Otherstan

Pop quiz time!

Which Central Asian stan speaks Persian (not Turkic), was always settled (never nomadic) and prints poetry on its currency?

Welcome to Otherstan! Outlierstan! Tajikistan, the smallest and poorest but most ancient and complicated country in Central Asia. Welcome to our world of cluelessness before we landed in Dushanbe, the country’s capital. 

Tajikistan is the little Stan that thinks big … really big … monumentally big. Big as in home to the largest library in Central Asia (since 2012), and the biggest museum (since 2013), and the biggest teahouse (since 2014). 

Tajikistan is a country standing tall as its Pamir Mountains (“roof of the world”). Tall as the Rogun Dam (under construction), soon to be the highest dam in the world. Tall as the tallest flagpole in the Stans (too bad, Almaty). 

In fact, Tajikistan is home  to more biggest and tallest than we can remember ever encountering in one place. In the capital, more is always better. After all, why have a handful of statues in a parkway if you can fit 25 in?

And why not build the biggest theater in Central Asia just because you have few theater-goers? 

In Tajikistan, even highway truck stops on remote mountain roads are grand/iose.

Tajikistan would stand out even without its architectural and flag-flying aspirations. Its people speak Farsi (Persian) not the Turkic tongues of the other Stans. The Tajik people were never nomads; they settled from the start, and they did it more than a millennia before their UZ-, KYRG-, KAG- and TURK- stanish neighbors galloped onto the scene.

Tajiks are more than an ethnicity; they are a culture which almost as many people outside the country identify with as inside.

Tajikistan’s population is the most religiously conservative in the Stans  so you see the most head and face covering, hear the most calls to prayer and have the most trouble finding a beer there. But how many nations put poets and poetry on their currency and name the majority of their streets for writers and philosophers?

Tajikistan manages to be more mountainous than Kyrgyzstan and on better unpaved roads (if there is such a thing).

And arguably more jaw-dropping. Driving from Dushanbe to the Uzbek border one of the most spectacularly scenic routes of a trip already loaded with spectacular scenery.

At the end of the drive through the Fann mountains, the seven glacial lakes awaiting us were photogenic enough to make the bumps worthwhile.

Tajikistan is the only place (so far) where we’ve felt we were in living history. Most of the country’s population lives in the countryside, and the countryside is a place that feels old as time.

In the end, we found the country’s rugged beauty, outsized cultural pride and monumental aspirations impressive but not exactly embraceable. 

Casual eye contact is hard to come by. Aesthetics take a back seat to grandeur and functionality to grandiosity.  Conversations with our guide sometimes became  expeditions into fringe Muslim conspiracy theories.

Tajikistan won’t end up being our favorite stan, but that’s okay. If we left everywhere we visit with a plan to linger we’d probably never get home.

COMING SOON! Alexander the Not-So-Great