Click on the link below to read a piece of mine on Moynaq and the Aral Sea that was published in online literary journal The Common:
http://www.thecommononline.org/dispatches/search-ghostly-sea
In Search of a Ghostly Sea
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Tagged Aral Sea, Central Asia, cotton, Environment, fishing, Kazakhstan, Soviet Union, Uzbekistan, water
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Charleston Library Society Talk in December
http://www.charlestoncitypaper.com/charleston/wide-angle-lunch-series-feeds-the-body-and-the-mind/Content?oid=3612312
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Tagged Central Asia, Environment, Kazakhstan, Soviet Union, Uzbekistan, water
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The Undercover Art Collector
By Alexander Volkov
On a cloudy day decades ago, the dashing Russian archaeologist and artist Igor Savitsky was visiting the widow of artist Georgiy Nikitin, when it began to rain. The woman asked if he would mind fixing the leaky roof for her. Climbing up to the attic to take a look at the roof, Savitsky discovered that the leak was being plugged by a canvas that turned out to be Nikitin’s portrait of the Uzbek king and poet Alisher Navoi. He found something else to stop the hole and took the painting to be restored in Moscow. Today it is one of tens of thousands of pieces that make up the extraordinary art collection of the Savitsky Karakalpak State Art Museum in the remote city of Nukus, Uzbekistan.
The Savitsky Museum opened in 1966 in this drab Soviet town — the capital of the autonomous republic of Karakalpakstan, a territory that occupies the northwestern flank of Uzbekistan, right at the heart of former Soviet Central Asia. Today it is heralded for having the second most significant collection of Russian avant-garde art in the world, after the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, all due to the tireless efforts of one man – the museum’s founder and first director, Igor Savitsky.
A Russian born in 1915 in Kiev to an upper-middle class family, Savitsky was an archaeologist and an artist and came here to Karakalpakstan for the first time in the 1950s as a member of an archaeological expedition; later giving up his apartment in Moscow to settle permanently in Nukus. In a room dedicated to him at the museum, alongside some of his own paintings you can see photos of him standing, windswept, in the desert on an archaeological dig, a romantic figure somewhat reminiscent of Lawrence of Arabia. With his archaeological background, he became fascinated by Karakalpak applied folk arts and began to collect them, gaining the respect of the local authorities for his attempts to preserve ethnic culture and traditions. This is most likely why they turned a blind eye when Savitsky then began to amass a collection of paintings by Soviet artists that had been banned by the state and/or squirrelled away, because they contravened Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s 1932 decree “On the Reconstruction of Literary and Art Organizations,” stating that all art should be in the socialist realism style, i.e. glorifying communism and the life and role of the worker. Artists who had refused to comply with Stalin’s decree were repressed, sent away to gulags, locked up in insane asylums, or met other unpleasant fates.
In the 1970s, Savitsky began traveling from one end of the USSR to the other, approaching artists and their families to ask if they had any work he could buy and take away to far-off Karakalpakstan with him. He gathered paintings he found in artists’ homes, in basements and attics, stuffed in drawers, hidden behind radiators; and more often than not, they were in bad states of disrepair, damaged and without frames. Far away from the prying eyes of Moscow, he built his collection in Nukus, which at the time was inside a zone closed to foreigners because there was a Soviet military base on Vorozdheniye island in the middle of the Aral Sea, several hundred kilometres north of the city. The list of painters featured in the collection includes names such as Alexander Volkov and Ural Tansiqbaev, among many, many others. A large number of the paintings depict Central Asian landscapes, culture and daily life, including Jewish communities in the Uzbek oasis town of Bukhara, tea drinking ceremonies in the bazaar, and the cotton harvest.
Tansiqbaev was an Uzbek painter who took up French-influenced post-Impressionism. He and Savitsky were very close friends and Savitsky was a frequent visitor at Tansiqbaev’s house in Tashkent. One day the painter decided to show him some earlier paintings he had done and Savitsky was very impressed by them. Later, Tansiqbaev had to adopt the socialist realism style in order to survive, but the museum in Nukus still has 88 paintings that Savitsky bought from him, representing his earlier period.
Today the museum’s two floors include sections of archaeology, Karakalpak ethnography, and fine art (including Russian avant-garde, Uzbek fine art and contemporary Karakalpak fine art). The rooms are crammed with paintings, sculptures and artifacts packed so close together that, at times, it can be hard to take in each work individually. Then you remember that what you are seeing here represents just five percent of the total collection of around 90,000 units. And the epic scale of Savitsky’s single-handed achievement becomes startlingly clear.
“The collection he managed to create, it’s obvious to any world art expert, is of international significance,” the museum’s current director, Marinika Babanazarova, told me in an interview at the museum. “Savitsky was obsessed, but these were not just the quixotic efforts of a crazy person, it is people like him who push boundaries and really achieve things.” Babanazarova took over the helm of the museum in 1984 after Savitsky’s death (he died in Moscow, and was buried here in Nukus), but she had known the director as a family friend since childhood. She said she never imagined being director of the museum, where people now come from all over the world to admire Savitsky’s collection, but in the end it became a kind of obligation. “Someone has to take care of the legacy of this museum and promote it.”
More than 25 years later, retirement is now on her mind, but first she must find a suitable successor to continue Savitsky’s legacy. “This is a very sensitive and difficult question. We need a tiger in the job to do this work,” Babanazarova said. “We, the senior staff, must prepare the new generation to whom we leave this heritage, so that they understand it as we do, and in accordance with Savitsky’s wishes.”
