Sharyn river descends from the Tien Shan mountains and flows for almost 400 kilometers. Of this, a stretch of about 50 kilometers cuts through sedimentary rock. This is one of the main tourist attractions outside Almaty. I’d started with the thought of taking a couple of days’ tour through the area, with a night’s glamping or two thrown in. But The Family developed a back problem before we left, and I dropped the idea altogether. After three days in and around Almaty, The Family declared that her back was fit for a long day’s drive. So we decided to visit the part of the Charyn canyon which is called the Valley of Castles.
As we approached the canyon the flat steppes turned into a rolling landscape covered with the thin vegetation of arid parts of the world: some grass, some low herbs. I learnt later that this is a 80 meter thick layer of sandy soil laid down by the action of rivers and wind during the Cenozoic era. Most of this soil has been laid down in the time after the collision of the Indian and Asian plates, and the raising of the high barrier of Tibet which prevented the Asian monsoon from reaching this part of the world.
The Sharyn river has dug through this mud and then cut through the Paleozoic rocks below, exposing the previous geology of the region. i could see a thin lighter coloured layer of rock between the soil and the red rocks below. Over centuries, the water has carved the wonderful shapes that you see here. The day had been overcast. Weather seemed to be complicated here. The region lies between the tropical and mid-latitude circulations of the atmosphere, and weather is determined by the interactions of these two stable circulations with the Atlantic westerlies.
It never rained, but the light did not improve till sunset, so we never saw the blazing colours that the canyon is famous for. We trudged back to the tourist center for a tea and cake at the cafe. Then it was time to locate our car and drive for two hundred kilometers back to Almaty. It’s this long drive that makes it worthwhile to see the canyon as part of a longer trip from Almaty. After all there are a lot of sights in this part of Kazakhstan, and you can get in pretty long walks.
Eurasian Jackdaws (Corvus monedula) are very hard to find in India. I’m pretty sure that I heard one in the Kashmir valley, but I managed to photograph one only in Kazakhstan. This photo is from the shores of Sorbulak lake outside Almaty. Kashmir is at the southern edge of its range. It is largely a northern bird, found across Europe and into Asia north of Tibet, even as far east as Mongolia. In Mongolia the range of C. monedula overlaps with that of Daurian jackdaws (C. dauuricus). I enjoyed watching this smallest member of the crow family. It is a very social bird, and many of them flew around together, taking off, circling a part of the lake and coming back in a bunch to land. Apparently it pair bonds for many years, perhaps for life. Their behaviour looked as complex as that of the house crows (C. splendens) which I’ve seen. I hope to run into jackdaws again somewhere. I’m slowly working my way through the corvids of the world. Will I get to watch them all?
There aren’t many places on WordPress where bird watchers can share posts. If you post any photos of birds this week (starting today and up to next Monday), it would be great if you could leave a link in the comments, or a pingback, for others to follow. You don’t have to post a recent photo, nor do you have to post a photo of the same bird as mine, but do use the tag “Bird of the Week” to help others find your post. For more information see the main landing page for this invitation.
Humankind, all of it, is closely related not only through our common origin about three thousand centuries ago, but through constant remixing as groups migrated over and over again, seeking better living across deserts and seas. All this unwritten history is revealed by the words of our genes, whose alphabet was deciphered less than a century ago. This script is common to all life, and must have developed a few tens of millions of centuries ago. In sharp contrast, less than 35 centuries have passed since humans invented writing. The period immediately preceding this is a great mystery. There are material remains from immediately before written history: cultures, in all senses of the word, except for the existence of books and records. Kazakhstan is part of the region through which the recent past of human history flowed, and it was fun to trace connections as we travelled through this wonderful country.
The most recent layers of history are the easiest to peel away. The expansion of Rus towards the east in the 19th century has left its mark on the draining of the Aral Sea, the radioactive sector called the Polygon where nuclear tests were done, and in the ethnic composition of Kazakhstan. But it also left beautiful churches and a wealth of knowledge of natural history and the deep past of humanity. The layers before that are also easy to discern: the westward movement of nomads out of Xinjiang, bringing with them the Turkic language that replaced the Indo-European tongues previously used across the steppes, and the backward flow of Islam along their route.
