The white flag of the Taliban flutters above the Afghan side of the Friendship Bridge spanning the two banks of the Panj River, which was opened in 2004 as a symbol of the increasingly close relations between Tajikistan and Afghanistan at the time. Although a few dozen meters separate the neighboring countries, it’s hard to make out the black letters of the Shahadah – the Muslim declaration of faith – inscribed on the flag as it flaps in the breeze. Only its dazzling whiteness catches one’s eye.
Vigilant eyes are constantly trained on this bridge, now chained shut and barred to traffic on both sides. Tajik soldiers, wearing glaring khaki-yellow camouflage uniforms (I will never cease wondering what natural setting this camouflage is supposed to blend in with), keep visitors from approaching. The nearby gas station is also empty for most of the day. Both times we stopped here last month, on the way to and from the high plateau between the peaks of the Pamir Mountains, the same two attendants were sitting there in the same corner and in the same idle position known in international sign language as the fly-swatting mode.
Hardly any vehicles pass by, even though this is the only overland route connecting Dushanbe, Tajikistan’s capital, with the eastern Afghan province of Badakhshan in the Pamirs. Few Tajiks own cars: Fuel and maintenance costs are too dear in a country suffering from an ongoing economic crisis; public transportation is sparse, consisting mainly of shared “taxis” (vans with an open area in back where passengers stand, crowded together). Tourists have vanished since the onset of the pandemic. The exceptions are trucks, the modern equivalent of the camel convoys on the ancient silk roads, which carry goods from the neighboring countries of China, Pakistan and Kyrgyzstan.
A large white Taliban flag also flies opposite the Tajik flag fluttering above Khorog, the provincial capital, some 240 kilometers further south.
A village on the Afghan side of the Panji River. Visitors in Tajikistan, across the way, can get a glimpse of the locales that have been recently conquered by the Taliban.
“The flag was hoisted overnight. One morning toward the end of July, even before Afghanistan’s president and the U.S. Army had left Afghanistan, we got up and saw that the flag on the other side of the bridge had been replaced,” says Yorali Berdov, an artist and social activist who created a nonprofit in Khorog, his hometown, to preserve traditional handicrafts and to promote tourism. The only place where the tricolor – red, black and green – of the previous regime in Kabul can be seen is flying over the Afghan consulate in this city. (The consulate staff, like that in the Afghan Embassy in Dubashne, are “barricading” themselves inside the building and are refusing to recognize the Taliban government, which for its part hasn’t yet dispatched official representatives to other countries.)
The small market that took place once a week for the past two decades on the Tajik side of the river in Khorog and enabled the residents of the Afghan Pamirs to sell their produce and wares, has ceased to operate. Tourism and other commerce, which had taken place since American forces entered Afghanistan, ended abruptly, even though the inhabitants of this area on both sides of the border share a common cultural identity and family ties, and speak the same language.
My last trip abroad, in the pre-coronavirus era, was in December 2019. In March 2020 Israel’s first lockdown was declared, its borders were closed and everything changed. The nearly two years that passed between that trip and this journey to Pamir are probably the longest period, as an adult, in which I didn’t travel abroad. Why did I decide to visit the Pamir region, of all places, in the midst of a global pandemic – a remote region in an impoverished country lacking natural resources, which most of the world’s population can barely locate on a map? Because I had never visited the ancient trading routes known as the Silk Road, and I felt that this level of professional knowledge – about the way raw materials, techniques and ideas moved from the eastern part of Asia via the center of the continent to the Middle East – was lacking for someone like me who writes about food.
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I can quote the splendid description Marco Polo wrote about the Pamir Mountains in the 12th century, or refer readers to another Western traveler who mentioned this faraway, isolated region in writings from the 17th century: These are both marvelous romantic accounts that are the bread-and-butter of chroniclers and those following in their footsteps. But the real answer to why this trip took place is a longing, not to say an inner need for overseas journeys – a feeling that was increasingly translated into a palpable feeling of suffocation.
Women selling homemade yogurt in the market in the provincial capital of Khorog.