If you are interested in learning more about Igor Savitsky and his extraordinary art collection, see the Savitsky Museum’s website (www.savitskycollection.org), or check out the documentary The Desert of Forbidden Art (http://www.desertofforbiddenart.com/).
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Tagged Aral Sea, art, Central Asia, Karakalpakstan, Kazkhstan, museum, repression, Russian, Savitsky, Soviet Union, Uzbekistan
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Gateway to the Aral
Aaaar-buuuz! Aaaar-buuuuz! A man wearing a white muslim skull cap who looks to be somewhere in his 60s and a young boy who could be his grandson, both barefoot, together push a flat trolley piled high with watermelons down a quiet side street in the high heat of the Nukus afternoon. Aaaar-buuuz! they call over and over in turn, the man’s tone rising with what sounds like hope on the first syllable, then falling in melancholy on the second, the boy’s voice higher and all on a single note. This new word I have just learned for ‘watermelon’ follows me down the street for a long time after they have passed, the sound travelling clear and true in the heavy, still air. Aaaar-buuuz! But no one seems to be buying the fruit today.
As I walk through the mostly silent streets I peek into a few shops, but everything seems a bit dusty and neglected. One mini-mart I enter has half-empty shelves – five ancient-looking bottles of beer and two rumpled packets of pasta. Then I discover that the bazaar is where all the activity’s at – whether you want to buy fruit and vegetables, underwear, change money, catch a marshrutka minibus shared taxi, or even have your fortune told.
I’m here in Nukus because, as well as being the capital of the autonomous republic of Karakalpakstan, a territory occupying the northwestern flank of Uzbekistan, it is also the gateway to the Aral Sea on the Uzbek side. British journalist A.A. Gill once described Karakalpakstan as “the worst place in the world.” To me that seems harsh. I feel like there are certainly worse places, but the overriding sensation in Nukus is one of space and emptiness. Everything feels either half-empty or unfinished, as if there weren’t enough buildings or people to fill up the space provided. Even the flowerbeds have a half-finished look to them, although perhaps that’s just because it takes a tremendous effort to grow anything here in this bone-dry land, which is to be my base for the next few weeks as I explore the Aral Sea region in Uzbekistan.
Although Nukus has an airport, I hadn’t been ably to fly directly here from Tashkent for reasons involving a broken or being-repaired runway. The explanations varied depending on the explainer – travel agents, taxi drivers, tour guides – but the one thing they did agree on was that no planes were landing there. I had decided not to do the 22-hour train journey from Tashkent in order to save some time, but the alternative meant getting on a plane to the city of Urgench, for now the closest functioning airport to Nukus, and then finding a taxi driver willing to take me from there on to Nukus, some 200 kilometres further north. After what seemed like an overly intimate security check in Tashkent airport (if I’d been trying to smuggle a pea through in my knickers I suspect the customs official would have found it), I was on a bus driving somewhere round the back of the airport where the domestic terminal is hidden away, being taken out to a plane that was even further away. I felt a completely unjustified wave of relief sweep over me as I realised that our Uzbekistan Airways flight was aboard an Airbus, as opposed to one of the many Yaks and Tupolevs we had been passing.
A few hours later I was stepping out of the airport and into a clamouring fray of taxi drivers – it was not going to be as complicated as I had feared to get a lift to Nukus. The drive north revealed a panorama of green cotton fields spreading out on either side of us. Uzbekistan is the world’s third-largest exporter of raw cotton and it is still a state-run industry, with fixed prices paid to farmers well below the market rate. Students, and sometimes schoolchildren, are regularly co-opted to work in these fields during harvest time, which starts in September. And it is the irrigation canals watering these fields that have slowly been draining the Aral Sea’s water supply since the 1950s.
Not long after leaving the airport, we drove under an archway welcoming us to the autonomous republic of Karakalpakstan. The word ‘Karakalpak’ literally means ‘black hat’, thought to be a reference to the traditional headwear that this ethnic group once wore. Although the Karakalpaks are ethnically and linguistically closer to the Kazakhs than they are to the Uzbeks, they have found themselves under the yoke of the Uzbek government since the collapse of the USSR in 1991. The republic has its own parliament, a pristinely white building atop which the Uzbek and Karakalpak flags flutter side by side whenever there’s a gentle breeze. But one foreigner who travels frequently to the region told me the parliament is little more than a symbol, with those working there having little experience of government. Across the street from the parliament is the regional office of the International Fund For Saving the Aral Sea.
On another street corner, in front of a statue of Ulugbek Mirza, the Uzbek astronomer and mathematician, I see a young bride and groom descend from a limo and pose, smiling shyly, for the camera. Then they head over to stand for a photo on the steps of the Savitsky Musuem, the building which houses a vast collection of Russian avant-garde art, Uzbek fine art and Karakalpak folk art squirreled away from the censorship of the Soviet regime by Muscovite painter and archaeologist Igor Savitsky starting in the 1960s. There are two reasons most tourists come to Nukus – to use it as a jumping-off point to catch a glimpse of the disappearing Aral Sea, and to see the Savitsky Museum’s extraordinary art collection.
The hotel receptionist was startled when I said I wanted to take a room for two weeks. “Nobody ever stays here that long,” he said.
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Tagged Aral Sea, Central Asia, cotton, Environment, Karakalpakstan, Kazakhstan, Soviet Union, Uzbekistan, water
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Tyrants at the Oasis
On a June morning in 1842, in the Central Asian town of Bokhara, two ragged figures could be seen kneeling in the dust in the great square before the Emir’s palace. Their arms were tied tightly behind their backs, and they were in a pitiful condition. Filthy and half-starved, their bodies were covered with sores, their hair, beards and clothes alive with lice. Not far away were two freshly dug graves. Looking on in silence was a small crowd of Bokharans. Normally executions attracted little attention in this remote, and still medieval, caravan town, for under the Emir’s vicious and despotic rule they were all too frequent. But this one was different. The two men kneeling in the blazing midday sun at the executioner’s feet were British officers.
– Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game
On a stiflingly hot July afternoon in 2011, I stand in Central Asia’s holiest city, Bukhara, in the middle of the Registan square, contemplating those who have gone before me. There are only a handful of people here today and most of them are either selling souvenirs or begging for money. There aren’t even many tourists around, as those who now come through by the busload tend to plan their visits to Uzbekistan to coincide with the milder months of spring or autumn. It was on this very spot where I’m standing almost 170 years ago, that an apparently bloodthirsty crowd of Bukharans gathered on June 24th, 1842 to watch Colonel Charles Stoddart and Captain Arthur Conolly — the two ragged figures that writer Peter Hopkirk describes as “pitiful” — as they were ordered to dig their own graves and then beheaded. Their remains, along with those of many others, lie buried somewhere beneath this square in a long-forgotten graveyard.
The Emir of Bukhara, Nasrullah Khan, would have looked down on the execution and listened to the accompanying music of drums and reed pipes from the conveniently placed balcony I can see above me that sits atop the white fortress walls of the Ark, his fortified citadel and town-within-a-town. In those days, a sturdy whip, said to have belonged to the epic hero Rustam, hung over the Ark’s heavy wooden main doors, with a handle whose girth is so thick that I would not have been able to close my hand around it. A warning to Bukhara’s citizens that the Emir would not tolerate insubordination lightly.
I try to imagine how the Emir might carry himself during such a day’s programme of events. Did he watch the men as they dug their own graves, and perhaps comment on their progress? Did he tap his fingers or his feet along to the drums, or whistle along with the reed pipes? And then, when it came time for the executions, did he give a regal wave of acknowledgement as the first head rolled? Perhaps he let a slight smile of triumph steal over his lips. Or did he rather maintain a stern expression as befitting his self-appointed role as enforcer and disciplinarian of these foreign invaders?
I can safely say that had it not been for Peter Hopkirk’s history The Great Game, I may have never become curious about Central Asia or indeed had any desire to travel here. Hopkirk’s fast-paced novelistic narrative tells of the swashbuckling high adventures and tales of derring-do that took place across the snow-capped mountain ranges, neverending steppes and inhospitable deserts of what are now the former Soviet ‘Stans and Afghanistan, as superpowers Russia and Britain vied for influence in the region, but never openly faced off against each other. This cold war of sorts was originally dubbed “The Great Game” by the doomed Conolly himself, although the phrase was later engraved in the annals of history after Rudyard Kipling used it in his novel Kim. The Russians, more poetically in my view, called these long-term covert operations “The Tournament of Shadows.”
These lands, that were largely subsumed into the territory of the Soviet Union during the better part of the 20th century, have been independent states since 1991 and are now mostly ignored by the superpowers that once fought so viciously over them. While Afghanistan, the so-called graveyard of empires, continues to resist all invaders and efforts to tame it.
Today Bukhara, which grew up as a caravanserai resting point on the former Silk Road trading route between China and Europe, is a perfectly preserved and polished little gem in the Kyzylkum desert, replete with turquoise-topped domes and intricately tiled medressas, cool cobbled courtyards that echo with Russian, Uzbek and Tajik, and pools where white-bearded men in square-topped Muslim skull caps gather to drink tea. It can sometimes be difficult to remember that so much violence lies beneath so much beauty…. and not only in Uzbekistan’s past.
This desert town is interminably windy and, during the summer months, bone dry and very, very hot. It lies about seven hours’ train journey southwest of the Uzbek capital Tashkent, and is providing an oasis of sorts for me on my journey to see what’s left of the Aral Sea on this side, a couple of days’ break along the way, as well a place (blame Hopkirk) that I always entertained romantic notions of exploring.
The Ark is its oldest structure and tourists can pay a couple of dollars to see where the Emir sat and issued decrees, ordered such brutal executions, and stand behind the wall that blocks the throne from view, where subjects could present their petitions, never knowing whether anyone was actually there listening on the other side or not. Fortunately today Emir Nasrullah Khan is long gone and there is no freshly dug grave awaiting me.
Sanjar, my Bukharan guide for the day, is keen to dispel some of the myths that populate his city’s grisly history. “Many people ask this, but prisoners were NOT tossed to their deaths from the top of this minaret,” he says with emphasis, gesturing to the Kalon Minaret, whose elongated shadow stretches far in front of us in the late afternoon sun. It strikes me a curious statement, given that I hadn’t enquired after its efficacy as an execution post, but maybe this is a persistent rumour he frequently has to address with visitors. After the Ark, little is surprising perhaps. His statement seems also to beg the question of where people were thrown to their deaths, but he’s already moving on and apparently we’re not talking about that any more.
The 47m minaret, that stands guard outside the 16th century Kalon Mosque, was probably the tallest building in Central Asia when it was built. Over the years it has survived, battered and bruised but still standing, attacks by the ruthless Chinggis Khan — whose hat is said to have fallen off as he gazed up at the building and was so impressed that he spared it –, and bombings by the Soviet Red Army.
