife.

There were also other stone memorials. I'm not sure if all of them were contemporary with the city of Balasagun. The hill in the background is believed to cover a large collapsed structure, which has never been excavated.

A view of the Chu River plains from the ground. It had stormed the night before and was still slightly drizzly. This is looking north. There is a range of bigger mountains, the Ala-too Mountains, to the south but they were obscured by clouds.

A closer view of the wild poppies that carpeted the steppes in Kazakhstan as well as the plains here in Kyrgyzstan.

The museum had a traditional yurt (or ger) on display. They had taken it down yesterday in anticipation of high winds that blew through the area with the overnight storm. They were in the process of putting it back up so while we were there we saw different stages of the process.

The museum building was small, about the size of a two-car garage. There were some interesting displays but it was hard to see much because the storm had knocked out the electricity and it was dark inside. We could only see the displays near the entrance. Ramil told us that the Russians had taken the best artifacts from Balasagun and they were now in museums in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

The roof supports are made out of steamed and bent willow branches. These weren't always easily found on the treeless steppes except along some rivers and streams so they sometimes had to be traded for. The matting around the outside is made of reeds.

The Burana Tower was near the mouth of the Shamsy Valley and after visiting the tower we headed up into the valley. It was drizzling at the tower but the further up the valley we went the rainier it got. The original plan was that we would go for a short horseback ride but because of the cold, wet weather we decided to forego it.

Instead we were invited into the summer dwelling of the family living there. Ramil referred to them as summer nomads. The man in the doorway works and lives in Bishkek with his family during the winter but moves to the mountains in the spring where he grazes cattle and horses.

The metal building is on wheels and can be towed from place to place although this one looked relatively stationary. We were invited in for tea and a small snack. There were at least three small kids in addition to him and his wife. We only saw one of the kids--the others were too scared or shy to come out of hiding.

Their summer dwelling was electrified but I noticed they didn't have any plugs or sockets. It was just a bunch of wires strung here and there. In places, the insulation was stripped off the ends of the wires and the two wires were bent into a J shape. The wife used an electric hot plate to heat water for tea. To turn on the hotplate she connected the bare wires from the hot plate to the bare ends of a wire hanging down from the ceiling. Once the water boiled she disconnected one of them.

The family had a traditional yurt set up nearby. It is probably good business for anyone who deals with tourists to have one. But, it also seems that the cultural significance of yurts is great enough that many people in the country would set one up anyway, even if they didn't live in it. Many Kazakhs and Kyrgyz are nostalgic about the nomadic life they were pressured to abandon.

The part of the yurt that holds it all together is the circular piece at the top that in Kyrgyzstan is called something like "tundook." The bent roof beams are whittled at one end to fit into holes drilled in the tundook. The tundook serves as something of a compression ring so no poles are needed on the inside except for really large yurts.

The tundook has considerable cultural significance. Partly, I think, this may be because of the traditional pre-Islamic religion of sky workship. In good weather the sky would be visible through the tundook. It's also sort of equivalent symbolically to a keystone, the part that holds it all together for the family, clan, and nation.

It was traditional that tundooks were heirlooms, handed down from father to son. Other parts of a yurt might fall apart and be replaced but the tundook would be repaired and preserved as long as possible.

The tundook is important enough to appear on both the flag of Kyrgyzstan...

and the official seal of Kazakhstan. The Kazakh word for it is something more like "shawneroc."

The interior of a yurt was traditionally decorated with repeating patterns. You can see that the roof beams are tied off from each other to maintain equal spacing and also tied to the lattice that forms the walls of the yurt.

A view of the lower Shamsy Valley through a raindrop-spattered car window. As we headed back down the valley, the rain gradually dissipated.

On the way down we spotted several birds swooping around in this grassy area and occasionally lighting on this boulder. We were able to drive up pretty close because the van served as a blind.

Ramil and Marat discussed what kind of bird it was and agreed that it was a bee eater. Later, back home, I was trying to determine what kind of bee eater it was and didn't see any that looked like this one. So, I emailed the photo to Todd and he said it was actually a European Roller (Coracias garrulus). I had spotted the same bird once when we were in Zhigergen but wasn't close enough to get a really good look or a photo. Although it's not rare, it is considered to be near threatened as its population is declining fairly rapidly due to loss of habitat and use of pesticides. It has been extirpated in some parts of its natural range.

A village near the mouth of Shamsy Valley. The village is on the opposite side of the stream from where the photo was taken. There is a fairly steep-sided, V-shaped valley that dips down sharply where the light green in the foreground meets the darker green. The dark green is the opposite bank of the stream.

After lunch, Ramil and Marat took us to the remains of an even more ancient city. The modern name is Ak-Beshim but the ancient name was Suyab. Suyab was founded by Sogdians in the 5th century but later taken over by Kara Khanids. The remains of Suyab were not discovered until the late 1800s. The Russians did some excavation within the last 50 years, of which some of the diggings are shown in this photo.

A Japanese group is currently doing some archaeological work, but not in this immediate area. Their research indicates that Suyab was abandoned roughly about the same time Balasagun was founded in the 10th century. The two sites are only about five miles apart, both on the Chu River plains. Their theory is that Balasagun replaced Suyab as the economic center of the region for mainly religious reasons. The region converted to Islam during the 10th century and they think there was no room to build a mosque in the already densely packed center of Suyab. It was easier to build a mosque elsewhere and then build a new city around it, which became Balasagun. The Burana Tower is the minaret of that mosque, which has never been excavated.