I embarked on my trip with Noam Backner, a writer, lecturer and tour guide who has a degree in Islamic and Chinese studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and who founded the Facebook group “Silk Road – History, Culture, Research” (in Hebrew). Until the outbreak of the pandemic he lived for seven years in China’s Yunnan Province, his point of departure for frequent trips to Central Asia, the object of his love and of his fascinating research. Backner, who speaks fluent Chinese and Farsi and mumbles his way through a range of Irano-Turkic languages, including Tajiki, planned and organized our trip. The small group also included Dr. Ronie Parciack, an expert in political theology and Islam in South Asia, and a lecturer in the East Asia Studies Department at Tel Aviv University.
Parciack’s interest is the religious ties between South and Central Asia – since the Middle Ages, most residents of the Pamir region have followed the Ismailist branch of Shia Islam, whose tenets are kept secret. Backner sought above all to return to this area, for which he feels an abiding love, to interview folk musicians and healers. And I went in pursuit of food and a need to suppress my own life and immerse myself in the lives of other people.
Back to the stone age
The Pamirs are referred to metaphorically as the “roof of the world,” along with other high-altitude ranges in Asia (such as the Himalayas, Hindu-Kush and Tien Shan). Their average elevation is 4,000 meters (13,123 feet) above sea level, which I can say from my personal experience last month means that visitors there can hardly manage to walk and speak at the same time. The tallest of the mountains here rises gloriously to a wild, frozen 7,495 meters. In the modern age, most of the range, and the desolate plateau between its peaks, lies within Tajikistan’s borders, with smaller sections in Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The sparse population that inhabits this harsh terrain is largely concentrated in the Badakhshan Autonomous Region – in the valleys that formed between the steep cliffs, and in particular around the tributaries of the Panj, one of the largest rivers of Central Asia.
“The remote location and the stark topography hindered the direct rule of the great powers and empires that dominated the region throughout history,” Backner explains. “But even so, this was an important junction for the trade that took place between India, China and Iran. The inhabitants of the Pamirs are descendants of ancient peoples of Central Asia. That heritage is still evident in the Pamiri languages – Eastern Iranian languages, only a few of which have survived in the modern world – in its people’s’ facial features and 10their distinctive culture. The two sides of the Panj River usually constituted one geographical, cultural and political unit. But the results of the ‘Great Game’ – the 19th-century and early 20th-century struggle between czarist Russia and the British Raj for control of Central Asia – led to the separation in practice between the Tajik Pamirs and the Afghan Pamirs, and to demarcation of the political border along the route of the river.”
Thus, while in the Middle East, contemporary borders were determined and new political entities were often invented according to a complex collection of interests of France and England, similar processes had begun to occur in Central Asia a century earlier as a result of the enmity between the Russian and British empires.
“The Soviet annexation and the establishment of the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic [in the 1920s], on the one hand, and the creation of the Afghan state, on the other hand, created the present border and led to considerable differences in the economic and social development between the two sides,” Backner continues. “Tajik Badakhshan is today a poverty-stricken region, yet the population there has incalculably greater access to food, resources and the external world than those who live across the river and share their religion, language and history.”
“According to our perception of identity we are above all Pamiris who belong to the Tajik nation today,” local activist Berdov, 49, explains. “When you cross the border to the Afghan Pamirs – as we were able to do during the past two decades, but is impossible today – you go back in time 100 years: to the way our villages looked then, to a world without electrical power and infrastructure, where agricultural implements from the stone age are still used. The people who live there have a very difficult life. They haven’t had a break from wars for more than a century, and every change, like the one that just happened now, gives rise to concern that their lives will become even harder.”
This journey to the Tajik Pamirs is in large measure also a journey to the Afghan Pamirs. The only route leading to Badakhshan is a perimeter road that winds along the route of the Panj River. This natural-artificial border between the two contemporary states, and the steep stone wall of cliffs on the Tajikistan side, encourage visitors to look at what is happening on the Afghan side. The road on the Tajiki side, one of the highest paved roads in the world, was created with the use of bulldozers and dynamite during the Soviet era, which ended in 1991, and is still largely without asphalt. On the Afghan side, construction of a parallel road began only in more recent decades. It’s doubtful that the new Taliban regime will see completion of that road as a top priority, Tajikis with us on the trip told us.
