Food & Culture

Somebody will ask what year you were born, not your age. The Kyrgyz twelve-animal cycle, the milestone years, and why people wear…

More than 360,000 went west and up to 100,000 did not return. In the same years 137,000 people were deported into the…

Sentenced to death twice before 25, head of the Red Army at 39, dead at 40 six months before they renamed his…

In 1916 tens of thousands of Kyrgyz walked into the Tien Shan trying to reach China. Urkun is the country's central trauma…

The capital may be named after a butter churn, a man, five beks or a pointed mountain. The encyclopedia says it cannot…

Bandits in Soviet accounts, founders of the republic in newer ones. What the Osh archive actually shows about the Basmachi in southern…

Chechens, Karachays, Meskhetian Turks and Kurds live in the Tien Shan because in 1944 the Soviet state put entire nations on trains…

Four administrative steps between 1924 and 1936 turned a scattered population into a union republic, and an earlier attempt in 1922 was…

A Frunze design bureau built instruments that flew to Venus, Mars and Halley's Comet. Around 1,500 staff, average age 28. The building…

The shape in the middle of the Kyrgyz flag is a yurt roof seen from the floor. How a yurt is actually…

More than 204,000 Kyrgyz live in China, in a prefecture named after them where they are a quarter of the population. How…

The Kyrgyz year starts at the equinox and the cold months count down nine, seven, five, three, one. The named winter spells,…