Makataeb, playwright 329
Malik (young man on a train) 320-2
‘Manet’, driver 125-7, 129, 131-5
Manzikert battle 1071 38
Maracanda 155, 175
see mainly Samarkand
Margilan 55, 248
people 235
Mari town 34-5, 45
picnic near 45-50
Maruya, metal-worker 315
Marx, Karl, bust 200
Mavarannahr 160, 263
Mennonite community near Khiva 121- 2
Merv city 34, 37-44
sack of 38-9
mausoleum of Sanjar 44
sacred site 39–43
Merv desert 33-50
Mervi people 36
Meskhetian Turks 238
Moghuls 160, 179
Momack, artist 17-20
Mongolia 119-20
Mongols 3, 159-61
sack of Merv 38-9
sack of Bukhara 82
and Khorezm 128
tombs in Samarkand 175-9
overrun Uzgen 263
and Khazakhstan 311
Moore, Thomas, Lalla Rookh 190
Moslems author’s discussions with 73-80, 110
and Communists 91
Khazakhstan 311-12
Khiva 116
in Kirghizia 354, 362
reverence for old tombs 156
and 19th century Russia 85
Samarkand 175-9
Shia and Sunni 10, 244, 284
and Turkmenistan 18
the Umma 279-80
Mosques and medresehs, Bukhara 59-60
Mozaffir, emir 82
Muqanna, the Veiled Prophet 37, 190-1
search for his castle 192-5
Murad, lorry-driver 44-9
Murat, Kurban 21, 23, 30
Muraviev, Russian envoy 115
Museum of atheism, former mausoleum 92
Najibullah, Muhammad, deposed 34
Namangan town 249
people 235, 251
holy man’s tomb 257
Naqshbandi Sufis 23, 24, 92, 94, 105-6, 246
Nasrullah, emir 82, 83, 84
Navoi, Alisher, poet 167, 200
Navoi town 132, 143
Nebit Dagh, oil wells 52
Nisa town 28-9
Nostradamus 218
Novi Urgench 112, 122, 124, 140
Nukus town 140
Nurkhon (Uzbek heroine), statue 248
Oman (of Tashkent), friend of the author 216-309
wife Gulchera 216, 218, 222
wife Sochibar 242, 306, 308
experience 278-82
irritation with the author 297-9
arrest and release 300-2
Omar Khayyam 132
Ommayad caliphs 244
Oraz, Turcoman writer 8-12, 17
Orthodox Church Samarkand 169-70
Tajikistan, visit to 290-2
Osh town 238, 259-63
Othman, caliph, Koran of 210-12
Oxus river (Amu Dariya) 1, 23, 51, 113, 134
see also Amu Dariya
Pamirs (mountains) 2, 55, 237, 239, 265-309
Parthians 28
Pasha, Christian taxi-driver 349-50, 355-6, 358-67
Pechenegs 159
Penzhikent town 302-3 Perestroika 8, 9, 18, 100
Persian language 55, 304
Persians peoples in Iran 239, 252, 284
slaves 87, 113
and Tamerlane 166-7
see also Samanids
Petya (in Samarkand) 182-7
Polo, Marco 2, 266
Przhevalsky, explorer 360-1
The Qazi, Dushanbe 283
Rachmon (student in bus) 109-12
Racoul (in Khorezm) 117-21
Radioactivity in Kazakhstan 312, 337
Rashidov, Sharaf 58, 145, 158, 199, 215, 300
Rich Men Also Weep, soap opera 316, 326
Roman legionaries, enslaved 37
Rudaki, poet 72
Rukh, Shah 165, 179
Russia and Afghanistan 354-5
and Almaty 323
against the basmachi 293-4
and Bukhara 64, 84
and Khazakhstan 311-12, 314, 316
and Khiva 113, 126
and Kokand 229
restoration of historic buildings 148
and Samarkand 151, 168
and Soviet Central Asia 3
and Sufis 261
and Tajikistan 273, 274-5
and Tashkent 199, 229-30
and Turkestan 3, 20-1, 24, 29-31
and Uzbekistan 58
and World War II 181
Russians archaeologists and Tamerlane’s grave 165
in Ashkhabad 5, 6
Bukhara deaths 97
leaving Bukhara 87
and the Dungan Chinese 78
in Samarkand 172-5, 184
slaves 113, 115
and Turcomans 10-11, 16, 20-1, 24, 29-31, 35
leaving Turkmenistan 27
lorry-driver 344
Sadik (an Uzbek) 270-3
Safar, driver 26-32
Salt, in Kunia Urgench soil 138
Samanid dynasty 71-2
Samarkand 55, 145
journey to 143-5
mosque of Bibi Khanum 146, 151-2
medresehs in 146-7, 154, 178
