Archive sections: ‘For the Record’
This was written a few years ago and is based on an answer to an enquiry we received by email from someone who was planning to bring their own vehicle to Kyrgyzstan. As such it is written in the first person. It is not meant to be definitive advice or exhaustive. Make sure you have [...]
For those of us involved in tourism, we used to understand the acronym as World Tourism Organization – a UN agency which brought together the members of the United Nations to consider issues relating to one of the World’s major industries … but a few years ago we had to get used to a new [...]
Kuman Ait is also known as Eid al-Adha (or the “Feast of Sacrifice”) and is the most important feast of the Muslim calendar. (Eid is an Arabic word derived from the Arabic word, “aada” that means a recurring event – one that returns. In Islam it it is used to denote a festival.)
Ilya Fyodotovich Terentev served as the first elected mayor of the city, between 1895 and 1900, although – for some reason – he doesn’t appear on all of the lists enumerating the Mayors of the city.
As a nomadic people, travelling from place and erecting yurts wherever there was pasture for their livestock … the Kyrgyz don’t have a wide heritage in terms of architecture. Indeed, some people say that the closest they came to architecture was in erecting mausoleums for people after they had died. Of course, the Kyrgyz were not [...]
One aspect of Kyrgyz Culture which has come to the attention of the West is the practice of Ala Kachuu – or “Bride Stealing”. It appears that this tradition stems from the times of nomadic culture and lifestyle of the past where people were constantly on the move from one pasture (jailoo) to another. (It [...]
Irkeshtam is approached from Osh, the second city of Kyrgyzstan, in the South of the country. The road travels south along the valley of the Taldyk and Gulcho river gorges to the village of Sary Tash (“Yellow Stone” in Kyrgyz), which sits on a cross roads. To the West lies the road to Dushanbe in [...]
Yakov Nikiforovich Logvinenko was born on 23rd October,1896 in the Poltava province of Ukraine and his family moved to Pishpek in 1912. He was conscripted into the Imperial Army in the First World War and sent to the front. During the war he achieved the rank of corporal – but after the October Revolution he returned [...]
Alexey Illarionovich Ivanitsyn was a mechanic who participated in the 1905 revolution – and the Imperial authorities exiled him to Central Asia – where he arrived destitute and penniless.
Sometimes, people get a little confused when they come to see me in my office. There are the things you might expect to see in an office: computers, papers and so on, but the decoration is, I admit, a strange and eclectic mix. As well Traditional Kyrgyz crafts, represented by a Shyrdak and a Mongolian [...]