Everything before that requires deep study. Fortunately more than a century of scholarship exists, and is easy to find today. Some of it surprised me. The cultural memory of Tengri-ism, the ancient Indo-European belief in the god of the sky and the goddess of the earth is reproduced in the colours of the mosques of Kazakhstan. Very often the domes are blue. Blue domes flourish across modern Almaty and Astana: a revival of the old ways. The original god of the sky, *Dyḗus ph₂tḗr, was remembered by the Greeks as Zeus. The Rigvedas remember the old deities as Dyaus, the sky, and the earth mother of Indra.
And horses? Where did this modern ship of the steppes come from? Genetics points to an origin 35 centuries ago, in the Volga-Don region. This points to the spread of this animal along with the horse drawn spoked chariots of war whose remains are found in the burial mounds of the Sintashta culture. The mobility of these horse-drawn chariots was a major advantage in wars against fixed settlements. I wonder whether the later name Purandhara, the destroyer of towns, by which Indra is sometimes known, has something to do with this. One remnant of nomadism in modern Kazakh life were rules of exogamy according to which “original” tribe you belonged to. This resonated with the notion of gotras in the Rigveda, and from which traditional exogamy rules of Indian cultures descend.
Somewhere in the middle of the last forty centuries of cultures ebbing and flowing across the grassy landscape of central Asia came the age of the Sakas. These golden warriors, as modern Kazakhstan calls them, are recorded across the histories of Asia and Europe. They are called Scythians in the west, after the description by Herodotus. Ancient Persians distinguished between different tribes of the Sakas: the warriors of Kazakhstan were described as the tribe wearing peaked caps, but another tribe was described as the people who drank houma. The name of the drink is cognate to the soma which appears a few times in the Rigveda. So the Indian contact with the Sakas is perhaps older than the events of 78 CE which marks the beginning of the Indian national calendar called the Saka calendar. By many accounts, the beginning of the trade routes now called the Silk Route started in the pax mundi imposed by Han China, the Saka dynasty called Kushans of India, the Parthian dynasty of Iran, and the Roman state.
The earliest travellers of these horizon-wide plains that we know of from their material culture are the pastoral nomads now called Yamanayas. Perhaps originating somewhere in the Volga-Caspian region, they and their culture travelled east on solid-wheeled ox-drawn wagons called ger, with tents that they called yurt. As the Yamanayas travelled, their language, now called proto Indo-European, PIE, beame the koine of the steppes, before fragmenting into other languages. The yurt are still visible across Kazakhstan. I sat in one in the ski-resort of Shimbulak and sipped a local aperitif, which I savoured as much as this connection with some of my ancient ancestors. It was interesting to sip a modern decendant of soma, sitting in a modern descdendant of the yurt, talking to The Family in a language which is a modern descendant of PIE.
Our very first meal in Kazakhstan was a well-considered introduction to modern day Kazakh food. The Family had pinged her network and come back with an introduction to a person who became our go-to consultant on Kazakhi affairs. This trust started with our first meal where we left the ordering to her. Instead of asking for a beshbarmak, which would have been a meal in itself, she ordered a variety of smaller plates. It was a great way to introduce newcomers to a range of local foods. When we met some of these things later in less ideal circumstances, we knew what to do.
The most familiar of these was the manti, a steamed meat-filled dumpling, which is shown in the featured photo. Variants will be familiar from China in the east to Finland in the north and Tibet to the south. For fifty centuries or more, Central Asia has been the exchange center of world culture. So it is hard to trace of the origin of manti.
