Kazakhstan – Don't hold your breath

Wilderness is the crack in a tame world

A phone call from a friend standing at the south pole told me that there is no real wilderness left in the world. Humans and their technology cover the world. But not entirely. There are gaps and cracks in this taming. You can still fall through and see the wilderness that the world once was, and will be sometime. The beautiful scene above is not a garden, but a piece of wilderness left deliberately to itself as a sanctuary for plants. High up in the wind swept plateaus of the western ghats, low plants have evolved to make the most of a brief abundance of rain in poor metallic soil. The Kaas plateau is a refuge created for them: an ounce of protection is better than a pound of rewilding. Most of the year it looks like a bare rocky plateau with dry grass. But for a few weeks at the end of the monsoon there is a changing carpet of flowers.

At the other end of the continental plate, where its movement to the north west has raised high mountains prone to earthquakes, oak and pine forests abound. We took a short walk through it in the first rains of the monsoon. Human feet have marked a slippery route through the slopes of the forest below Hatu peak in the Shimla hills where we traversed the line between oak and pine. The grass is abundant enough for horses and cattle to graze on. This place is wild, will perhaps never be completely tame, but highways, towns, farms are a short distance away.

In the middle of the monsoon we saw the inverse. On the sea facing slope of the old maritime fort of Cabo de Rama in Goa a garden has begun to run wild. The local vegetation has recolonized cleared beds, and some of the garden plants have over-run their borders. In a decade the last blurred lines of the garden will fade into wilderness. This is a process we saw over and over again in Goa. The wild comes back, as it will sometime in the future when we are gone.

But here is a different wilderness, rapidly disappearing. The lesser Florican (Sypheotides indicus) is very rare, and very endangered because of habitat loss. The scrublands of northern India where it made its home have largely become agricultural land, in a repeat of the degradation of land that is common in Europe and the Americas. Farmers near Ajmer have now leave fallow lands between fields to allow these birds to nest. Community involvement in protection is a new story that is evolving in parts of the world. This is an older social contract struggling to establish itself over the greed that is the legacy of the modern empires which carried a certain style of industrial capitalism across the world in the 18th century.

I came across a similar story in Kazakhstan. This is the beautiful Kolsay lake in the Ili-Altau mountains, which is part of Tien Shan range. The lake is artificial, being created by a dam on the Kolsay river. At one end of the lake there is a rapidly expanding apron of tourist utilities. But the rest of the area around the lake and river has been left wild. Hikers and campers, and even other construction, is permitted only in a narrow ribbon in the mountains. Decades of unthinking exploitation of nature have left an industrial base looking for more minerals to extract. But at the same time a romantic social consciousness of a nomadic past helps to preserve certain wild places.

Nepal is even more committed to preserving its wild places. Its small industrial base cannot out-compete its income from tourism that is attracted by unspoilt landscapes. You can see this tension in the photo here. The three rhinoceri were hemmed in by two jeeps full of photographers. It was a tense situation, which could have exploded at any time. Fortunately, the drivers of both vehicles has enough experience to give the animals space to be free to explore ways out of the impasse. A similar tension is the cause of Nepal’s unsettled politics, but there are innovations being tried to balance the needs of a decent life for people and of preserving the wide wild world.

Easter Orthodox

You read about this whenever you read about the calendar: how the Julian calendar, set up by the first Council of Nicaea in what we call today 325 CE, overestimated the length of the year by a very small amount. As a result, the spring equinox had shifted by 10 days by 1583 CE when Pope Gregory issued a papal bull to reform the calendar. Not only did it set up the modern mechanism where the century year is not a leap year unless it is divisible by 400 (so 2000 CE was a leap year but 2100 CE will not be), but also shifted the date of the Spring Equinox back to what it had been in 325 CE. However the Great Schism of 1054 CE had severed the link between the Roman and the Eastern churches, so the Orthodox church retains the Julian calendar.

Knowing all this is not the same as being able to apply it in your everyday life. So I was taken aback when I realized that I’d booked a hotel run by Russian speakers in Kazakhstan during the weekend of Easter. In 2024 CE the date of Easter Sunday has shifted by 36 days between the Eastern and Western churches. Of course astronomical reasons can only account for 13.5 days out of this, so other doctrinal differences must come into play. So you may say that experience taught me more than mere school history.

Due to the holidays, staff were thin on the ground. But so was occupancy. So the hotel ran very smoothly. On Easter Sunday the default breakfast changed from the normal meat-heavy style to the sweeter and somewhat lighter thing that you see above: a bowl of porridge with berries and dates, muesli and milk, a slice of black bread, a small serving of fruits, a red berries juice, and tea. Even in this light avatar it was heavier than our normal breakfast. So when we walked past the reception and were invited to pick up something from the table of Easter goodies laid out in one corner, we only took a photo and pinch of something sweet.

