Onward to Tajikistan

I CAN FIND most countries on an unmarked globe but Tajikistan I had to look up. I knew it was in Central Asia, and thought that it had a Russian border and an Afghan border (I was wrong) but that was basically it. I found that I didn’t even know anything about the Tajiks. I thought that they were some kind of Turks. They’re not.

Tajikistan’s borders are with China, Afghanistan, Kyrgizstan, and Uzbekistan. There is no Russian border. The Tajiks speak a language related to Farsi, the language of Iran, and to Kurdish. The borders of Tajikistan were established after the Russian Revolution. It was first classified as an autonomous region of Soviet Uzbekistan (Uzbeks being Turkic) but the Tajiks claimed they were not Uzbeks, and wanted their own Soviet Socialist Republic. This came to pass. Now, they are their own country. The capital city is Dushanbe, which Wikipedia has descried as “little…more than a small village” in the past.

In the Central Asian context, Tajikistan seems to be in a kind of country-cousins relationship with the culture centers of the region. When we think of great cities of Central Asia we think of Samarqand, Bokhara, Tashkent, Fergana, Kokand, all in Uzbekistan, and Kashgar in Xinjiang. We do not think of cities in Tajikistan.

For northern Central Asia as a whole,