As long as we can remember, our image of Silk Road towns was blue. Blue domes, blue tiles, blue sky.
(Click here for more Uzbekistan photos)
The bus moves slowly through the desert, it is too hot, and everyone is slumped drowsily in their seats. Suddenly someone stirs and looks out of the window. We are coming to a town. There is a huge blue dome visible from afar in the blue sky: The Mausoleum of Khodja Ahmed Yasawi in Turkistan. Although geographically in Kazakhstan today, architecturally it belongs to the blue-domed monuments of Samarkand, Bukhara and Shakhrisabz in Uzbekistan.
A lot of them are built by the Timurid Dynasty. Its founder Timur was born in 1336 in a village south of today’s Samarkand. He became leader of Transoxania in 1370, and at the height of his rule (around 1400) his realm spanned from India to Russia. Due to a limp acquired in battle, he was also called Timur-i-Leng (Timur the Lame), a name distorted to “Tamerlane” in the West. While he slaughtered his defeated enemies with excessive cruelty, he spared the best artisans in the conquered towns and brought them to his capital Samarkand to build magnificent madrasas (theological universities), mausoleums and mosques.
In Uzbekistan, Timur’s home country, many of the most beautiful examples of Timurid architecture have been restored to their former glory. At the same time, the traditional harsh way of dealing with enemies of the state is also well-adhered to. Tanks and machine guns guard the entrance to the Ferghana valley, where civil unrest and demands for independence from Uzbekistan have spread in the past years. Groups of bored militias patrol the streets and metro stations of the capital Tashkent and control passports at random. We have often seen people being led away for no apparent reason. “I have been arrested in the metro twice, and once all the foreigners were evacuated for several weeks to be out of the way for police raids”, a cheerful American working for the UN told us. Locals complain about the arbitrariness of police controls – and have no choice but to pay bribes so often and so openly that even we foreigners notice.
This year, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kirgizstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan are all celebrating 15 years of independence after the breakdown of the Soviet Union. In an effort to shape a new national identity based on the glorious past, the statues of Marx and Lenin have been replaced by Timur and his grandson, the famous astronomer Ulug Beg (and by similar historical figures in the other countries). Gradually, national languages replace Russian, which still remains more than the lingua franca. Kazakh, a Turkic language, is written in a modified Cyrillic script, and even the transliteration of Uzbek, now in Latin letters, is based on the Russian alphabet. As in Russian there is no “h”. For loanwords, usually a “g” (“г”) is used instead. Thus, we read and hear (yes, they also pronounce it like “g”) words like “Golland,” “Gamburger” and “Gipermarket.” “From Berlin?,” a young football fan enquired: “Wow, Gertha!”
We are now curious (and a bit worried) to see the historical legacies in Turkmenistan: Timur or Stalin? Our five-day transit visa is valid until 18 September, well ahead of the Independence Day in October. Apparently, no visas are issued for the whole of October in order to keep all foreigners away during the celebrations. As we suppose there are no Internet connections from Turkmenistan, we will (hopefully) be in touch again from Baku (Azerbaijan).