On both sides, it’s still possible to identify, amid the precipitous cliffs that drop down to the river, the treacherous paths carved out in ancient times by travelers, which even today barely allow the traffic of people and pack animals.
The boundary between Tajikistan and Afghanistan, like most geopolitical borders in the world, was never marked by a fence or other physical markers. There are places where the Panj widens and the distance between the Tajik and Afghan sides increases to a few hundred meters. Mostly, though, only a few dozen meters of water – at times a raging torrent and at times calm and tranquil – separate the villages on the two opposite riverbanks. The proximity makes possible a relatively close glimpse of the way of life in the villages of the Afghan Pamiris, and in recent months also of the conquest of many of them by Taliban forces.
Bridges connecting the two banks at narrow places, such as the Friendship Bridge in Khorog, are few in number. But from other sites along the Panj, we were also able to see the Taliban’s white flag on munitions bases abandoned by Afghan and U.S. forces, or on vehicles carrying troops driving between the villages with loudspeaker systems. And we could see it flying over schools, which gave rise to anxious thoughts about the fate of the girls attending them.
Two cows, three goats
Fate decreed that we would land in Dushanbe on September 9, the day on which the country – including the inhabitants of the Badakhshan region of the Pamirs – marked Tajikistan’s 30th Independence Day. The celebrations included colorful parades in cities and villages alike, and the addition of updated photographs, on top of the thousands already adorning squares and street corners, of Emomali Rahmon, the country’s president for the past 22 years. The “big bang,” a subject that comes up in almost every conversation we held with people along the way, was the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the country’s forced parting, for good or for ill, from its Soviet identity and the feeling of belonging to the stable, orderly world it provided.
Berdov, a graduate of art studies in the University of Dushanbe, had hoped to pursue his education in St. Petersburg.
“I had a Soviet passport, I served for five years in the Soviet army, and suddenly you’re told that you don’t belong. You’re no longer part of the Soviet entity, and the possibility of living and studying in St. Petersburg, for example, is blocked,” he says, reflecting the ambivalence many of his countrymen seem to feel about the Soviet era, as juxtaposed with the joy and pride of Tajik independence.
A village on the Afghan side of the Panj River.
“Life under the Soviet regime may have lacked rights and freedom of choice in the Western liberal sense – and those whom the state targeted suffered unforgivable abuse – but it provided stability, security and order. As a Soviet national, you were eligible for free higher education and health care, two areas in which the Tajiki state is woefully deficient,” he adds.
A civil war, which raged from 1992 to 1997, aggravated the economic crises created by severance from the Soviet Union. Hunger was widespread and assistance from international funds and aid organizations was needed. It’s possible to comprehend the changes that have occurred in Tajikistan, and particularly in the remote Badakhshan area, through the prism of both the upheavals that occurred in agriculture, still the main source of livelihood in the country, and by looking at local diet.
The most blatantly visible change – even to tourists – on the Tajik side of the Pamirs is the disappearance of the mechanized agriculture of the Soviet era. Instead of the tractor and the combine, there are ploughs hitched to oxen, and the manual labor is done by means of hoes, scythes and sickles. The lifestyle here has perhaps not reverted to the stone age, as on the Afghan side, but it has regressed by several decades.
Grain harvest in Pamiri fiels on the Tajik side.
“It’s most apparent in the branches of agriculture that require heavy machinery, such as wheat, which most farmers don’t want to grow commercially today,” says Surov Mosieyev, who’s in charge of agriculture in the district. While wheat – as well as other grains like barley, rye and millet – are among the most important raw ingredients of basic Pamiri diet, local inhabitants currently grow only 20 percent of the grains they consume. The rest is imported from other parts of Tajikistan, but mainly from neighboring countries.
“Most of the wheat local farmers grow is a modern strain,” Mosieyev says. “But in Bartang Valley and Wakhan Valley, traditional strains are still cultivated, and in the past few years we have also brought in heirloom strains from the Afghan Pamirs, where, precisely because they lagged behind in other spheres of life, they passed on local varieties that have thrived in the region for thousands of years, from one generation to the next.”