Registan market square 146-8
history 155-6, 159, 179-80
capital for Tamerlane 160, 161-3
and mausoleum of Tamerlane 163-8
ancient Maracanda 155
Shir Dar medreseh 147
Orthodox cathedral 169-70
Shakhi-Zinda 175-9
trade 179-80
culture 180
Sanjar, sultan, mausoleum 44
The Satanic Verses 75
Saxaul (plant) 45, 109, 131, 314
Sayora (girl in Dushanbe) 286-7
Sayyid Mahomet, khan 115
Scythians 2-3, 159
Seljuk Turks, and Merv 34, 38
Shachimadan (Khamzabad) 239, 246
Shakhrisabz 187-90, 299
girl at 189-90
Shamanism, Uzbek 62
Shavgat, driver, and family 157-8
Sheibanid dynasty 60
Sherali (a Tajik) 270-3
Shukrat (in Khorezm) 117-21
Siberia 120
Silk Road 55, 56
Bukhara 72
Khazakstan 320
Kirghizstan 356
near Merv 34, 37
Samarkand 179-80
Siyon 192-3
Skobelev, General 20, 51
Sogdians 155-6, 302-6 Sohrab and Rustam 54
Solomon, alleged founder of Osh 260
tomb 261, 262
South Africa 203
Stalin, Josef V. 67, 70, 78, 88, 91, 174, 226, 248
state frontiers under 238
Steppes 311–40
Stoddart, Colonel 83-4
Storks 65, 236
Sufism 62, 91-6, 245-6, 261, 262
Kazakhstan 317, 319-20
see also Naqshbandi
Synagogue, Bukhara 98-9
Syr Dariya (Jaxartes) river 217, 229, 236, 360
Tajik people 56, 87, 88, 167, 238, 239, 274, 277, 302
Tajikistan 3, 218, 269-70
student in 283-5
Talib, lecturer, and family 286-9
Tamerlane (Timur Kurgan), emperor 54, 82, 99-100, 128, 146, 151, 160-3, 179-80, 253
death, and mausoleum 163-8
birthplace 188
White Palace, Shakhrisabz 188-90, 300
and Othman’s Koran 211
water stoup in Turkestan 318
Tania (in Samarkand) 152-5, 170-5, 182-7
Tartar people 221
Tashkent, capital of Uzbekistan 198-202, 225
journey to 197-8
Russian waif in 197-8
capital of Russian Turkestan 199
&nbs
p; Lenin Square 201, 215
playhouse 205-6
Moslem quarter 209-12
Imam Bukhari medreseh 209-10
residence of Grand Mufti 210-12
government 239
Tekesh, sultan of Khorezm 128
Tekke tribe (Turcoman) 20-1, 30
Tienshan mountains 55, 226, 320, 341, 342, 358, 360
Timur Kurgan see Tamerlane Timurid dynasty 179
Toloi, son of Genghiz Khan, and Merv 38
Transalai mountains 266, 267
Transoxiana 55
Turania (Greater Turkey) 119-20, 293
Turanian peoples 159
Turcoman art 15
Turcoman people 4, 6, 8, 17, 20, 239
and the Russians 10-11, 16
and Bukhara 82
Turkestan 88, 199
shrine of Sheikh Ahmad Yassawi 317-18
Turkestan town 315-16
Turkey feeling for, 117-21, 132, 167
and Armenia 121
Turkic people and Bukhara 72
and Kazakhstan 311
and Kirghizstan 356
and Tamerlane l6l, 167
Turkmenstan 1-32
independence 3
resources 4
Uighur people 119, 361
Ulug Beg 62, 148, 162, 165, 166, 179, 180
Medresehs 60-1, 73-6, 147
Umma (Moslem community) 279-80
Unemployment, Samarkand 149
Urgench, capital of Khorezm 127-8
mausolea 127-9
Uzbek people 4, 54, 55, 62, 85, 87-8, 167-8, 238, 239, 318
and Bukhara 82
riots with Kirghiz 260-1
and Tajikistan 272
Uzbekistan 3, 55
Communists in 117-18
and Russia 58, 91
Uzgen town 263-4
Vambéry, Arminius 115
Veiled Prophet see Muqanna Vezir city 135
Victory Day, Samarkand celebrations 180-7
Vyatkin, Vladimir 180
War memorial, Ashkhabad 11
Water, holy springs in Bukhara 62
Wolff, Revd Joseph 84
Women and Islam 75-6, 284
in Bukhara 97
in old Bukhara 63-4
fire-worshippers 106
at Merv 39-40
Turcoman 17, 34
Wu Ti, emperor of China 260
Xinjiang mountains 239, 355, 360
Xinjiang province 119
Yagnob people 305-6
Yakut people 120
Yeltsin, Boris 365
Yurchi village 295-6
