Food & Culture

On 22 December 2009, 2,600 tonnes of explosives dropped a mountainside into the Naryn, and the rubble is the dam. How Kambarata-2…

The first Kyrgyz newspaper was printed in Tashkent in 1924. A century later it is the state gazette, and the country has…

Look for a Kyrgyz novel in English that is not by Aitmatov and you run out fast. The akyns, the Soviet generation,…

A twenty-institute academy running on $5.7 million a year, the man who wrote the Kyrgyz alphabet and was shot for it, and…

Kyrgyz tobacco went from 76,000 tonnes a year to 1,450. What the Soviet industry was, why a single buyer ended it, and…

Horse rib meat and fat in intestine casing, simmered an hour. What chuchuk is, how it differs from kazy, what it costs,…

Ganfan means dry rice. Ashlyanfu puts two kinds of starch in one cold bowl. Both came over the Tien Shan in the…

Some 439,000 peasant farms averaging three hectares each, on a country that is 45 per cent pasture, importing most of its grain…

About 1.5 million pupils in school buildings designed for 850,000. Why Kyrgyz schools run in shifts, what teachers earn and who funds…

The tax service says 12 per cent of GDP, statistics say 19.5, the IMF said 38. Four official answers about the Kyrgyz…

21 March is the one day the whole country does the same thing. Sumolok, Ala-Too Square, kok-boru, and why March is the…

Silver here is protective, not decorative. The pieces and their names, what tumar amulets are for, and how to tell handwork from…