But the distinct nasal azan, or call to prayer, that I have been accustomed to hearing even in determinedly non-religious Kazakhstan, does not ring out from the minarets and mosques here in Uzbekistan, where around 90 percent of the population is Muslim but the vast majority of those are non-practising. The azan was banned by another strongman leader, Uzbek President Islam Karimov, after a series of devastating bomb attacks in 1999 in Tashkent, which were blamed on wahabi Islamic fundamentalists. The minaret may still stand, but its voice — like the voices of Stoddart and Conolly — has been silenced for now.
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Tagged Aral Sea, architecture, Bukhara, Central Asia, cotton, Environment, Islam, Kazakhstan, Peter Hopkirk, religion, Sovie Union, The Great Game, Uzbekistan, water
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Aral Sea (Uzbek side) on Radio New Zealand
http://podcast.radionz.co.nz/ngts/ngts-20110728-1912-aral_sea_the_uzbekistan_side-048.mp3
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Tagged Aral, Aral Sea, Central Asia, cotton, Environment, Kazakhstan, Moynaq, Soviet Union, Uzbekistan, water
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The Old Man and The Sea
A man sits on a rock in the middle of a desert-like landscape and stares off into the middle distance, where a perfectly round yellow sun casts an pinkish-orange glow over the scene. The sky is the same pinkish-orange colour as the land — indeed its hard to see where one leaves off and the other begins — and the two blend together in a harsh but beautiful palette. Only the slight undulations in the ground provide some relief from the unrelenting severity of the view. Although he has his back to you, you can see that the man’s shoulders are hunched, his head sunk heavily between them. He is dressed in what seems to be some kind of brown jacket and trousers and he is wearing heavy boots; he rests his right forearm on his knee as if weighed down by the oppressive heat.
This scene titled Waiting is the middle section of a 1989 triptych, or three-panel painting, by Tashkent-based painter Rafael Matevosyan. It is flanked on the left by a scene of fishing boats on the sea (Yesterday), and to its right is the same scene minus the water (Today). Matevosyan has been painting the Aral Sea, chronicling its desiccation and the slow death throes of the former fishing port of Moynaq, for almost 50 years. Ever since the sea, deprived of its watery lifeblood, began to retreat from its shores.
I first meet the 87-year-old artist on a steamy July afternoon in a small apartment in the northwestern Sebzar rayon (district) of Tashkent that serves as his studio. As the car I’m in turns into the driveway of the unassuming concrete block apartment building, a young boy driving a donkey and cart passes us on his way out, kicking a cloud of dust into he air as he goes. Gayana, one of Rafael’s daughters, beckons me upstairs from a crumbling balcony that looks like it might give way at any second.
Inside the cool apartment, Rafael himself is busy working on a huge canvas daubed with blues and greens that, propped up on an easel, dominates the small room. He rushes to find me a chair as I enter, always the gentleman as I am soon to learn. There are piles of paintings stacked against the white walls, others hanging crowded together on the walls, more pinned on white sheets that hang at the windows, and still more heaped in a cramped storage room off the studio area. Despite the sheets, the light still manages to stream in through the open windows and reflect warmly off the dark wooden floor. A tiny ginger-and-white kitten wanders in from the balcony and weaves between our legs, scaling my backpack as I place it on the floor and shake hands with my hosts — Rafael, Gayana, and the painter’s wife, Ada.
When Rafael Matevosyan was born in 1924 in Uzbekistan’s ancient Silk Road city of Samarkand, the Soviet Union was in its infancy and the Aral was still the world’s fourth largest inland sea. A true product of Soviet times, his parents were Armenians who had moved to Uzbekistan from their home in the disputed South Caucasus region of Nagorno-Karabakh. And when the painter was a boy of six his family moved back to the Caucasus, this time to the port city of Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital on the Caspian Sea.
It was there that Rafael first began painting the sea, the Caspian Sea. “But it was hard because there were already many prominent painters living and working there, painting the sea, and they didn’t really let beginners get a foothold,” he says, adjusting the black velvet beret he wears at a jaunty angle over his longish grey hair. His eyes, sunken a little into a face that is gaunter than it once was, are still a deep clear blue above his prominent hooked nose and neatly trimmed grey beard. He’s also a little hard of hearing these days, and Gayana often repeats my questions to him when he seems not to have heard them. Occasionally, as he tells his story in Russian, he will stop for a moment and get lost in a reverie; staring into space mid-sentence, not like he’s forgetting, but rather remembering.
“One guy, who was like a kind of mentor to me, told me ‘Rafael you should go to Uzbekistan and paint there.’ This was good advice, and with two of my friends I headed to Karakalpakstan to paint the Aral Sea. I’d never even really heard of the Aral Sea before,” he says, fixing me with a lengthy stare and then, unexpectedly, breaking into an infectiously joyful laugh. He pours me a cup of coffee and offers me a little bunch of black grapes from a fruit bowl also loaded with apples and peaches, while he picks away at a piece of traditional round non bread.
RAFAEL MEETS THE ARAL
Karakalpakstan is an autonomous republic that makes up the far west flank of Uzbekistan and is under that country’s remit. It is also home to Moynaq, the former busy port town and commercial fishing centre that used to sit right on the edge of the Aral Sea. Rafael settled in the Karalkalpak capital of Nukus — a grid-patterned Soviet city — and lived there from 1962 to 1979. “When I arrived there in 1962, I met the fishermen and I liked them and what they were doing, their way of life; I liked how they treated me,” he says. “And I started painting their daily life and their work.” Thus began his lifelong love affair with the Aral Sea.
His arrival was timely. By the mid 1960s the effect of irrigation canals draining water from the region’s two major rivers — the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya — and away from the Aral Sea, to slake the thirst of the region’s growing cotton industry, was beginning to show. The sea was slowly shrivelling and dying, taking an entire way of life along with it.