Zelim Khan, Bukhara artist 65, 67, 68, 70, 86, 89, 90-1, 103-4, 107
pictures 89-90
wife Gelia 65-71, 86-91
mother 66-70, 86, 88-9, 103-5, 107, 173
Zerafshan river 1, 62-3, 144, 302
Zoroaster, worship 62, 113, 304
Insights, Interviews
& More . . .
About the Author
Meet Colin Thubron
I HAVE WANTED TO WRITE since childhood. My mother must have had something to do with this. She came from the family of John Dryden, the first poet laureate of England, and encouraged my juvenile poetry. My father was an army officer, and was American on his mother’s side, a descendant of Samuel Morse, inventor of the Morse code.
I had a privileged childhood, growing up in my parents’ rural home in southeast England. But the British custom of sending children away to boarding school from the age of seven made for a hard, early lesson in self-sufficiency. These were the immediate postwar years (I was born in 1939), and life in Britain was still somber. But when I was eight my father was posted to Washington and Ottawa for four years, and the excitement of this new world, with the vastness of the North American landscapes, came like a revelation to a boy from war-drab England, and perhaps planted the first seeds of fascination with places abroad.
“ In late 1965 I took the plunge into full-time writing, and settled with an Arab family in Damascus to start my first travel book.”
In 1953 I went to Eton, a school that encouraged independence, and typically excelled in English and history, and failed at mathematics. By the time I left, in 1957, I knew only that I wanted to write. I went into publishing, spending four years with Hutchinson as a trainee, then assistant editor. For a year and a half afterwards my love of travel took me abroad making freelance documentaries for BBC television in Turkey, Morocco and Japan. This was followed by a brief return to publishing in New York (1964-1965) with Macmillan Publishers, as a production editor.
In late 1965 I took the plunge into fulltime writing, and settled with an Arab family in Damascus to start my first travel book. Mirror to Damascus was published in 1967, and was successful enough to open a future. Soon afterwards I traveled on foot through Lebanon for The Hills of Adonis (1968) and settled in Jerusalem in the year after the Six-Day War for Jerusalem (1969).
But I had always hankered after writing novels, and, after a grim apprenticeship with failed ideas, produced The God in the Mountain (1977), set in Cyprus, and a travel book on the island, Journey into Cyprus (1975). This was followed by a second novel, Emperor, a multifaceted story of the conversion of Constantine, and A Cruel Madness (winner of the Silver Pen Award in Britain), set in a mental hospital.
At that time my travel books had all been about geographically small places. Then, in 1978, something changed: a motor accident, a fractured spine, and some emotional sadness started a new direction. I decided to learn Russian and take a car into the Soviet Union, whose gray unchangingness (this was Brezhnev’s time) made it an unlikely subject for a successful travel book. But I went in summer, spending the nights in student-run camps, and was only harassed by the KGB in my last weeks. The resulting book, Among the Russians (published in the United States as Where Nights Are Longest) coincided with a surge of popularity for the travel book genre in Britain, and gave me financial security.
