Tashkent
After leaving Tajikistan we came to the Uzbek capital for a couple of days.
Tashkent has a different cultural heritage than the rest of Central Uzbekistan. It’s in the North with more historical contact with China. It recently celebrated its 2,500 yr. anniversary.
The first settlement near Syndora was probably in the 8th-7th C BCE. In the 1950s and 60s excavators on the right bank of the river uncovered what was known as the “Chaght.” In the 6th & 5th C BCE there were numerous fortresses in the region.
Russian and Uzbek archeologists named the fortresses as no writing was uncovered. The first mention of the city of Chih, was by Chinese author Chang-zang in the 3rd C BCE; Chih means “Stone City” in Chinese and was duly inscribed in the authors chronicles.
Tashkent was part of the Davan Kingdom in the 4th -3rdC BCE; the capital was in Bergana. Stealing trade secrets is not anything new, and the first Chinese spy came in the 4th C BCE to learn how iron swords and knives were made. Up til then the Chinese had been repeatedly defeated by the Davan as the latter had iron and “flying horses.” The King of Davan captured the spy and threw him in prison. While in his cell he learned everything he could from the other prisoners, who were understandably upset with the King and willing to share any and all of the Kingdom’s secrets. He was either released or he escaped, no one is certain, but in any case he made it back to China and gave all the trade secrets to the enemy. These particular Chinese developed over time into the Kushan Empire. The Kushans had two main tribes led by Tishian and Chaniska. After one of the many battles with the Chin, Chaniska established the Kushans at the end of the 3rd, beginning of the 2nd C BCE. They expanded their territory to the Tashkent region and ruled here until the 2nd C CE. During the Kushan time, Buddhism came into the region and flourished well into the Samanid era. The Kushan Buddhists lived peacefully with their Zoroastrian neighbors. The Period of the Nomadic Migrations started in the 2nd C BCE.
In 350 CE one group of migrating Turks from Novosibirsk, made Tashkent their capital. Some of the other nomadic tribes went further West to the Caspian and Aral Seas. The nomadic groups were never united, but instead were governed by tribal rulers; which in turn meant that warlords had an easy time conquering the individual tribes/clans. And conquer they did; it was a revolving door with various rulers. By 550 CE most of Central Asia, with the exception of Tajikistan, which was originally part of the Sogdian Empire and was more influenced by Iran and spoke Farsi, were Turks speaking a Turkic language. They became known as Turkmen. The Sogdians were primarily merchants and farmers, while the Turkmen split into two groups farmers and nomadic tribes. There is another version of the origin of the Tajik people, that says Timur ordered what would become the Tajik population from Iran in order to construct Samarkand and when the construction was finished exiled them to the Pamirs which is why the Tajiks in the Pamirs are Shiites rather than Sunnis as the rest of Central Asia.
In 713 Kutai ibn Muslim came to the region with his army with the express purpose of converting the people to Islam. The city’s citizens revolted, but the rebels were soon suppressed and the city was destroyed.
Istakhri, an Arab historian mentions the city as ”Chashkent” and relates that it had numerous fortresses near the river, which meant that when the river flooded there was a lot of damage.
In the 10th C, the city was governed by the Samanids, but Ismoil Samanid couldn’t effectively govern the marauding nomadic tribes. Nonetheless the city grew and by the 12th C Arsland Khan Karakten, called it “Ylouishan.” The city was surrounded by mud-brick walls with 12 gates and a deep moat.
Muhammad Khorasm Shakh was one of the few to conquer the city; he did it by cutting off its water supply. People fled from the city as refuges in order to just get something to drink.
The next major invasion came from the Karakhanids who restored the city and named it Bingkent. The name ‘Tashkent’ was used by a later historian who claimed that Bingkent is a translation of Tashkent. Chin-Bing – Tash all mean stone, and kent means city.
In the 13th C Ghengis Khan made his appearance and made his son Changatai the governor of the city. Many of the current residents’ names and features derive from the Mongolian invasion. When Timur overcame the Mongols, he reconstructed the city and named it Shakrhia in honor of his youngest son, but it wasn’t an important or strategic location for the head of the Timurid dynasty. It probably also didn’t help that nearby he had suffered defeat in the Battle of the Mud (it rained in the desert, which created muddy conditions that Timur’s dry sand army wasn’t used to & his brother-in-law, Hussein didn’t arrive in time with back-up forces.)
After the fall of the Timurids, Tashkent was like a ping-pong ball between the Khanate states of Bukhara and Kokand, although it belonged to the latter more often than the former. During the Kokand Khanate the city was divided into four districts, which still exist today.
In 1865 the Tsarist Russians arrived under the leadership of General Kaufmann who played on the divisions among the three Khanates to divide and conquer. The soldiers had trouble scaling the high Tashkent walls, so they bribed a locksmith to make keys to the city gates. They then wrapped the wheels to their carts with cloth so that they wouldn’t be heard and walked into the city. Once there they burnt it and killed everyone in sight. In June of that year, the city officially became part of Tsarist Russia.