Few crops are grown for commercial purposes here, but in a world where many farmers have gone back to growing much of their food by themselves, many here are continuing to plant wheat on a small scale for domestic needs – even if the total, hard-won output may not exceed one sack of grain per harvest. Other crops being cultivated for human and animal consumption include ful (fava beans), peas and other legumes.
The dense planting of grains and legumes in the same rows reduces the possibility that a particular crop will not succeed (the farming season is short – only four months – as in the rest of the year, temperatures dip below freezing and snow covers the ground); moreover, the legumes enrich the soil with minerals that are vital for growing grains. The joint harvest of these crops has also engendered traditional foods such as aush – a soup of noodles made from wheat flour and ful flour, peas and legumes. In one of the houses we stayed at – these far-flung villages have no hotels or guest houses, so tourist accommodations take the form of houses earmarked for that purpose – the village women prepared the soup for us. Locals have also gone back to grinding flour in small mills built in the past on the branches of the rivers, which are operated by water wheels.
During the Soviet era, residents of the Tajik Pamirs received seeds from the kolkhoz (which is one of the reasons for the shrinking genetic diversity of local edible crops), cultivated huge swaths of the same crops and sold the produce to the state. It is difficult to get an explanation of how the distribution of land to private farmers was carried out after the collapse of the Soviet Union; in today’s Tajikistan, too, people do not criticize official institutions. But clearly a major trend in the current era, in some cases by choice and in others because there is no alternative, has been a return to traditional methods of growing crops, to using plants grown from open-pollinated seeds (in contrast to the hybrid ones produced by large seed companies), and especially to growing a range of crops in small enclosures and without pesticides.
Growing side by side in the densely planted, lovely vegetable patch of Matluba Zolobiya, in the village of Dasht in the Bartang Valley, are cabbages, beets, potatoes, various types of cucumbers and gourds, and also the tastiest tomatoes I’ve eaten in several years (meaty and so juicy that there’s no need to add oil to the salad; it’s saturated with the juices of the tomatoes themselves). The tomatoes, whose seeds I began to crave, are also used to make preserves for the winter; the jars have already been wrapped in cloths and stashed in one of the rooms of the house. The fruits of the strawberry, apricot and pear trees are dried or used for various jams and other concoctions.
There are also two cows, which help with the fieldwork, and three goats, whose milk is used to make lean cheeses, butter, zibda (a curdled-milk product) and kurut (dried yogurt, which recalls the Middle Eastern kishk). But all the raw ingredients that Zolobiya had labored to grow and process over the past few months will not be enough even for her small family during the long, hard winter. And the price of basic commodities that the family cannot produce by itself – such as oil and flour for bread – is high partly because they have to brought in from the capital city to the isolated valley, from a few hundred kilometers away.
Zolobiya, who was born in the village and attended Khorog University, lives on the farm most of the year with only her son and daughter-in-law; to help make ends meet, her husband works in Khorog. Still, this small family is more fortunate than many others. Most of the young Tajiki men in the Pamirs are compelled to leave home to work in Russia, generally as cheap laborers with no rights, at construction sites, in order to support their families. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, it has become even more difficult for them to return home to visit. In many of the villages we saw, the women and the elders told us that their husbands and sons hadn’t been home for two years or more.
“The young people don’t stay in the villages because the income from farming is so low,” Mosieyev says. “We are losing the young generation, and only the intermediate generation and the elderly remain to work the land.” And farm work is made particularly demanding by the local topography: This is a mountainous environment full of craggy stone cliffs where there is very little land suitable for agriculture. Every tiny bit of cultivatable earth is exploited to maintain life, even if that entails the arduous removal of stones, efforts to block erosion of the soil during springtime spring flooding or working the steep slopes – quite unbelievably – to enable creation of agricultural terraces, vegetable patches or groves of fruit trees.
A meat vendor in a market in Khorog.
Further enhancing the almost-incomprehensible beauty of the fields of crops on both steep sides of the Panj River gorge, in Tajikistan and Afghanistan alike, is the traditional irrigation system: A network of trenches and dams channels the waters of the melting snows and the glaciers from the summits of the mountains to the small fields below.
