The Stories Under the Ground (Part One)

What happens when history complicates traditions?

Ak Beshim, Chuy Province, Kyrgyzstan

The Chuy Valley tells a story of contrasts. On the floor of the valley, the land is flat and cultivated, made up of villages and farmland with occasional pockets of trees the color of gold in mid-October. The surrounding mountains are untamed, protruding whichever way they please. Up high, the paths on the foothills waver and crumble; the farther down you go, the more gridded they become.

As you travel through the villages, gravel road turns to pavement back to gravel again. A man on a horse may pause the traffic. A woman browses through her smartphone in the back of a Yandex taxi. A call to prayer is muffled by horns and a siren.

Driving near the farm fields, you may occasionally see a mound that rises only a few dozen feet until dropping down again. You may see a few more, then a few more, until the whole thing becomes a game, and you keep count of the small hills that are connected to nothing and come out of nowhere. 

What’s harder to notice, however, is that even these hills follow a grid of sorts. And this is where the contrasts deepen: the mountains surrounding the valley are natural and rugged, the mounds inside the valley—orderly and, in a sense, man-made. 

. . .

Our car is parked on the top of one of these hills. The morning sky is still dark, and it’s easy to feel the breeze up here, to the point that we can only endure a couple of minutes of standing out in the open air. 

My guide leads me towards the edge, and with a hand wrapped in his sleeve, he points to a wooden hut with a tin roof out in the distance. It’s the only building in sight.

“That’s where they found a part of a buddha statue. Once they found it, they covered it up with that building.”

The breeze picks up, and he leads me to another portion of the hill. Here, I am met with rows of dirt and rocks that have been shaped into squares. Yellow weeds cover the mounds like some type of camouflage.

“This is what used to be called Navekat. Right here is where the city center used to be.”

At that moment the sun begins to rise over the mountains, from the east. My guide walks up to the mounds of rubble, looking down at the ground.

“Archaeologists have found Christian artifacts on this site as well,” he continues. “We think that this city may have had a sizable Christian population around a thousand years ago.”

Within a minute he’s back in his car, and I am left outside to admire the sunrise.

. . .

A few weeks before my trip to Navekat, I had been sitting in a taxi on my way towards a post office south of town. In taxi rides, I always wonder how long it will take before the driver spots that I’m a foreigner. For some reason, this time it doesn’t take him very long.

“Where are you from?” my driver asks me.

I begin my recitation. I reply that I’m from America, that I’ve been here for only a few months but have lived in Central Asia before, and that I’m still working on studying Russian. He nods in reply.

“Do you know Kyrgyz?”

“Unfortunately, no.”

“I must tell you, Kyrgyz is the hardest language. Russian is hard, but Kyrgyz is the hardest.”

“I’ve heard it’s a rich language,” I reply.

He pauses for a moment. “We used to be a great empire, you know. Like Genghis Khan. We were everywhere in Central Asia.”

I shuffle in my seat a little. “Really?”

“Yes. You know the Kazakhs? We conquered the Kazakhs at one point. The traditions they say are theirs, those are our traditions.”

“I’ve heard they are very similar.”

His story of the Kyrgyz continues as the ride goes on. Outside my window, the cars sway past in a flurry of images until we hit a traffic light, only a minute or so from my final destination.

After glancing at his GPS, he concludes with this comment: “I try to follow the teachings of my ancestors. There are too many choices in this world, too many decisions. I just want to follow what they did.”

. . .

My taxi driver follows a reasonable line of thought. In a time when we have access to over a billion voices on a single website, it’s easy to get lost in the ever-expanding torrent of opinions and beliefs. For many Central Asians like my taxi driver, looking to ancestors can provide a cultural and religious tether. Their practices and teachings help bring stability in a world flooded with new ideas.

But this line of thought also prompts a difficult question, one which many Central Asians wrestle with. If the forefathers of Central Asians taught practices worth emulating, what then, exactly, did their forefathers teach? How do they know what they ought to practice and believe?

In some ways the answer to this question is simple. The Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Uighur, etc. all follow a variety of oral traditions that are passed on from parent to child to grandchild. Questions such as how to prepare a meal, host a visitor, submit to authority, show respect to others—all of these can be answered by pointing to what parents and grandparents and great-grandparents taught.

But at other times, particularly when discussing matters of religion, navigating this question can feel like navigating through the Chuy Valley. That is, as you take this path, you begin to sense that you are in a place with far more complexity than you ever expected.

Navekat, Chuy Province, Kyrgyzstan

. . .

My wife and I are sitting down with some friends of ours, enjoying a light conversation on the topic of religion. The subject is far more approachable here than it is in the West, and so we ask plenty of questions and exchange perspectives. At one point, the topic turns towards the hijab.

Our friend comments, “There’s a big discussion going on here in Kyrgyzstan about the hijab. Some women are proud of them and insist on wearing them. They say, ‘we are Kyrgyz, and Kyrgyz are Muslim. This is a part of our culture.’”

“And the other side?” we ask.

Our friend’s response: “Others say that isn’t true. ‘We didn’t wear the hijab before we became Muslim,’ they say. ‘That’s not who we are.’”

Walking down the street, you can sense the contrast, another angle of the story. Hijabs intermingle with scarves intermingle with long hair, short hair, dyed hair. The mountains clash with the valley floor.

What’s interesting to note is that both sides appeal to tradition. Both sides desire to look back to their forefathers, but clarity has yet to be reached.

. . .

The reality is, a look back in time will only complicate the answer to this question. Over the last several years, archeological digs throughout Central Asia have revealed a rich diversity of cultures and religions, ones that feel out of place to modern Central Asians. But what’s being realized, first to dig crews and subsequently to Central Asians, is that though the findings may feel out of place, they cannot be called foreign. The churches and monasteries under the ground do not belong to ancient, foreign missionaries; they belong to ancient, Central Asian forefathers.

Over the next several weeks, we’ll be exploring what is being found at these archeological sites. And with that, we’ll continue to wrestle with this question of tradition that many Central Asians have to face. In a culture that so deeply cherishes the teachings of past generations, what is to be done when archeologists uncover a completely unrecognizable forefather?

In truth, we probably won’t get a great answer to that question. The next articles in this series, unfortunately, may further complicate the picture, add more complexity to the story.

But I guess that’s what we get when we talk about the middle of nowhere and everywhere.

. . .

This is the first article of a multi-part series. Please consider subscribing to receive articles as soon as they are published. Thanks!