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| Tian Shan Mountains above Karakol |
Every Sunday morning, Karakol hosts an animal market, not unlike the very large one we've visited in Kashgar, China. Many of the local people in Karakol are Uighers, as they are in Kashgar, as well as Chinese, Kyrgyz, Tajik and Uzbek.
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| Sunday market, Karakol |
It had rained all night before we visited the market, so we waded through mud and muck, enjoying the animals and the fervent negotiations underway as animals changed owners. The animals weren't always as pleased as the owners were by their new circumstances.
We watched a father and son shoeing a hapless horse. Here, the horse is led into a wooden chute and has both legs on one side tied tightly to a wooden brace. His owner holds his head and talks quietly to him to keep him calm. Unlike our farriers, these horseshoers cut the hoof down very substantially so that, when they hammer nails into the hoof to hold on the horseshoe, it is quite painful. This particular horse struggled and lunged, but was held fast in place. I hated to see it, but he finally calmed down and endured his misery. Poor, beautiful creature.
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| unhappy horse being shod |
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| shoeing a horse |
The sheep have large pads of fat on their rear ends, a prized attribute because this fat flavors most of the local food, from pilaf to shish kebab. Each skewer of shish kebab, for example, has chunks of this fat interspersed among the pieces of meat.
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| fatty butts of the sheep |
Karakol was initially a Russian settlement in a territory frequented by nomads. Most of the Russians are gone now, but they left behind the tiny houses they built, white with blue windows and shutters, made small so they could be heated in the harsh winters.
The Russian heritage is best seen in the charming wooden Russian Orthodox church. There are still Sunday services. The main mosque was built by the Chinese who settled here in the early 19th century, so it reflects Chinese architecture.
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Russian Orthodox Church
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| Chinese mosque |
We had dinner one night at the home of a Chinese/Uigher woman, an excellent cook. Her father had been a Chinese trader who moved between Kashgar and the eastern steppes of the Soviet Union, now Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. He had a wife and children in Kashgar. On one of his trips in the 1950's, at a time when the USSR and China had particularly bad relations, he reached the border high on one of the passes in the Tian Shan Mountains to find it closed. He was never able to return to China. So, he settled in Karakol, married again, and had 10 children. Our hostess was the youngest child.
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| Olga, our guide, our hostess, Gail |
We asked our hostess to talk about the differences between the Soviet period and now. She said during the Soviet era, everyone had a job and job security so they knew they would have money, even if it weren't a lot. They had schools and health care and improving conditions for women. But, she added, while we don't have the security, we can start our own businesses, which we couldn't under the Soviet regime, and make good lives for ourselves.
She had been "wifenapped" when she was 17. That means that a young man picks a girl he likes and kidnaps her. He "has sexual relations with her", which could hardly be anything but rape in this culture, and then goes to her parents and says they can either have her back or let her marry him. In this conservative Muslim society, the parents virtually always make their daughters marry their kidnappers.
Our hostess had 3 daughters before her husband died. She must have become very fond of him because talking about his death last year made her cry. With no skills and only 9 years of school, she had to find a way to support herself and her remaining daughter (the other 2 were married), so she worked with a Swiss NGO that helped her set up her house to serve meals to tourists. She has been so successful that now she also has 4 rooms that she rents to tourists or to their guides and drivers. They are immaculate, as is her tourist dining room. And her food is delicious.
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| view from our guest house window |
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