Tashkent became the backwater destination for those who the Tsar didn’t like. The first theater was built in 1910, the first newspaper in 1915. At the turn of the century and during the following decade there were a number of intellectuals who (according to the museum guide) brought Western European ideas of freedom of thought and freedom of speech to the city. (according to other people they also wanted to reinstall Sharia Law and tighter Muslim control.) The government started to crack down on the jiddists as they were called, which led to a revolt in 1917 calling for a democratic country of Turkistan. The republic, which sprang from Tashkent and Kokand included territories from the 3 Khanates and spread across parts four of the Central Asian countries lasted only 72 days, before Russia once again imposed its will. Von Kaufmann died in 1919 and Mikhail Frunze became the governor of the region then later the first Prime Minister of Central Asia under Lenin. He believed that all the intellectuals and Central Asian culture should be eliminated so that the Soviets could control the population more easily. This attitude continued under Stalin who exiled or killed the remaining jiddists who had founded a madrasah and newspaper to teach European and Muslim cultural ways, science and literature. When they questioned the government’s actions, Stalin’s response was swift and their voices permanently silenced. Every night for a period of months, 35 activists from all over were brought to a particular site and executed. Today there is a cemetery at that spot dedicated to their memory and others who were killed during Stalin’s regime.
During WWII Tashkent was called the ‘Town of Bread’ as most people not engaged in the factories were put to work in the fields to supply food for the troops. Children from other parts of the Soviet Republic were sent to work on local potato farms. Tashkent’s location and railway made it a strategically important city for the Soviets during WWII. Manufacturing factories opened for airplanes, bombers, tanks, ammunition, uniforms etc., all to support the war effort. At the end of the war, when the factories closed, there was an economic downturn in the city and people suffered. The men didn’t return after WWII, instead they were sent as fodder for the Soviet- Japanese War. One of the consequences of this military campaign was that Korean and Japanese captives were sent to the Soviet Republics and today there is a sizable Korean population in Tashkent specifically and in Uzbekistan generally. All the buildings constructed in Tashkent in the 50s and 60s were done with Korean and Japanese prisoners of war. Each of the major cities has a Japanese cemetery for them and these have now become tourist attractions for family members in Japan to come and visit their ancestors’ graves.
During the 1960s there was mass starvation as the fields that had produced food during the war were turned to cotton production. Every inch of land that didn’t have a building on it was supposed to grow cotton to meet the 5 million ton per year quota set by Moscow. Someone in Moscow, no one knows who, changed the quota to 6 Million without letting the Uzbekis know. This created a ripple effect, both in terms of human lives and environmental damage that the country is still dealing with.
In the 70s and 80s the Soviets redesigned their economic development efforts and Tashkent became the seat of the government of the Five Central Asian provinces. It was the fourth major city of the Soviet Republic after Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev. There was a fairly massive building campaign undertaken to support the population, including the building of an underground metro system the only one in Central Asia. Three of the four lines are still operational and the metro today is clean as well as efficient.
Following political pressure from the West as well as internally, the Central Asian republic’s constitutions stated that they could be independent if the President of the Soviet Union agreed. Gorbachev signed the documents for independent republics on August 31, 1991. Independence day celebrations take place in the four Turkmen nations on August 31 and Sept. 1, while Tajikistan celebrates their’s this year on Sept. 9th. Security throughout Uzbekistan is very high, especially in the Fergana Valley, during the weeks preceding the celebration.
Soviet Deputy Karimov was made President of Uzbekistan and he has been re-elected to that office seven times in a row.
As one walks around the city, there are remnants of the Soviet past all around. Some of the emblems and statues were changed, the Soviet ones now in museum archives, replaced with ones that represent the new nation. For example, near the President’s ‘White House’, is a former Soviet pillar that had an emblem of the USSR with a statue of Lenin on top. Lenin has been replaced with a beautiful bronze globe with a relief of Uzbekistan in the center, indicating that no one from the outside should interfere with Uzbekistan. (A lesson I sincerely wish our politicians would learn – no country, whether it is Syria, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan or the U.S. wants anyone to interfere in their business. We are not the world’s policemen!) In place of the emblem is a statue of ‘The Happy Mother’ with a baby in her lap. This Madonna-like image has nothing to do with Christianity, it actually comes from a VI C BCE amulet that is in the History museum. (Yep, the goddess does survive!!!) There is also the emblem that is on the flag with its wheat and cotton shafts indicating the wealth of the nation, the 8 pointed star for the 8 heavens in Islam, the crescent moon and 5 pointed star for the 5 Pillars of Islam, the sun, and valley between two rivers representing the geography of the country between the Amudarya and Srydaria Rivers, a rising Phoenix with the text in Cyrillic that states “Uzbekistan. ‘The Happy Mother‘ represents the culmination of the new country with its new beginnings, whereas ‘The Sorrowful Mother’ is the main figure by the Commemorative Walls dedicated to those who fought and died in wars ordered by the Soviets. The Sorrowful Mother looks down thinking about her lost children whose names are engraved on hundreds of bronze tablets lining two terraced walls. The contrast between ‘The Sorrowful Mother’ whose children had no freedom and ‘The Happy Mother” is a continuation of Soviet art propaganda, but an effective one. The Commemorative Walls are impressive and I was stunned to find a number of Rodins on the Tashkent panels, until reminded that people from all over the Soviet Republic were sent here during the war. My distant Croatian relatives would have been part of this mix. The imagery and symbolism doesn’t stop there though. Perhaps the largest square in the city is Mustakillik and it is graced with an open entrance with three storks, peace, happiness, and rebirth, in the center flying to the sky.