Another view of some of the excavations and our driver Marat. Central Suyab was roughly rectangular, covering an area of about 86 acres, with a fortified wall with elevated bastions. There were three gates on each side with crooked entrances to make sieges somewhat more difficult. A suburb was added with an area of about 148 acres with a less substantial wall. [1] As at Balasagun, you could still see the remains of the city walls as bumpy ridges that could easily be mistaken for natural formations.

Artifacts found at Suyab show evidence of multiple religions including Buddhists, Zoroastrians, and Nestorian Christians, a heretic sect. A number of ceramic ossuaries and fragments of ossuaries have been found that were part of the burial rituals of Nestorian Christians [2], according to Ramil. Chinese, Mongol, and Turkic people fought for control of the region for five centuries.

Marat knew only a little English and didn't speak much but seemed to understand some of what he heard.

Remains of an unbaked clay brick wall. Based on its location, this was probably from a building and not part of the defensive walls of the city.

There is no record of any inhabitation after the 10th century except for a handful of squatters who moved into one of the two Buddhist temples before they collapsed. There is no sign that there was ever a mosque in Suyab, which archaeologists theorized was the main motivation for building Balasagun and abandoning Suyab.

"Fat-ass" sheep were grazing in the area. Ramil said this breed of sheep was raised for meat, not wool. Many had a prominent fatty deposit on their rear end. The dark-faced one, whose head is in the center of the photo is an example. These fatty deposits are considered a delicacy when they are cut into chunks, skewered, and grilled as sheshlyks.

We were staying overnight in the home of some local people in the city of Tokmok. Tokmok is the fifth largest city in Kyrgyzstan, with a population of about 53,000 people. It is the economic center of the upper Chu region and is, in a sense, the modern version of Balasagun and Suyab. The three places are all within nine miles of each other.

It somehow seemed a little weird to take a lot of photos of the home we stayed in so I only took a couple outside. It was a walled compound in which there did not seem to be a square inch of wasted space. It included two houses, a covered garage, a neighborhood store, a small shed with about eight or 10 sheep crowded into it, a chicken coop, two outhouses (both squatters), and the rest of the space was put into a garden.

There were three generations of people in the house--a couple in their 60s; a couple in their 30s, one of whom I assume was the son or daughter of the older couple; and two kids, a girl about 14 and a boy about eight. Some of them looked east-Asian and some of them looked middle-eastern--all within the same family. The young girl would have looked at home in China and her brother would have looked at home in Lebanon.

Through Ramil, the grandmother told us we would be having laghman for dinner. She then disappeared into a small kitchen behind a curtain. Chain-Wen asked Ramil to ask her if she minded if Chain watched her cook and she told Ramil that she did indeed mind, that it would make her nervous. Chain told me later that she saw the granddaughter sneak a package of commercial seasoning to the kitchen and she thought the grandmother probably didn't want to let us know that it was not a totally home-cooked dinner. It was good either way.

I'm not sure who lived in each house, but it seemed like everyone vacated one house so that the five of us had one house to ourselves. It looked like I had the young boy's bedroom. The only problem I had was that the neighborhood store, which was part of the family's enterprises, was not staffed. It had a locked door from the outside for customers and a door from inside for the family to enter. If someone from the neighborhood wanted something from the store, they had to ring a buzzer for someone from the family to come open it up. The buzzer was mounted on the wall right outside the window of the room I was sleeping in. Three or four times, just as I had fallen asleep, the buzzer rang and it was loud--probably so it could be heard anywhere in the compound. At one point, the door from the inside to the store was open and I was able to peek in. It looked like they had a little bit of everything, including a couple shelves of liquor. I wondered if that was why people were ringing the buzzer.

This is one of the few photos I took of the Tokmok homestay. The buildings shown belong to the neighbors. The garden, animal pens, and outhouses were not within the walls of the family compound. It looked like almost everyone in the neighborhood had outhouses instead of indoor toilets.

Tokmok is only 35 miles from Bishkek so we really hadn't traveled all that far but we had seen a lot and were busy almost the whole time and it felt like a long day.

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Footnotes

[1] Despite being inhabited for at least five centuries, Suyab had a much smaller footprint than Balasagun. The combined area of Suyab (counting the suburb) was 234 acres, which is less that half of a square mile, while Balasagun was estimated to sprawl over 10 to 12 square miles.

[2] Nestorianism was a sect of Christianity based on the teachings of Nestorius who was born in the late 4th century in what is now Turkey. He believed that the human and divine natures of Christ were separate but loosely connected, giving Christ something of a split personality. His teachings were condemned at the ecumenical councils of Ephesus in 431 and Chalcedon in 451. Since then, all major branches of Christianity have believed that Christ's human and divine natures are inseparably fused in one person. This was the earliest of several major schisms in Christianity. At one time there were Nestorian churches from the Middle East to China, mostly spread out along the Silk Road. Today there are some remnant Nestorian churches in Iran, Iraq, and Syria.

Sources:
Balasagun
European roller
Kara-Khanid Khanate
Nestorianism
Qara-Khitai
Suyab

Note: Tokmok to Kaji Say

 

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