Building History

If you read Terroir’s previous blog on Kyrgyzstan, you might be forgiven for thinking that the whole country consists of sweeping mountain pastures, picturesque nomads, woolly yaks, woolly yurts and re-purposed railway carriages.  This isn’t quite true, of course, and this week we will, finally, give you a peep at those three historic monuments we mentioned previously.   

But we will start our story in prehistory – perhaps 4,000 years ago – with Bronze Age rock carvings (images below from the Cholpon-Ata Open-air Petroglyph Museum) …

… and fascinating Balbal figures. The Balbals reminded us very much of the archaeological site at Filitosa in southern Corsica and the southern mainland of France, some 4,000 miles to the west.

Below: left Balbals at Cholpon-Ata Open-air Petroglyph Museum); right, at Filitosa, Corsica (© Amaury Laporte https://www.flickr.com/search/?text=Filitosa%20corsica&license=4%2C5%2C6%2C9%2C10)

Subsequent political geography seems complex.  The early silk trading routes started over two thousand years ago and the ‘owner/occupiers’ of what is now Kyrgyzstan included the Saka tribes (who seem to have successfully seen off Alexander the Great), Huns and Tocharians. Turkik peoples, from the west, started to arrive from the 6th century AD and Arab invasions brought Islam to central Asia in the 7th century AD.   

[Various sources including the Bradt guide to Kyrgyzstan].

So now we can go to our first heritage building - the Burana Tower - a remant of the ancient city of Balasgun, founded in the 10th century by the Karakhanids, a Turkik group described by our guide book as ‘cultured’.  It seems they were also heavily into trade, and Balasgun (in the Chui valley of northern Kyrgyzstan) is said to be one of three cities in the region controlling the silk roads.  The tower is thought to have been a minaret, heavily restored in the 1970’s. 

The surrounding urban complex (a fortress plus dwellings, shops, baths, mausoleums, etc) is hard to imagine now, but the small museum is interesting - and also amusing due to a bad attack of that universal problem of mis-translation. The Russian text refers to ‘women’s adornments’, the English text to ‘wallies’. If you know what the ‘wallies’ might be (image below right), please let us know. A couple of Scottish suggestions are already in (china dogs and ‘peely-wally’ ie pale/off-colour), but they don’t seem to get quite to the heart of the matter!

Tash Rabat – our second monument - is a breathtaking, 15th century, silk road caravanserai on a site which may also have been used as an earlier monastery (Christian or perhaps Buddhist) prior to the arrival of Islam.  The location is remote – over 100 km from the town of Naryn – but well worth the long climb into the Tian Shan Mountains.  The Chinese border is maybe 30 km away, as the Eagle flies. 

Half buried in the hillside, the stone built structure must have been part hotel, part secure warehouse and perhaps part administrative centre too. The situation is phenomenal, and the building’s historic aura is almost tangible. Inside it is cool, secure, but cunningly constructed to make good use of natural daylight. Around 30 small rooms provide bedrooms, kitchens, storage, prayer rooms and prison cells. It was thronged with ghosts.

By the time the Tash Rabat caravanserai was built, it seems that ethnically Kyrgyz people (nomads/warriors) had arrived in the Tien Shan Mountains and spread into what is now called Kyrgyzstan.  This journey from northern Mongolia included robust altercations with rivals and futile attempts to resist Ghengis Khan and his Mongolian Golden Horde.  Later (17th century) the western Mongol Oirats got involved, only to be replaced, in the 18th century, by the Chinese.  Things seemed to get tough again with a takeover by the Uzbek Kokand Khanate (the guide book mentions issues relating to Silk Road fortresses, high taxes and violent repression). 

Next: enter the Russians.  The Tsar’s armies defeated the Kokand forces in 1865, annexed the territory and took control.  It seems that, in social and landscape terms, nothing was ever the same again. 

A new breed of migrants started to enter Kyrgyzstan – sedentary, house dwelling, farmers.  Many were soldiers, but many others were landless peasants, offered free land (well, actually nomadic, seasonal grazing) and building materials, in exchange for populating what the Tsar saw as a frontier zone.  Russian or Soviet rule would last until the early 21st century. 

Not all incoming migrants were Russian, of course, but all needed some form of shelter.  Permanent military and domestic structures must have started to make significant inroads into the nomadic Kyrgyz people’s lowland pastures. 

Many of the new incomers were Muslim Hui and Uyghur refugees from China and one assumes their spritual needs were already met, at least in part, by the existing Islamic infrastructure of the Kyrgyz society. But the Russians would have been Orthodox Christians, looking to construct churches as well as homes, barns and barracks. 

And so we come to our third historic Monument, the splendid, wooden Orthodox Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, in Karakol.

The cathedral website is in Russian, but travel websites (such as https://visitkarakol.com/holy_trinity_cathedral), dedicated to enticing tourists to Kyrgystan, provide useful background information.

Once a garrison town, Karakol is now described in our guide book as “delightfully serene … resonant with the ghosts of 19th-century rural Russian life”.  We can thoroughly recommend the small Museum of Local History which illustrates, amongst many other things, the lives and homes of the peasants who arrived to take up their homeland’s offer of a better life.  Building the church must have been a significant event in their new lives and their new landscape. 

Below left: Museum of Local History and, right: agricultural machinery and dolls dressed in the costumes of the immigrants who came to farm here

The first church, apparently a small brick building, was destroyed by an earthquake in 1885, some sixteen years after it was constructed.  The larger, wooden replacement took six years to build and, at the time, was by far the tallest building in town.  The cathedral survived a rather chequered career in Soviet times but was returned to the church in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed.  It has, of course, needed considerable but we would judge, pretty successful, restoration. 

Of course there are other places of worship in Karakol. We also visited the Dungan, or ‘Chinese’ Mosque. This too is constructed from wood (completed in 1910) and also symbolises the migrant journey of the muslim, Dungan Chinese, escaping persecution. In terms of architecture, Holy Trinity brought Russia to Kyrgyzstan, but this mosque’s history is slightly more complex. As you can see, despite it's rectangular minaret, it resembles more pagoda than mosque, and reflects the Dungan’s Buddhist past.

In Britain, this would probably be a listed structure by now. We suggest it’s time Kyrgyzstan increased its heritage building list from three to four!