David Beatty Photography

In 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, I had the chance to make a three month journey through the Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. It was a uniquely opportune moment. For the first time Westerners were able to travel more or less freely through this lost heart of Asia, for decades sealed behind the Iron Curtain, without being subject to the control of the old Soviet Intourist apparatus which had dissolved. I took a three month crash course in spoken Russian and flew to Moscow in the early autumn and on to Alma-Ata the capital of Kazakhstan. 

From there I journeyed by car across the steppe to an old former collective called Zalanash, nestling on the edge of the Alatau Mountains near the Chinese border. Here I stayed with Sarsembek, a 73 year old Kazakh hunter and eagle trainer. (See the Gallery 'Bird Men of the Alatau') He possessed two golden eagles and was the last surviving eagle trainer  in this region. The communists had attempted to eradicate this practice as it was connected with an ancient animist tradition of the Tatar nomads.

In Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan I met an enthusiastic  Kyrgyz journalist who agreed to drive me around Lake Issyk-Kul, at 5,269 feet the second largest saline lake after the Caspian Sea, which though it borders the awesome Tian Shan Mountains never freezes over - its name translates as 'The Warm Lake'. On the way we stopped at his small dachau on the outskirts. After coffee he threw a couple of pistols and an automatic rifle into the boot of his car - just a precaution he exclaimed nonchalantly, explaining that as a journalist in the post-Soviet era he had been exposing the illegal sale of body parts from local hospitals, and this notoriety meant he was included on a number of black lists. With this alarming news we set off on the long journey, the road ahead now filled with potential ambushes. 

Historically this lake was an important stop-over on the Silk Route, and under the Soviets the lake was used to test their nuclear submarines. Communist apparatchiks had kept their holiday homes by the lake, and I was shown the house where Trotsky had stayed before fleeing to Mexico. One morning I rode an Akhal-Teke horse saddle-less at a brisk gallop along the lake shore. Reputedly selectively bred for centuries by Turkmen tribes this horse is renowned for its speed and endurance, and there are several stables along the lake's northern shore. 

After circling the lake we drove to Naryn in the south west where the local governor gave me his 1950s Buick and driver to take me across the Torugart Pass to the Chinese border at 12,000 feet where the governor's letter had me swiftly deposited on Chinese soil free to photograph a busload of Kyrgyz dancers and musicians who were visiting their native country for the first time. They had been born in China, the children of those who had fled the Stalinist purges of the fifties. For the next few days I accompanied them as they performed to audiences in Naryn and elsewhere in their glittering red costumes and somewhat kitsch versions of the bridal headdress 'shokulo', tall cone-shaped hats with long veils falling behind.

In Tashkent my contact introduced me to an Uzbek writer, who amongst other things had penned a few Hindi film scripts for Bollywood. My visa did not allow me to visit eastern Uzbekistan, as the President Karimov was wary even then of Islamic extremism. But in this Uzbek's generous company I was escorted safely to the Ferghana Valley, where the Emperor Babur was born, and on to Margilan famous for its handwoven silks. The valley was dominated by cotton fields, a Soviet monoculture that had become ecologically disastrous, replacing the fig, almond and apricot orchards of the past. Margilan had been the silk capital of Soviet Russia, but traditional methods still survived, the delicate fabric dipped in vats of dyes made from pomegranate skins, onions and nuts, the women bent over cauldrons of boiling cocoons, their raw hands drawing out glistening webs of silk thread. We stopped at a village called Yorilgan and were welcomed to a spectacular Uzbek wedding where the women wore silks emblazoned with the popular rainbow coloured ikat weave.

I travelled through Samarkand and Bukhara, Islamic monuments to tyranny and holiness with their turquoise tiled mosques and baked brick madrassas. Samarkand was the ancient Maracanda, now mere fragments painstakingly unearthed by archeologists, the creation of the Iranian Sogdians, Silk Road merchants, whose faith was a syncretic mix of Zoroastrianism and Hinduism, and whose wealth had created a beautiful metropolis by the time Alexander the Great arrived in 329 BCE. The Samarkand you visit today was the 14th century creation of Tamerlane, whose brutal Asiatic conquests could be traced by towers and pyramids built of human skulls. Samarkand was the crowning monument to his own glory, a combination of the grandiose and sacred, an architecture based on the principles of an Islam he venerated, but whose power he also cynically manipulated for his own ends. He butchered millions in his path to power, but he was also intellectually curious, engaging in heated debates with scholars and acquiring an extensive library of illuminated manuscripts. Under Tamerlane Islamic culture brimmed with disquieting paradox, a mix of barbarism and aesthetic refinement, acts of brutal conquest and the contemplation of exquisite gardens full of roses and tulips. The restored centre piece, the Registan square, features three religious schools, madrassas, one founded by his grandson Ulug Beg, the other two not completed until two centuries later. They shine with a sanitised brilliance, yet feel curiously empty, turquoise and aquamarine gems of history shining amidst the surrounding bleak and polluted industrialised landscape you drive through to reach these memorials to a tyrant whom the Soviets vilified, but whose memory is now being resurrected as the father of Uzbekistan and the symbol of its greatness. Yet Tamerlane was no Uzbek, but a Turco-Mongol, in 1326 a fugitive sheep-rustler with military ambitions. The Uzbeks only arrived from the north in the late fifteenth century, nomads who adopted Islam, the community of the faithful, and who traced their lineage back seven generations, the clan their true home, their name bearing no national or ethnic identity. Modern Uzbekistan was a purely Soviet invention. 

Yet all along what most suprised me was how after 70 years of communism a very Islamic style of life had survived. Though Islam came late to this region, mostly brought in the nineteenth century by Sufi mystical sects, like the powerful Naqshbandis of 12th century origin, it had survived underground through complex Sufi networks. Yet in many ways it was only a veneer upon more pagan animistic beliefs of Turkic clans whom the Russians had forcibly organized into collectives in 1924, dividing Kazakh from Kyrgyz into separate regions, imposing the Russian language. Now they suddenly found themselves astonished by an independence they had not fought for, and were briefly basking in a retrieval of cultural expression long suppressed. Amidst their graceful hospitality I was invited into homes whose courtyards were filled with pomegranate trees, whose red seeds were scattered in the mouth-watering rice dishes we ate seated on the floor, from where the cry of the muezzin could again be heard at dawn and dusk, and where the dark haired beauty of the women, with their mix of Mongoloid and Persian features, and the rugged Asiatic looks of the male descendants of Turkic nomads enchanted me.  These were the overlapping attributes of a mixed populace I had only read about or long imagined from the pages of travel books, now miraculously come to life before the ever curious lens of my camera. 

In the following pages I hope I have captured in vivid and fleeting 

impressions the spirit of these people and places during a brief window of opportunity that opened with the fall of Soviet Russia and before the traumatic changes of 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan. These catastrophic events drastically changed the political and religious dynamics of the region. But now I can look back on a spellbinding journey through this lost heart of Asia that ended in Khiva, in the far West of the country on the border with Turkmenistan, formerly the seventeenth century capital of the Khanate of Khiva ruled by the Astrakhans, a branch of the Genghiz Khan dynasty. To my astonishment I arrived as a film was being shot on the life of Genghiz Khan. The city's ramparts were being stormed by hordes of Mongol horsemen while extras in chainmail and helmets milled around amidst drifts of special effects battle smoke and carefully orchestrated explosions as Khiva again came under siege, a distant brutal past brought briefly but colourfully back to life.