Tashkent was destroyed by an earthquake so there are not too many ancient buildings left standing. In the rebuilt Hasti Imom Complex, which has a number of new and older mosques, medrasahs, minarets and the Islamic University, is a small building that was constructed to house a very special book. According to the guidebook:
“In 650, Caliph Usman ordered his adopted son, a writer named Zeyd ibn Sabit, to collect all the records of the prophet Muhammad’s preachings and gather them all in one book. Only five copies have been made which were later sent to Mecca, Medina, Damascus, Chufa and Basra and all other drafts were burnt. Usman had left the original copy for himself. According to the legend, at the moment of his death, Usman was reading one of the copies of the Koran and hence its pages were covered with the Caliph’s blood. This copy disappeared, but after a period of time, a few copies of the Koran with blood-stained pages spread across the Muslim world, and each of them made the claim to be the original Usman Koran. One of the copies of this relic was found in Samarkand where it was kept in Hodji Ahrar mosque, a Sufi order sheikh who lived in the 15th C. On its pages, written all over with one of the most beautiful Arabian print, deep-red stains could be seen clearly which were believed by the preservers of the mosque to belong to Usman. On important national holidays the Book was carried out of the mosque to be shown to the public.
There are a few versions about how the Usman Koran got to Samarkand. The first one is that it was brought from Baghdad in the 10th C by Abubakr Caffal ash-Shashi, a theologian. The second claims that the student and successor of Hodji Ahrar went on Hajj and on his way back he cured the Caliph of Constantinople. As a gift he asked for the Usman Koran. The third and most commonly supported version is that the Usman Koran was found by Emir Timur during his campaign in Syria and Iraq and later was kept in his library from where it inexplicably was brought to the Hodji Ahrar mosque. In the early 1990s, after Uzbekistan had gained its independence, the relic was granted to mufti by the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov.” (16)
The original was taken to Leningrad, but after Independence it was returned to the country, where upon the President gave it to the Muftis.
According to Kahramon, there is a legend that says Timur had problems invading Kufa in modern day Iraq, so he called all his advisors together but they weren’t able to help. Finally a local person told him he would never be successful as the city had two sacred protective relics: Caliph Usman’s Qu’ran and Prophet Daniel (from the Lion’s Den) tomb. So the Uzbek hero brought (stole) the Qu’ran and (pillaged) Daniel’s leg bone. Daniel’s leg was placed near the Usman Qu’ran in another tomb where it grew in length to 15m. When the Russian Archbishop came to worship at Daniel’s leg’s tomb, he took some of the holy water from the tomb and sprinkled it on a dead tree outside. The tree came back to life and lived as long as the Archbishop, when he died so did the tree.
Regardless of the legends, this book is considered by Uzbeks to be the world’s oldest Qu’ran. It is written in a beautiful Kufi style calligraphy. Unfortunately, photography was strictly forbidden. When we were there, a Turkish pilgrim got in trouble with the armed guard for taking a picture of some of the Qu’rans in the neighboring rooms, and there were cameras surveying everything by the Book as well as additional guards posted on both sides. This Qu’ran is huge, when open it is between five and six feet long and at least 20 inches high. As there are maybe (I didn’t actually count them) ten lines to a page, it is a pretty thick book. We were lucky to get in, the building was closed when we got to the Complex, and I think they only opened it for the group of Turkish pilgrims, because as soon as they left we had to as well.
Tashkent is a modern city and while historically it was separate from the Central Uzbekistan metropolises, it truly is the capital city today. The historical museum is very nicely laid out and provides a wonderful introduction to the different eras. I would sincerely recommend starting one’s journey through the country here in the museum, before venturing into the overwhelming richness of Uzbeki monuments as otherwise it is very very easy to be completely confused with strange names and unfamiliar historical events.
Tashkent: The City and the Legends.Tashkent: Davr Nashriyoti, 2012
