Tajikistan

The Tajiks are the Persian-speaking people of Central Asia, heirs to the Samanid Empire of the ninth and tenth centuries, centred on Bukhara and Samarkand — cities now in Uzbekistan — during a golden age of Persian literature and science. Over later centuries the region was ruled by Turkic and Mongol dynasties and, by the nineteenth century, the Emirate of Bukhara, before the Russian Empire pushed in.

The Soviets created the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic in 1929, drawing borders that left the great Tajik cultural centres outside it and gave the new republic a mountainous, landlocked territory with a weak economy. Moscow built cotton irrigation, aluminium smelting, and hydropower, and settled the lowlands.

Independence in 1991 was followed almost immediately by a civil war (1992–97) between the government and an opposition of Islamists and democrats, with strong regional dimensions; it killed tens of thousands and displaced far more. Emomali Rahmon emerged as leader in 1994 and has ruled ever since, tightening control, sidelining the Islamic party, and grooming his son to succeed him. The economy leans heavily on remittances from the roughly one to two million Tajiks working in Russia, and on the giant Rogun Dam project on the Vakhsh River.

Tajik culture is Persianate: the language, the poetry of Rudaki, Hafez, and Ferdowsi, the celebration of Nowruz, and cuisine and courtesy shared with Iran and Afghanistan. Most Tajiks are Sunni Muslim, but the people of the Pamirs are Ismaili, followers of the Aga Khan, whose foundations have funded much of the region's development.

Hospitality is central and elaborate — a guest is seated at the place of honour on the korpacha cushions around a low table, plied with tea, bread, and fruit, and pressed to eat. Bread (non) is treated with respect and never placed upside down or thrown away. Elders are deferred to, and life-cycle events — weddings, circumcisions, funerals — are large communal affairs, so large that the government has legislated to limit their scale and cost.

Regional identity remains strong, a legacy of the civil war, and the state promotes a national narrative rooted in the Samanids and an "Aryan" heritage.

About 10 million people live in Tajikistan, the youngest population in Central Asia and still mostly rural. Agriculture — cotton, wheat, fruit, and livestock — employs much of the workforce, but the defining economic fact is labour migration: remittances have at times equalled close to half of GDP, and many villages are largely populated by women, children, and the elderly for much of the year.

Dushanbe, the capital, has been rebuilt with wide avenues, monuments, and one of the world's tallest flagpoles; Khujand in the north is the second city and more tied to the Fergana Valley. Electricity is rationed in winter in much of the country outside the capital. Poverty is widespread, and public services are thin.

In the Pamirs, life is high, cold, and remote, sustained by small irrigated plots, livestock, remittances, and Aga Khan-supported schools and clinics.

Tajik cooking is close to the wider Central Asian and Persian table. The national dish is osh (or palov), rice cooked with carrots, onion, and mutton in a heavy cauldron, served from a communal platter. Qurutob — torn flaky bread soaked in a sauce of qurut (dried salted yoghurt) and topped with fried onions and herbs — is a distinctively Tajik dish.

Soups are important: shurbo, a clear mutton-and-vegetable broth, and laghmon, hand-pulled noodles in a spiced meat-and-vegetable soup. Skewered grilled meat (shashlik), manti (steamed dumplings), sambusa (samosas baked in a tandoor), and flatbread round out most meals.

Green tea is the constant social drink, poured and re-poured. Fruit is exceptional — apricots, mulberries, melons, pomegranates, and grapes — much of it dried for winter, and walnuts are a Pamir staple.

The Pamir Highway (the M41) is the country's headline: one of the highest roads in the world, running from Dushanbe through the Gunt valley to Khorog and across the high, empty eastern plateau past Lake Karakul to the Kyrgyz border, with the Wakhan Corridor branching off along the Panj River within sight of Afghanistan's peaks and, beyond them, the Hindu Kush.

The Fann Mountains, between Dushanbe and Samarkand, offer accessible trekking among turquoise lakes — Iskanderkul, the Seven Lakes (Haft Kul) of the Marguzor valley, and Alaudin — with homestays in the villages. The Pamirs proper hold Tajikistan's highest summits, including Ismoil Somoni Peak at 7,495 metres, and the vast Fedchenko Glacier.

In the cities, Dushanbe has the National Museum with the reclining Buddha of Ajina Tepa and the Ismaili Centre; Khujand has a restored fortress and a huge bazaar; and the Hisor fortress and the Sarazm archaeological site near Penjikent — a 5,000-year-old proto-urban settlement and a UNESCO site — reach far back into the region's past.