The same could be said of the other snack which accompanied our meal: the baursak. This is a fried ball of dough, which from its fluffiness could have yeast or eggs (or both). It brought back half-forgotten memories of a snack that my mother had learnt the recipe for when I was in junior school. She made it from cake batter, so it had egg, yeast, sugar and salt. This fried snack is not the healthiest of eats, but it is comfort food. Something like this can be found in Turkey and the middle east, the Konkan coast, and perhaps many other parts of the world. Where did it come from? Central Asian food, like many other of its customs, evokes a strange familiarity.
Massive walls made of brick are visible at the entrance of the tomb of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi in Kazakhstan. This world heritage piece of architecture from the 14th century is a wonderful place for photography. I did a little, but I plan to go back one day and spend longer, watching the light change through the day.
Walking around an archaeological dig, the ruins of an ancient city on the silk route which was sacked and destroyed by a Mongol horde, I chanced on one of its current inhabitants. The lizard ran across the hard ground and stopped close to me. From where I was I could only see its back. I took a photo for the record (see below). But I’d learnt some time ago that to identify a lizard you also need to take a look at its dewlaps and throat pouch, and, if possible, its underside. So I tiptoed across to one side, making sure that my shadow never came anywhere near it. That part was easy, since the sun was almost directly overhead. I got a side view, which you can see above. In this fuss I forgot to ask whether that shard of pottery that you see here is modern or medieval.
The Family asked “So what is it?” The only answer I had was that it was not a gecko and not a chameleon. It took me a while to search. But fortunately Kazakhstan has fewer lizards than India or Africa. I believe this could be a Small spotted lizard (Mesalina guttulata). That is perhaps not the end of the story. I found a paper which very encouragingly starts by saying “Previous phylogenetic studies have shown the existence of several species complexes within the genus, some of them with high levels of undiscovered diversity.” It then goes on to describe how they identified three previously undiscovered species, in the Arabian gulf alone, which were all mistaken for M. guttulata. So encouraging for us amateurs! There are still enormous undiscovered worlds within ours.
Our taste in rooms runs to fairly minimal: plain light coloured walls, lots of light, modern light furniture. But every now and then we come to a hotel whose aesthetics is completely different. In Astana we had one of these: an old-fashioned Russian-style hotel. The Family loved the room, everything from the flowery wall-paper, the golden drapes, the iron-frame bed, the decorated wooden furniture, lace curtains, down to the flowers on the woollen carpet. This was not Kazakh for certain. The employees mostly spoke Russian.
I had to refresh my memory of the history of Astana. It was a small town founded in Tsarist times, but grew big during the war when industries moved to Kazakhstan from Russia. In fact the Kazakh SSR was the core of post-war recovery of the USSR. About a fifth of the population of the city are ethnic Russians. Our hotel was on the right bank of the Ishim river, just outside the core of the new planned city. When we explored the streets around our hotel we found interesting 21st century houses: brick facings on what looked like insulated walls, double glazing, canted roofs, electrically operated large decorative gates. Central Asian communities build walls very high so that you can’t see the houses. These were a different style: Russian.
Beyond this enclave of single-family homes was a block of apartment buildings. They didn’t look modern in style, with their slate-covered wavy roof lines. Nor did they look like Soviet-era apartment blocks. They left me quite puzzled. Astana’s architectural history seems to be complex.
Khoja Ahmed Yasawi (1093-1166 CE) is a name to remember. He was a mystic, the first poet to write in Khaqani Turkic, the language of the silk route (speakers of modern Hindi will recognize one word in five), and the founder of a Turkic Sufi order called the Yeseviye which strongly influenced the Islam of Central Asia. In 1389 his mausoleum in Yasi (currently called Turkestan) was ordered to be rebuilt by Timur. Yasawi was born in the nearby silk route town of Sayram, now a suburb of Shymkent, and his family’s tombs are scattered across a few streets in that town. He moved to Bukhara, rose to prominence and moved back to Yasi to preach.