Contemporary art of Kazakhstan

We didn’t manage to seek out galleries and art spaces in Kazakhstan. They were not close to the places where tourists go. Nor was it easy to find good quality Kazakh handicrafts. That makes me suspect that the market for art is very small. It was only in museums that we came across examples of contemporary Kazakh art. Artists were constrained at one time by the requirement that art follow what is called today the Soviet Realist Style. Even while keeping within this style some people could produce interesting art as you see in the gallery below. Since the country’s independence, Arabic calligraphy has begun to flourish. I’ve blogged elsewhere about an exhibition that I saw. The big space between these two poles is being filled up, as we realized from the museums in Astana and Almaty.

I found several interesting pieces among the older, realistic, works. The sculpture of the violinist that you see above drew my attention because of the look of concentration on the face of the subject. The two prints were interesting because of different reasons. The one of the mother and child dealt with shapes and abstractions while the one with the road and the rails played with space while remaining within the political boundaries of the time.

In another room in the museum I’d seen a much older sculpture which was called the Second Tobolsk Thinker. Many of these large pieces of sculpture which are found across the world are ritual objects. I’m sure art was put to decorative use, much in the way that we do, at all times. But the money for these large pieces once came from organized religion (as it does today, from banks and tech companies). Although this piece is far from contemporary, I put it here to show that ancient forms from this region continue to influence modern Kazakh artists.

The bronzes and ceramics which I show in the gallery above seem to me to be consciously searching for a national identity. This is only to be expected from a country which has been in existence since the very end of the previous century and has to deal with the many ethnicities that live together. Even in terms of religious belief it has to find a balance between the more recent Islamic and Christian faiths, the older Buddhist and Zoroastrian beliefs, and the ancient Tengriism of the nomadic ancestors of large parts of Asia and Europe. Artistic inspiration is taken from all these strata of history.

Among the galleries of paintings I found myself getting bored. I have a blind spot when it comes to representative paintings; I get bored of them very quickly unless the artist has tackled a technical issue. The only photo I took was of this interesting mixed media piece: ceramic and paint. The artist has taken the nomadic history of Kazakhstan as his inspritation. It’s part of the overall post-independence theme that I found: a search for the notion of Kazakhstan. No wonder the art is so interesting. I just wish there was an easier way to engage with it: galleries and art spaces, for example.

Two interesting sculptures

But heft is not what I look for in art. There has to be a lightness of being (now where did that come from, I wonder). The two sculptures you see in the video above have that quality of fun, while still being accomplished works. You need to walk around both in order to see them properly, so I thought of taking a video.

A Kazakh chain restuarant

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Our day out birding in Kazakhstan was long. It was time for an afternoon’s tea when we finally pulled into a village for lunch. Bakht, our guide and driver, had warned us that lunch would be very late but pleasant. It was a self service restaurant and we inspected the food on offer. Lots of meat and rice as always in Kazakhstan, but also the usual salads, and some grilled veggies. The Family and I decided to share plates. She ordered plov, the Kazakh version of pilua, and a large salad. I chose a lentil soup and a plate of meat. The portions were large and pooling would be right for the two of us.

The skewers of meat had not escaped my attention. I thought they were kababs until Bakht said “Shaslik” and ordered a combination of skewers and rice. I hadn’t realized that we were in shashlik country. That was something to keep in mind for later. All three of us decided to have a chai with the food (it was tea time after all). Later I walked up to the sweet counter and chose a few baklava for everyone to share. They turned out pretty decent.

Before we drove off I turned to take a photo of the restuarant. We were happy with it and I wanted to keep it in my memory. It was a good thing I took that photo, because I wouldn’t have remembered its name otherwise. Later I found that Degirmen was a well-known chain of restuarants across Kazakhstan. It serves good food at a very reasonable price, and the locals love it.

Nargis

Many springs have passed without me seeing a daffodil in bloom. When I passed a flowering bed of nargis (genus Narcissus) I took a few photos. Later I wondered about the ubiquity of these flowers in ancient literature: the Greeks and Persians knew it. It turns out that even the number of species in this genus of beautiful flowers is disputed. The genus probably originated during the Neogene period (23 million years ago to less than 3 million years ago). Since their center of diversity is in the Iberian peninsula, it seems that they originated there and spread eastwards, speciating wildly as they spread around the Mediterranean. When humans came to these parts of the world, they found it full of many varieties of these six-petalled flowers with their internal crown. They are beautiful flowers, and it hardly matters to common a flower fancier like me whether there are 25 species or over 150: I don’t know enough to tell the species apart.