Rafael, who today holds the title of Honoured Artist of Karakalpakstan, soon realised this idyllic community he was recording was under threat. “While I was there I sailed on the sea and I painted and painted; and when I compared my paintings over that period of time I could see the sea was disappearing.” He starts to produce painting after painting from the back storage room piled high with canvases to show me. Each one has its own story. In this one you can see the sea disappearing from underneath the old wharf, in that one the rescue of a fisherman who fell overboard during a storm is narrated. He often stops to examine my face as he talks, searching perhaps for a reaction, or maybe just out of sheer curiosity.
He wanted to tell people what was happening, to alert them to the impending disaster. But under the Soviet Union the painting of “negative events” — like the retreat of the Aral Sea — was frowned upon, to say the least. In 1967 he mounted his first personal exhibition titled The Sea is Retreating, the Aral is Getting Shallower. City administration officials in Nukus “strongly hinted” that he should take his paintings down. But he was not to be defeated. On a second try, instead of putting up different paintings he simply changed the titles of the existing ones. “So instead of Ship on the Shore and Sea Out There, I renamed that picture Twilight, and The Sea is Retreating became After the Rain. But whatever the stickers said, the meaning behind the paintings were still the same.” This time, his exhibition went ahead as planned.
“I had seen what was happening with the Aral Sea and it was impossible for me not to speak out about it,” he says. “The reason I continued to paint the Aral Sea and chronicle its decline was that I saw this disaster happening right in front of my eyes.”
In 1979 he moved from Nukus to the Uzbek capital Tashkent, where he has lived ever since. But he continued to depict the Aral Sea’s slow death in his paintings.
“I knew that life in Karakalpakstan would be like living in a dark hole where nobody would ever hear you,” he says. His last visit to Moynaq was almost 10 years ago, in 2002. “I still have a lot of work to finish here at the moment. I still have many sketches from before, and if I go and do more they will just pile up. So I need to finish what I have here and then I will think about going again….”
Over the years he has painted some four hundred pictures of the Aral Sea. Around two to three hundred of them are right here in his studio, with another one hundred or so among the collection of the Savitsky Museum in Nukus. There is also a wall in Moynaq’s tiny town museum dedicated to his paintings. “Today half of the residents of Moynaq have only seen the Aral Sea in Rafael’s paintings,” his wife Ada says.
And he shows no signs of slowing down. The painting he was working on when I arrived is destined for a solo exhibition he is planning next year. I have no expertise when it comes to art criticism, only my gut instinct. But I like his paintings, which are rendered mostly in oils and some acrylic on canvas. Maybe it’s because he is so charming, or because I am fascinated by his chosen subject, nevertheless, I like them.
NO MORE ARAL FISH
As one of his granddaughters bursts through the door in a four-year-old’s flurry, home from kindergarten, I take my signal and start to get up to to leave. Teasing him, I say I still have one more really important question to ask him before I go. Does he like to eat fish? He laughs, pleased at my feeble attempt at a joke. “Koneshna! Of course! I can cook any type of fish, prepare any sort of fish dish you might want.”
“He is always going to the market and buying two or three kilos of fish and bringing them back here to dry out and salt,” Gayana says. “We tell him: ‘Papa, there’s so much fish here we can’t eat it all!’ But still he keeps going and bringing more back. Sometimes we have so much that I have to give it away to his friends so they can eat smoked fish with their beer!”
She says that even up to 15 or 20 years ago their friends from Karakalpakstan, mostly fishermen, would still come and visit them in Tashkent and bring fish for the family. But now they don’t visit as much as they used to — tickets are more expensive — and they don’t bring fish any more. “Because there are no more fish in the Aral.”
Rafael, still perhaps thinking about all those fish dishes he could prepare for me, says fish from the Aral Sea had a very unique taste. “Not like the Caspian, which is polluted with oil and gas. The Aral had much cleaner water back in the day,” he says, and then pauses for a moment, seemingly lost in thought. “Now you can’t even grow anything in the soil there — you’d need to ship soil from the Ukraine to the Aral Sea region to do that.”
As I start to say my goodbyes, Rafael asks me for my solemn word to send him a copy of my book when it’s done. I promise that I will, but also remind him that this is unlikely to happen any time soon. He tells me he was once interviewed by a TV crew who promised to send him the video afterwards, and even though he stood each day for months at the window waiting for the parcel to arrive, it never did. And as I head out the door, he catches my eye again and says in a mock-scolding tone: “I’ll be waiting at the window, Tara…”
We’re driving away and he’s getting smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror, still waving from the balcony, when out of nowhere I’m engulfed in a sudden wave of sadness, thinking about him standing there, waiting hopefully for the post…
*Special thanks go to Patricia O’Toole and Dr. Philippa Strum for their invaluable help in making my meeting with Mr. Matevosyan possible.
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Tagged Aral Sea, art, Central Asia, cotton, Environment, Karakalpakstan, Moynaq, Nukus, Rafael Matevosyan, Soviet Union, Uzbekistan, water
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The Heart of Central Asia
The Russians had captured Tashkent in 1865, not on orders from St. Petersburg but by the adventurism of local generals. Within a few years it became the capital of Russian Turkestan, and there grew up beside the native town a pleasant, nondescript cantonment, where water channels trickled and great trees bloomed. Its first governor-general, the vain and chilly Kaufmann, ruled like a petty emperor. His army and administrations were filled with exiled bankrupts and adventurers. Far from home, local society became inward-looking and licentious, while beside it the Uzbek community continued almost unstudied, as if it would one day fade away.