When we walked up to the mausoleum it was immediately apparent that it was unfinished: the immense arch over the entrance had no mosaic work on it. But that was interesting in itself, as the citation in the UNESCO World Heritage listing points out. We could see that the structure was made from bricks of fired clay. Far above us, construction beams were visible: each was the trunk of a tree. It is said that Timur was obsessed with this structure and took part in its design. The work was abandoned for lack of funds on Timur’s death in 1405. We found that you could not enter the structure from the front.
So we walked around to the back and gasped at the beautiful tile work on the facade. We admired the tile encrusted Thuluth style callgraphy across the top of the facade. If our guide Devlet hadn’t mentioned it, I wouldn’t have noticed that the repeating tile work all across the facade just says “allah” over and over again in Khufik script. The structure with its thirty five rooms functioned as a khanaqah, and contained both a mosque and the mausoleum. We first entered the mosque (see the detail of the mihrab in the photo above), and then went round to see the grave of the poet-preacher. This was crowded and I could only get a restricted view of the jade covered sarcophagus. The ribbed dome that you can see in the featured photo lies directly above it.
The architecture of Yasawi’s mausoleum was innovative. It was later copied across Central Asia and become the style which is today known as Timurid. It is said that Timur himself took part in the planning of this structure. Whether or not you believe that, Timur was interested enough in the progress of the construction that he returned fairly often to Yasi. Even though Samakand, Bukhara, and Tashkent have better known Timurid structures, this one is preserved much better, and, being unfinished, let us in behind the curtains to see how it was made. It was also interesting to see features like the alabaster muqarnas (stalactites) adorning the vaults above us, and the profusion of tiles inside. It is said that Timur brought mosaic workers from Shiraz and tile workers from Isfahan to participate in the building of this mosque. We had assumed that centuries later the making of blue glazed tiles would be a local handicraft, but it wasn’t.
The kazandyq, the main hall, was closed off for repairs. This lies under the primary dome: with its diameter of 18.2 meters, it is the largest brick dome in Central Asia. Even now it is an architectural marvel. In the 15th century it must have seemed miraculous. This room had a large bronze cauldron. Devlet told us that it had been taken for an exhibition to St. Petersburg, then Leningrad, and had not been returned for decades. It was only in the years of Perestroika that it was returned. It was a pity that I couldn’t get closer to it. But there was more to see around the grand structure.
Eurasia’s steppe, all ten million square kilometers of it, is the largest ecoregion in the world. It is quite possible that when it first developed, it was by far the largest ecosystem on land. I tried to find out the geology of this vast region and realized that it is so large that the history of its assembly is the geological history of the continents of Asia and Europe. Its beginnings are possibly over 200 million years in the past, and it was already one piece of land when the supercontinent of Laurasia came together. Although north America and Eurasia were joined together, grasses did not take over large parts of the world at that time. So the prairies and the steppe evolved in parallel later.
Past responses to disturbance in the Asian steppe-desert imply that modern ecosystems are unlikely to recover their present structures and diversity if forced into a new regime. This is of concern for Asian steppes today, which are being modified for human use and lost to desertification at unprecedented rates.
When you are in the steppes you see grasses and low herbs of various kinds everywhere. I noticed first the domesticated species: horses, cattle, sheep. There are stories of wolves, and there are smaller creatures, various kinds of herbivorous burrowing rodents and rabbit-like species, and a a huge variety of birds. The steppe eagle and the wolf could be the biggest hunters here, but there are certainly weasels and their relatives, wild canids, and bears. I wondered how this ecosystem come about. Fortunately the answer was not hard to find. There was even a paleontology section in the National Museum in Astana which gave the answer.
More than 40 million years ago mammals were diversifying across the world to fill ecological niches vacated by mass extinctions after the Chicxulub impact. During a hot and wet period of the earth, two families of flowering plants proliferated across the steppes. They fed a group of ancestors of the odd-toes ungulates whose descendants today are equids, rhinoceri, and tapirs. You see above two of the fossils recovered from this time. This era was brought to an end as by three gelogical events.