In 1985, after studying Mandarin, I traveled through China at a time when the country was cautiously opening its doors. The resulting Behind the Wall: A Journey Through China won the Hawthornden Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, and was followed, in 1994, by a venture into the newly emerged Muslim republics of the broken-up Soviet Union for The Lost Heart of Asia. A long journey through the now-accessible Russian heartland produced In Siberia in 1999.
Throughout the past thirty years I have alternated travel books with novels. The two genres are often reactions against one another. The novels are introverted and intense—one, for instance, set in a mental hospital, another in a prison, another in an amnesiac’s brain. I have published successively Falling (1989), Turning Back the Sun (1991), Distance (1996) and To the Last City (2002). These are stark, short tales, sometimes autobiographical in feeling, but not in plot.
The travel books, on the contrary, stem from a fascination with the outer world, often distant and little-known. My concentration on the lands of the old Soviet Union, on China, and on Islam reflected at first a romantic obsession with the great civilisations of Asia. But more recently, after Among the Russians, the books have grappled with the darker concerns and fears of my generation.
“ Throughout the past thirty years I have alternated travel books with novels. The two genres are often reactions against one another.”
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About the Book
Strange Taste of Turkic Delight
The following article, written by Julia Llewellyn Smith, appeared in The Times (London), on October 5, 1994. Reprinted by permission of The Times.
COLIN THUBRON , the man regularly described as our greatest living travel writer, insists on fourth-class railway carriages and barely blinks when he loses a tooth in a calf’s-head stew.
Yet he comes home to a disappointingly comfortable corner of west London, all pastel-painted houses and twenty-fourhour delicatessens.
“Hello,” he says, openin
g the door of his garden flat. “Would you like some orange juice? I’ve got some that’s fresh-ish in the fridge.” I was expecting camel’s milk.
Never mind: inside the flat, Thubron inhabits a satisfying drabness of sludgy browns and shabby furniture that conforms to the image of a transitory resting place before the next adventure.
In fact, Thubron spends most of his time in London. Each travel book takes three years to write, but of that only four months are spent on the road. After that a place becomes familiar, and its impact dims. “The books tend to be adventures for me as well as for the readers,” he explains. “They are incursions into the unknown, and meant to express my own bewilderment and enlightenment.”
So far he has tried to pierce the “harrowing immensity” of Brezhnev’s Russia in Among the Russians, and the “terribleness of Chinese history” in Behind the Wall. But these giants fade in inscrutability compared with his most recent trip into the five former Soviet republics of Central Asia. Most readers, after all, have at least heard of Leningrad and Shanghai, but few could claim to know the second city of Turkmenistan, let alone its history.
“Each travel book takes three years to write, but of that only four months are spent on the road.”
It was this mystery that drew in Thubron, at a time when the Tajik civil war was deterring the sturdiest of travellers. “I suppose to most people it’s an enigma. It’s so ill defined and it always has been. My preoccupation was the identity of these people in the break-up of the Soviet Union. You would suppose they would feel violently nationalistic or be willing converts to Islamic fundamentalism.”
His expectations were thwarted. The people he met generally had little national or religious feeling. Many even hankered for the days of the Soviet empire and the identity it gave them.
“None of them expected to be independent. The Georgians and Armenians were clamouring for it, but to these people nationalism had always been a rather shadowy concept. They have always had very loose allegiances. They think of themselves as a group or family, they don’t feel Uzbek or Tajik. And Islam is a rather lukewarm element, mainly because the people are Turkic and think extremes are unmanly.”
He was uneasy in strange surroundings and expected these people to feel the same way. It is a shamefaced admission from a writer who is obsessively non-judgmental about his surroundings, to a point where detractors (rare) complain of soullessness.
People seem irresistibly compelled to confide in this gaunt, tanned man, with a face like a Crusader, and he listens without comment to the women moaning about their husbands and the young men who want to save his soul. Even the motorbike messenger who comes to the door as we are talking starts telling him how he skidded on some oil.