— Colin Thubron, The Lost Heart of Asia
Originally, I had hoped to cross the Kazakh-Uzbek border by train, travelling the 22-hour route from Aral to Tashkent and tracking the Syr Darya river some of the way south past the Kazakh cities of Kyzylorda and Turkestan, until dipping away over the border to the Uzbek capital. But, for this trip at least, it was not to be. Visa restrictions meant I had to land at Tashkent airport and pick up my tourist permit there.
Despite the forests-worth of paperwork that went into my visa application, when it came down to actually sticking a visa in my passport, the process was surprisingly simple and speedy. There was no one in the airport immigration office when I arrived so, like the good girl I am, I asked a stern-faced policeman in green what I should do and he went off in search of someone who might know. Ten minutes later a young guy in jeans and a polo shirt who spoke flawless English came up to me and asked me for my passport. I handed it over unquestioningly and, only as he melted away into the crowd, did I then begin to wonder if that had been altogether wise. Isn’t not letting your passport out of your sight one of those golden rules of travel, or something? But he was back 10 minutes later with a full-page green and blue Uzbek tourist visa firmly glued into my passport granting me 28 whole days here, and a receipt for 70 dollars. Done.
Tashkent, which was levelled by a devastating earthquake in 1966 that left 300,000 people homeless, is today an occasionally oppressive, sprawling city where broad Soviet avenues and spacious green parks filled with monuments that look like giant bugs and space ships co-exist with neighbourhoods of mud-walled houses, twisting alleyways and chaotic bazaars. It doesn’t have the flash factor of Almaty, which with its modern glass-fronted high-rises and shiny five-star hotels in parts reminds me a bit of Dubai, but it has a charming quirkiness that grows on you as you start to get to know the place a little better.
Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan are the predominant powers in post-Soviet Central Asia, and are representative of the region’s two traditional lifestyles: the Uzbeks were and still are traders and sedentary farmers, and the Kazakhs nomads. Kazakhstan’s position between China and Russia, as well as its oil wealth, has established it as a regional power broker. Uzbekistan, by contrast, boasts a proud legacy as the region’s cultural centre and cradle of Islam; and its sophisticated urban heritage and enchanting architecture (outside of Tashkent, it should be noted) go hand-in-hand with the history of various of its cities as important trading points and oases along the ancient Silk Road trading route between Europe and China. Tashkent, or Toshkent meaning ‘City of Stone’ in Turkic, most probably suffers in comparison with the reputation of such awe-inspiring jewels as Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva, which were not aesthetically Sovietised and are still filled with graceful minarets, delicately tiled medressas, imposing mosques and cool cobbled courtyards. All of these renowned spots lie on my path back to find the Aral Sea on the Uzbek side.
Geographically as well as historically, Uzbekistan lies right at the heart of Central Asia. It shares a northern and western border with oil-rich Kazakhstan, is flanked on the east by mountainous Kyrgyzstan and troubled Tajikistan, and in the south by volatile Afghanistan and theme-park Turkmenistan. It is one of only two countries in the world that are double landlocked, or surrounded by countries that are themselves landlocked, the other being Lichtenstein. Memorise that for your next pub quiz!
Uzbekistan has Central Asia’s largest population at 27.8 million, but its area of 447,400 square kilometres is only about one-sixth the size of Kazakhstan –Central Asia’s largest country in terms of landmass. The Uzbek language, like Kazakh, is Turkic but is now written with a Latin script, rather than Cyrillic. This is telling, as there is far less Russian influence and a correspondingly smaller Russian population here, than is evident in Kazakhstan.
The first and only other time I was in Tashkent was in late 2001 when I was sent here briefly as a Reuters correspondent, just after 9/11 and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. All eyes were on Uzbekistan’s sealed southern border, where the Soviet-built Friendship Bridge straddles the Amu Darya river, as a possible entry point into Afghanistan. Then there was a heavy police presence on Tashkent’s streets, with uniformed men on almost every street corner, and the city was full of journalists waiting for news to break and with little else to do but drink. Most mornings the Reuters photographer, TV producer and cameraman — two large Russians and a wiry but indefatigable Chechen — would knock on my door at around 10am proffering a bottle of cognac. I had to stop answering the door after a while because they wouldn’t take no for an answer. Most days I managed to hold them off until about 5pm. In 2011 there is a much lower (at least visible) police presence on the streets, but one thing that hasn’t changed from back then is the financial situation.
First and most importantly there are two exchange rates — official and black market. If you change dollars at the black market rate and then pay fixed som prices, especially for high cost items like plane tickets, you can save around 30-40 percent on the equivalent dollar or official rate price. Changing money on the black market means going to the Chorsu Bazaar and exchanging crisp 50 or 100 dollar bills (no old, torn or otherwise damaged notes will be accepted) with the money guys (they will glide silently out of the woodwork if you wait around long enough) for black plastic bags overflowing with tens of thousands of wrinkled and battered som bills held together by knobbly elastic bands.
Uzbekistan has one of those currencies that, at first, makes you feel like a millionaire. The highest denomination note is 1,000 som, which is worth less than 50 U.S. cents on the black market. So you can imagine the number and thickness of the wads when you are changing 50 dollars at a rate of around 2,500 som per dollar. But the millionaire look soon loses its charm, as I can’t fit worthwhile amounts of cash in my wallet and have to resort to carrying around the black plastic bag in my backpack and counting thousands of som out surreptitiously under a table or inside the bag each time I have to pay for something. It’s not exactly elegant. My only consolation is that everyone else must be doing the same thing.