One was that India collided with Asia, raising the Tibetan plateau, and cutting off monsoon circulation in the steppes. Another event was the northward movement of Africa which closed off the Parathetys sea, which had originally spread from the Mediterranean to Mongolia. And also at this time the earth began to cool and the Antarctic ice sheet formed for the first time. As a result the climate of the steppes became arid, and this first ecology of the Cenozoic era was decimated. The desert steppes were left populated mainly by rodents and rabbits.
Then, about 17 million years ago the climate warmed again and the steppes became covered with grasses and shrubs. On this stage then appeared the mega-mammals: giant deer, woolly mammoths, lions, aurochs, and the like. Eventually, about 10,000 years ago a tool-using ape species from Africa expanded its range into this region. Interestingly, the geological record shows an almost immediate disappearance of these large animals. Most people would conclude that some species were hunted to extinction, and others which were dependent on them died away as a result.
Later the same ape species introduced the domesticated animals which now roam the steppes. Even this landscape is under threat. The Gobi desert is expanding. If it expands enough then the grasses will go the way of the previous ecology. When the earth recovers the species that come will be new and would be unfamiliar to us. But grassland apes like us will not be around to marvel at them.
Did you know that tulips came from Kazakhstan? Neither did I, until a Kazakh mentioned it. I did a quick search and came to an article in The Astana Times which said “The first tulips came to the kingdom of the Netherlands over 400 years ago from Türkiye, where they were brought from Central Asia. They originated in the mountainous regions and adjacent deserts of Kazakhstan and Central Asia more than 10 to 20 million years ago.” In another age when I visited Turkey I learnt a little about this back story: how tulip mania spread in Turkey beginning from the time of Suleiman the Magnificent. Now, on a walk on the banks of the river Sayram Su in the Tien Shan mountains I got to see the original tulips.
The wildflowers from which garden varieties come are often smaller. These wild tulips were definitely smaller than the Dutch cultivars whose macros take over photo forums in early spring. But finding meadows full of wild tulips is a bit of a dream. We sat down to our picnic lunch in just such a meadow. I munched on an apple and sank back on the grass, to get a worm’s eye view of the place. I didn’t have any previous experience with tulips, and the people I was with were not interested in flower identification. So, for the moment the lovely wildflower which you see in the gallery above (bud and flower) remain unidentified.
Tulipa regelii (?) The biggest technical challenge in taking these photos was the bright sun. Although I was using the better lens, with its UV absorbent coating, it wasn’t enough to get rid of the glare: you can see that bits of the petals are blown out. Why can’t I fix this by changing ISO? That’s because of the harsh shadows which such a strong illumination gives rise to. Stepping down the ISO would then throw the shadows into complete darkness, giving a different feel to the flowers. I’ve always found it much harder to take macros in very bright sun than under an overcast sky.
Another tulip that I saw on the walk was quite different in shape. I recognized the first one as a tulip because of the shape of the bud. This was something I put down mentally as possibly an anemone as I passed. But someone else stopped and said “A different tulip.” Maybe it is the Tulipa regelii. The next time I go to Kazakhstan I’ll make sure to find a guided walk for tulip watching. April is the best time for it. The weather was wonderful, and I understand that it is the time when the largest variety of wild tulips flower.
Tulipa greigii
Once I realized that a variety of tulips flower in this region in May, I went back to an accidental photo I’d taken the previous day in a cemetery in Sayram. I’d not looked carefully at the red flowers which had popped up everywhere, putting them down as poppies. But now, looking at the photo I’d clicked inadvertently while slipping my phone into my pocket I realized that these are not poppies at all. They are the colourful Tulipa greigii.
Of course a walk in the Tien Shan mountains in late April is full of other lovely things. Some I sort of recognized, like the dandelion that you see above. There are so many types of dandelions that I won’t go further. The butterfly? It was very uncooperative. As I circled it to get a good look at its wings, it circled its perch to keep the wings angled away from me. But from the brief look I got as it flew I think it belongs to the genus Phalanta, the leopards.
Don't hold your breath 