The fruit groves – bor in local parlance, a term that actually refers literally to gardens, rather than groves – are the most beautiful and pleasing of all. One can die happy after tasting the apricots from a Pamiri garden festooned with purple clover and green vegetation; heaven knows how we’ll go back to eating the contemporary varieties of apricots that have taken root in Israel. In the local culture the apricot, like the strawberry, is considered to be a fruit of paradise. Both originated in China, but in the thousands of years that have elapsed since they arrived in Central Asia, the trees and their fruits have become an inseparable part of the diet and the way of life of the inhabitants of the Pamirs.
For instance, dried strawberries, which make up a considerable part of the diet in times of distress, including the civil war, are ground into flour. Apricots are used to make atola, a juice used in preparing a variety of traditional dishes; their pits, whose taste evokes aromatic almonds, are eaten roasted or are crushed into a powder that is even tastier than dried-strawberry flour. In the summer, outside the homes abutting the lone thoroughfare in Pamir country, local folk sell apples and pears from bowls or pails. Born in the mountainous regions of Central Asia, these fruits come in a mind-boggling variety (though today’s farmers and consumers – even in the Pamirs, where isolation from the outside world has allowed preservation of traditional lifestyles – tend to prefer modern varieties that produce abundant crops).
“For thousands of years people, lived in a narrow local environment and grew accustomed to the distinctive climate and conditions it offered,” says Dr. Davlatmamadov Shirinbek, 82, a renowned surgeon and scholar whose practice combines modern and folk medicine. “But in the modern age we deviated from the local. We in the Pamirs are relatively fortunate. Because of the distance and the isolation from the modern world, most people here continue to live mainly off the fruits of their land. But today, when many varieties of foods from the outside are being brought here, too, I see a significant increase in nutrition-based illnesses, such as [high] blood pressure. A person living in the Pamirs is not meant to buy bananas from Africa in the market.”
Shirinbek, with his fine, delicately expressive features, is an object of pilgrims from all over the world due among other things to his work to preserve the indigenous culture and languages, as well as traditional medicinal treatments by means of native plants. His home is located in the steepest part of Owring, the remote village where he was born and to which he returned in the civil war, after years of working as a surgeon in a Khorog hospital. Because there is no paved road to his house, we leave our vehicle at the bottom of the hill and proceed on foot, a tough 45-minute climb between rocks, to a splendid traditionally built structure whose interior is lined with bookshelves.
Hadicha Jalolova, the surgeon’s wife, herself an obstetrician, offers warm Pamiri hospitality to the unexpected and breathless visitors from Israel (she and her husband, the good doctor, who easily negotiates the path to and from the village clinic, don’t have a cellphone): green tea and black tea with milk and salt; fresh and dried fruits from the trees in the yard; naan, a flatbread with a dense crust that is baked in the wood stove; kaymak, a rich cream or thick yogurt; and a selection of homemade jams and concoctions (if there’s one thing in the world better than Pamiri apricots, it’s Pamiri apricot jam, with its light smoky flavor that comes from being cooked on an open fire outside). The Soviet addition to this delightful array – with all due respect to the local cuisine – is a plate of sweets and bonbons in glistening, glittering wrapping, all of which the doctor insisted on stuffing into the guests’ pockets when they left.
In almost every village we visited we were the first “guests” (in the Pamiri language, tourists are still called “guests”) local inhabitants had seen for two years. In the Indian restaurant in Khorog, we met a French couple whom the pandemic had caught in Laos and who were making their way back slowly to Europe, by bicycle, via Central Asia. In Langar, the last stop on the long, difficult route to the barren plateau, we met a Canadian hiker, a wounded, lonely soul, who still insists on plying trails even in a closed world rife with travel restrictions (whether because he has a particular agenda or he lacks the money to get home). But with the exception of a few eternal wanderers, it is apparent that most people have not yet resumed trekking here – and for obvious reasons. “In 2019 I hosted 700 tourist guests in my home,” we were told by Yodgar Moloyev, the religious leader in Langar, in whose home we stayed. “In 2021 I’ve hosted 16, including your group.”
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