Disturbing the Sleeping Saints of Sayram (3)

We drove past a school and into a bumpy side lane until we saw a small minaret in the middle of Sayram. This was the Qydyr Paygambar minaret (or Kizir Paigambar, if you follow Persian orthography rather than Arabic in referring to an apocryphal companion to the prophet Moses, Musa Paigambar in Persian). The gate to the little park was closed, and our taxi driver walked up to a nearby house, rang the bell, and got the keys for the gate. We walked around the 20th century brick structure: a reconstruction of a minaret of the mosque which once stood here. There was a very narrow spiral staircase leading up, but the entrance to it was locked.

In one corner of the park, under a shade were archeologists’ trenches. The old mosque is under investigation. If I was Kazakh I would presumably have known the stories which are associated with this place. In the absence of that cultural knowledge, the significance of the place was lost to us. The first mosque in Kazakhstan was built in Sayram, after it fell to an Arab army in the 8th century CE. For a few moments I entertained the idea that this mosque was that. But it probably isn’t, because a board near the gate said that the minaret dates back to the 12th century.

Sayram, now an industrial suburb of Shymkent, is said to be 3000 years old. But as usual in any town that ancient, there are only a few things which are even a few hundred years old. Most of this suburb of Shymkent is modern buildings: some from the 21st century, many from the 20th. Perhaps only some parts of the mosques and mausoleums are as old as the 18th century. You’ll have to be an archaeologist to be able to find any artifact of the medieval town, and an archaeologist with enormous resources to dig for any remnants of the 1800 years of the pre-Islamic history of the town. A little more than seven centuries ago, Genghis Khan is said to have camped in Sayram as his army laid siege to Otrar, another of the old Silk Route towns. His army destroyed the town completely, but paradoxically, the digs there gave me a much clearer picture of life in those times. In Sayram there is little that is older than the gate and wall you see above, an early 20th century structure. The keeper of the monument was probably born half a century later.

This was the entrance to the tomb of Mirali Baba, an Islamic scholar, and the son of Padshak Mailk Baba, a Sufi theologian from a time soon after Khoja Ahmad Yasawi. The style of the monument was different from the others that I saw. The rest were built in the early Soviet years, over dilapidated or disappeared older structures, and were modelled after the Timurid tomb of Yasawi. This was altogether different. The facade was more decorative, and the door was well carved. A single dome above the center was pointed rather than rounded.

There was a nice view of the Sayram mosque which stood next to it. Later I realized that the fact that Yasawi’s mother’s grave stood right next to the mosque could mean that a mosque stood there even in the 11th century. Was this then the site of the mosque built by Iskak Bab, the leader of the Arab army that conquered Sayram, and brought Islam to Kazakhstan? That would make it the site of the first mosque ever built in Kazakhstan. There are more questions about the monuments of Sayram than answers.

Disturbing the Sleeping Saints of Sayram (2)

Sayram looks like a small industrial suburb of Kazakhstan’s third largest city, Shymkent. But brush away the thin surface of Russian facade, and you find deeper layers. Sayram, under its older name of Isfijab, was once a thriving city on the silk route, and traces its founding from about 1000 BCE. The penultimate layer of its history begins with the Islamic conquest in the 8th century CE. The featured image is a view of the Mausoleum of Abdel Aziz Bab from the graveyard around it. This man was involved in the Arabic invasion.

It is said that there was a long battle for control of the city between the Nestorian Christians who held it at that time, and the Arabic forces led by Iskak Bab. Abdel Aziz was the standard bearer of the victorious Arab forces. After the victory Iskak Bab is said to have consecrated the first mosque ever to be built in Kazakhstan. When I heard about Abdel Aziz Bab’s mausoleum, I imagined an older structure, not the simple brick structure from the 1920s. The grave was built over, as Muslim graves were beginning to be a century after the Prophet, and it was covered with embroidered cloth as graves of people important to Islam often are.

Elaborate mausoleums did not come to Islam till several centuries later. I looked for traces of structures built between the 8th and 20th centuries, and found a decorative pillar embedded into the brick wall. This was built in a different style, and was perhaps a remnant of an earlier structure. I looked up at the entrance arch and found a similar decorative arch showing through the plain plaster that covered the facade. Russian archaeologists had been active in this region and there is bound to be literature on this structure, but I have not found any description that I can read about the history of this mausoleum. I hope a good historian writes a book for the wider public about the structure and the history it represents.