And there are only a handful of ATMs where you can actually draw money out, so you have to budget wisely here or be prepared to free up days to deal with a paperwork-heavy banking system. One day it took 30 minutes, four people, six pieces of paper and eight signatures (yes, I counted) to draw out 200 dollars — four 50 dollar bills — on my Mastercard.
Money aside, my most important mission in Tashkent this time around is to track down the painter Rafael Matevosyan, who has dedicated his life to chronicling the Aral Sea and its disappearance in pictures since his first visit there in 1962. I want to ask him if he’ll tell me his story and the story of his Aral Sea.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Almaty, Aral Sea, Aralsk, borders, Central Asia, Environment, Islam, Kazakhstan, money, Rafael Matevosyan, Soviet Union, Tashkent, trains, Uzbekistan, war, water
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Children Are The Future
Today there is an air of festivity about Aral. Instead of the usual dusty silence, the streets, or rather the main street, is filled with cars crawling bumper to bumper and honking their horns. The few drinks stands, which usually have no more than two customers at a time and that’s during their busy periods, are assailed by groups of teenagers in threes and fours counting out coins to buy Cokes and Fantas. Girls dressed in what looks like a less saucy version of the classic French maid outfit — black satiny dresses with full, short skirts and white aprons –, their shiny black braids adorned with large white bows, stroll arm-in-arm amongst what passes for a traffic jam here. “Hey, what’s going on?” I ask one young lady, who is also wearing a pale-blue sash across her chest. I recognise her from the Internet cafe where she asked to practise her English with me once. “It’s graduation day!” she throws over her shoulder as two of her friends drag her off with a half skip. “Come to the square tonight — there’s a party! Everyone’s going to be there.”
When I was last here in 2002, I noted the apparently forlorn tone of a sign — Children Are The Future – inscribed above the doorway of a deserted-looking school. Today a new generation of Aral students are celebrating their freedom like teenagers all over the world, and many will soon head off to universities in cities such as Kyzylorda, Aktobe and Almaty. I’m curious as to what their plans for the future are. Is this their ticket out of Aral?
Nursultan, who bears the same first name as Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, is among the recent crop of high school graduates and will soon be heading to Almaty to study in the city university’s medical faculty. He’s a tall, lanky 17-year-old in a grey V-neck T-shirt and beige trousers, with the broad shoulders and strong build of the man he is to become, but still the roundish baby face and shy smile of the child he has just recently been. I ask him how he feels about finishing up at school. “I’m very happy, but I’m nervous as well about leaving my friends and my hometown,” he tells me at the now-empty high school, where he is helping clear out boxes and books from the classrooms. “It’s our last big graduation party tonight, and then I’m heading off to Almaty to study to be a pharmacist.”
He knows Almaty well as his older sister is studying there and he has been to visit her many times. Now it’s his turn to head off there for the five years it will take to graduate as a pharmacist. So what about when he’s done? Will he stay in the big city? “No, I plan to return to Aral. I’m used to living here and when I’m away I miss it. In my heart I belong here. I hope to get a job as a pharmacist here after I finish my studies.” Of course there is no telling what may happen once he gets used to big city life, and when perhaps he discovers that jobs in Aral are not so easy to come by.
But there is a stronger force than employment pulling him home. “I’m one of three kids, and I’m the only son, so it’s my duty to come home and take care of my parents.” The ties that bind. The Kazakh sense of family is strong and several times when I have asked people in Aral what brought them here, or persuaded them to return once they had left, the answer has been parents — either their own, or perhaps a spouse’s.
Add to that a sense of pride in being from Aral, and an almost perverse sense of martyrdom in some quarters about what Aral people are capable of withstanding, and I’m ready to believe that many of these teenagers will come back home after they have completed their studies. After all, I’ve met adults in their 30s and 40s who have done so and are still living here. “My parents told me about the sea when I was younger, they said they used swim in it when they were kids,” Nursultan says, brushing self-consciously at his dark, spiky hair. “Local people are psychologically strong, they are very patient in overcoming difficulties because of what they have been through.”
Maybe there’s something about the mythology of the dying sea that draws them back as well. A few days earlier I was invited to the house of an Aral musician, now in his 70s, who composes dirges and ballads about the sea to play on the traditional dombra, a small two-stringed lute with an oval box shape. “My mother used to bathe me in the Aral Sea when I was a baby, so now the Aral is in my blood. The Aral Sea is my mother,” he said, caressing the strings of his dombra with a doleful air. “She is coming back.”
That night after dinner, I head down to the town square at around 10pm. You can already hear the party from a good way off, and cars are parked up in front of the square — tailgating, though with less beer. “Everyone” is indeed out and dressed up for the occasion, the young men wear shiny suits and skinny ties, while the young women show off brightly coloured cocktail dresses and floor-length ball gowns paired with vertigo-inducing high heels, their hair teased into ringlets, chignons and french twists. I feel decidedly underdressed in my scraggy ponytail, worn jeans and grubby T-shirt.
Students, parents and really anyone else who fancied a night out for once are gathered around the edges of the square and at one end there is a stage where two student MCs are keeping events lively. The scene is reminiscent of a cross-between a school formal dance and a student cabaret. A display of traditional dancing is followed by what seems to me to be a sort of homage to The Sound of Music, with girls in long white dresses, hats and gloves being courted in dance and swept off their feet by dapper-looking boys who offer them roses. A local TV cameraman is there gathering video footage, and several photographers who are definitely not among the proud parents snap picture after picture. Soon the students converge upon the square and dance together in big circles, alternately whooping and singing along to a jaunty pop tune that chants “Ka-zakh-stan” over and over.
These are not the faces of despair.
A woman, probably in her mid-20s, is standing behind me, watching the proceedings with a young baby in her arms. “These big graduation parties didn’t exist when I was a student,” she says. “They started holding them about five years ago here. I wouldn’t have been allowed out to such a party.”
Just before midnight I slip away home, leaving the students to their well-earned partying, which I hope will go on well into the night.
A few days later I’m standing in the departures hall of Almaty’s airport and I notice a large map of Kazakhstan hung high on a wall, with a photo of President Nazarbayev superimposed alongside it, striding forward in a purposeful fashion. The map shows the country’s rivers and the three main bodies of water — the Caspian Sea, Lake Balkhash and the Aral — as patches of bright blue, but it only labels the first two. It seems like an odd omission to me. Is the Aral Sea slowly disappearing off the map? It also reminds me that some experts have said that Lake Balkhash, in southeastern Kazakhstan, is in danger of becoming the next Aral Sea. The lake covers 16,400 kilometres — much smaller than the Aral’s 1960 surface area of 67,500 square kms — but, like the Aral Sea, it is shrinking because too much water is being diverted away from the rivers that feed it. Will the Aral Sea be able to recover itself, at least here in Kazakhstan? And can the Aral Sea story serve as a cautionary tale for generations to come? What does Aral’s future hold?
Posted in Kazakhstan
Tagged Almaty, Aral Sea, Aralsk, Central Asia, children, Environment, future, Kazakhstan, Soviet Union, water
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Lessons in Kazakh
[S]everal of the women beckoned me aside and started to mutter in Russian. When I said I did not understand this language, they were incredulous, pointing to my fair hair as proof that I must be Russian.
— Robert Byron, The Road to Oxiana
I’m beginning to feel a bit like the Pied Piper. From the house I’m staying in, which is just across the road from Aral’s train station, into what must be seen as the “centre” of town — the main street where most of the few shops are situated and the dusty central square that is home to the local government offices and the two working ATM machines — is about a 10-minute walk, crossing the sand-covered and disused railway tracks, passing the green-domed mosque and the town water pump, and avoiding the pack of stray mangy dogs that always hangs out on the same corner. I’m usually only a few steps out of the door when it begins. Zdrastvuyte! Russkaya? Privyet! The high fluting voices of children follow me down the street, shouting greetings and questions in Russian as I continue on my way. If I turn around they scatter in all directions, giggling, but as soon as I start walking again the chorus starts afresh. Child-size heads pop up above fences and little faces appear in windows. Privyet! Kak dela?
And it’s not just the children. Russian follows me wherever I go here. The language of occupiers, of light-haired and light-eyed invaders and conquerors. I fit the physical description ’tis true, although my language skills in that particular area leave something to be desired. Where in Almaty I could pass unnoticed, slip through the streets as maybe a foreigner or a Kazakh-born Russian but no one cares that much, here I don’t stand a chance. I’m clearly a foreigner and so the default language is Russian, which is fine except I wish I could speak some Kazakh. A Turkic language written in a 42-letter version of the Cyrillic alphabet, Kazakh, and also Russian are spoken and signposted side by side in the big cities here. Everyone speaks Russian — a legacy of Soviet times — while only about 64 percent of the population speak Kazakh. Russian is the first language for some urban Kazakhs, as well as the sizeable Russian minority. But the further out into the countryside you go, the less Russian you hear. In the most remote areas, Russian is considered a language of “foreigners.” In Aral today there is only one Russian-language school, whereas in Soviet days all teaching was done through Russian and Kazakh was only spoken in the home.
In Kazakh I’ve only made it as far as rakhmet (thank you) for now. The other day I tried it out while buying water in a small shop at the railway station. I ordered what I needed in Russian and then thanked the lady behind the counter in Kazakh. Rakhmet. Her eyes lit up. “You speak Kazakh?” I felt guilty for having somehow led her on. “No, just rakhmet,” I replied, a little crestfallen. Back to Russian again.
G., who runs the internet cafe in Aral, is in his early 30s, smokes Camel filterless cigarettes and wears tight black jeans. He doesn’t want to speak to me in Russian. He would prefer to practise his English with me. Our conversations often take on a slightly surreal tone. I come away from them asking myself probing questions about my life, questions that he did not intend by the way. His information needs are much simpler than that.
In the Internet Cafe, Aral
G: Are you married?
ME: No
G: What?
ME: No, I’m not married.
G: But what?
[Is this a 'what' of overwhelming shock and disbelief, I ask myself? Sadness? Pity?]
ME: What do you mean what? What am I if I’m not married? Single, I guess.
G: But what you not married?
[Huh]
ME: Oh, you mean WHY? Why am I not married?
G: Ah, yes, WHY you not married?
ME: [Sighs] I wish I had a good answer for you buddy, I really do.
“If you’re not married by the time you’re 25 here, then people will think there’s something wrong with you,” Akmaral, my translator, tells me. It’s not the first time I’ve heard it said in this part of the world. Sometimes it’s just easier to invent a fake husband back home in order to avoid the inevitable looks of shock and confusion that typically follow such a confession. But that’s OK. I’ve also collected three wedding proposals (rakhmet!) in the two weeks I’ve been here in Aral, even though I am considered well past my prime. Or maybe because… hmmm. It would be one effective way to learn Kazakh, that’s for sure.
In any case, I think this might also mean it’s almost time for me to move on.
Posted in Kazakhstan
Tagged Aral Sea, Aralsk, Central Asia, Environment, foreigners, Kazakh, Kazakhstan, Russian, Soviet Union
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