Abdel Aziz Bab’s mausoleum is far from the modern center of Sayram. At the center, right next to the main mosque of the town in our era, is the Karashah Ana Mausoleum. I’ve mentioned Khoja Ahmed Yasawi many times in posts about this region. This is a mausoleum to his mother. Again the structure is of brick, and made in the 1920s, being a miniature copy of the Timurid mausoleum to her son. I walked around, looked at the building from all sides, and convinced myself that the structure hewed closely to the one that it was copying. I could not see any remnant of an older structure. This was in contrast to the mausoleum to her husband, which was more grand, and where parts of the past structures were visible. Does that mean that the first structure over the grave of Yasawi’s mother was built only in the 20th century? Clearly tourism sites have no access to better information than me: one claims that the mausoleum was erected in the 13th century, another that it dates from the 18th century, and so on. I’m looking forward to an authoritative book.

Beshbarmak and Allies

We’d spent the day travelling in rural Kazakhstan, but as we approached Almaty The Family began to consult her phone to find good restaurants. Having decided on one, she called up Leila, our contact in the country, and invited her to dinner with us. The restaurant turned out to be very fancy. Leila said she’d been to it a couple of times, and that the food was very good. We suggested the national dish: Beshbarmak, and asked Leila to round off the order. She’d introduced us to Kazakh cuisine three nights earlier, and we were comfortable with her choices.

The beshbarmak is a sharing dish: with large helpings of potato and greens accompanying horse meat, beef, and lamb. I was familiar with the horsemeat sausage: I’d been eating it for breakfast every day and had developed quite a taste for it. Leila asked for Qumis with it. This fermented mare’s milk is a Kazakh specialty. I was expecting the sourness, but the extreme saltiness was unexpected. Having had camel milk in Rajasthan, I know that some milks can be very salty. Now I can lump horses with camels in a category of mammals whose milk is too salty for my taste.

Every beshbarmak yields shorpa. When the meat has cooked (“a whole day,” Leila explained) the broth is poured out, and some bits of the meat and a little portion of the potato is added to it. Then it is simmered until it is time to serve it out. The deep brown umami taste of the shorpa was perfect for me. I would have liked some of the crusty white bread I’d had during the day to go with it, but none was available. I guessed that in two meals with Leila we’d worked our way through the most well-known among Kazakhstan’s dishes.

Vulgar lilac

We passed a flowering tree on the path to one of the mausoleums of Sayram. I didn’t really pay attention to it except that my mind registered a half-forgotten scent. Later, The Family stopped by the small tree, attracted by the masses of flowers. Again there was that nearly familiar scent. I couldn’t place the tree, though. We stood there long enough for me to take several photos. Later I could identify it as the common lilac (Syringa vulgaris). It is not common in the part of the world where I live, but I’ve met it before. If it had lilac coloured flowers I might have recognized it. But its flowers are variable, and I’d come across a specimen with white flowers: beautifully photogenic, but unrecognizable to a novice like me. Just so, most of us no longer have the familiarity with Latin that the early botanists had, so we have to pause a beat to recall that in that language vulgar only meant common and had no sense of judgement attached to it.

Winner takes it all

My bare feet sank into the plush carpet of the lobby as I took in the swank interior. A fountain in the middle of the carpet! A glittering chandelier hanging over it! Unbelievable that I was inside a mosque. But that is Kazakhstan for you. As the oil riches of Kazakhstan are being pumped further by the discovery of radioactives and other minerals, public buildings have become ostentatious. Across the world, a mosque often serves as a place to meet for a little chat, and Kazakhstan is no exception. So this place did look a bit like a swank hotel lobby.

Khoja Ahmed Yasawi was famous enough that Timur decided to make a greater monument to him to demonstrate how devout he was. Who can beat that? So when Nazarbayev, independent Kazakhstan’s first president, decided to burnish his reputation, he suggested that the new capital, Astana, should have a mosque dedicated to the memory of the same Sufi saint. He is sometimes called Hazrat Sultan, the holy sultan, so the mosque is named the Hazrat Sultan mosque.

We’d seen the white mosque shining in the sun as we went to the nearby Pyramid. Our taxi driver said “It’s just a small mosque,” but agreed to take us there. It may be small in Astana, but it covers nearly 18,000 square meters and minarets which are 77 meters tall. It was a long walk to the entrance doors (above, at three different distances). The lobby was plush, and the area under the main dome, looking west is what you see in the previous gallery. Quite a beautiful “small” mosque, I would say, even if it is built in a completely traditional style.