In Bishkek, on 31 August, Kyrgyzstan celebrates sixteen years of independence. At the top of the column where Lenin once stood, a statue of liberty and the Kyrgyz flag, in a setting that has remained Soviet; on the square, people dance and enjoy themselves, and nomadic symbols are everywhere. Folklore, or reality? In this small Central Asian country crossed by the old Silk Road, between Kazakhstan, China, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, the answer lies higher up, in the valleys of the Celestial Mountains. At more than 3,500 metres, shepherds still live in yurts, and the young people who left to look for work in town come back to tend the animals.
On 31 August, Bishkek celebrates sixteen years of independence; in the mountains, a French teacher insists, you still see “shepherds with yurts, with their animals” everywhere.
In Kyrgyzstan, the nomads who own the most animals are true notables, and each man in the family takes his turn guarding the herd.In the festival crowd, Ilatbu, a French teacher, comes up to Christophe. Her parents were nomads; under the USSR, people were gathered into towns, into concrete houses. Yet nomadic life has endured: “It is our tradition.” The shepherds, she says, are in the mountains. Before joining them, you have to learn to ride: she sends him to Rash, a breeder who takes in tourists on the shores of Lake Issyk-Kul. “Above all, for me, being Kyrgyz means being free in the mountains, with my horses.” With him, you cross the mountains, tend the herd, drink its milk, kumis. A proverb sums it up: “Horses are the wings of man.” Christophe, who is afraid of them, learns to say “chu” to move forward and brings the horses back with Rash, despite his horror of going downhill. Rash’s father captured eagles and falcons to train them, a tradition going back seven generations in the family; he arranges a meeting with Talgarbek, one of the few eagle hunters left. His eagle is a little over four years old, weighs six kilos and eats six hundred grams of meat a day. The tradition dates back to the 16th century, when a famine caused by the cold drove the ancestors to hunt with birds of prey; his grandfather passed it on to him. There are said to be only about fifteen of them left in the whole country.
Every part of the horse is used: the meat, the milk, which is called kumis, the hide, and the horsehair, from which ropes are made.
Eagles are used to hunt foxes; after the kill, Talgarbek gives his a little meat, “so that it does not lose its hunting instinct”.In Sari-Bulak, on the old Silk Road, Christophe finds a truck heading for the Chinese border: three hundred kilometres, twenty-four hours of hairpin bends at altitude, and a load of scrap metal. “We sell our metal to the Chinese because, you see, here in Kyrgyzstan, we have no factory to recycle it,” the driver explains. He will cross a pass at 4,600 or 4,800 metres, where the engine runs short of oxygen and the men of breath. In the past, caravans took months to bring silk back from China; today, the road carries steel, and the more modern Chinese trucks overtake the Kyrgyz one. At the At Bashi livestock market, the truck of Aïbek, the supplier who does the rounds of the shepherds, has broken down. A stranger offers a seat in his car: an injector problem after fifty metres, seven hours planned for about a hundred kilometres. At the end of the track, the former Soviet cultural centre, built in the early sixties: the media library where films were shown to the shepherds, the sauna, the remains of the hospital. Nine families still live there, and shepherds from the surrounding area come to turn their wool into felt. Aïbek, who runs the shop there, would like to enlarge it, “because more and more people are coming to live in the valley”.
For the driver, this is the road “that links the Chinese and the Kyrgyz”; the only other one to China goes through Osh, in the south-west of the country.
For the believer, icons and saints offer protection against the hazards of the road.The Ak-Sai valley rises to more than 3,500 metres. The yurts are scattered, but the neighbours form one big family; it is at Tourgounaly’s that Christophe is taken in, as a surprise guest. He takes off his shoes and admits that at altitude he has strange dreams. At dawn, he follows his host behind the sheep, which know their pasture and go there on their own. Territories are shared by agreement between neighbours, and the mountains serve as landmarks. You have to leave early and come back late, because the animals must graze and walk for the meat to be good: “When the sheep grow fat, our faces light up.” Of four hundred sheep, two hundred and thirty are his; he tends the others for six months for people from the village, taking turns with his two sons. For six or seven months a year, the family stays at the winter quarters. “I am not afraid of solitude. Why should I be? We are here to feed our children.” Some young people have left for town to look for work; most come back to tend the animals and take up their ancestors’ trade. And besides, he says, “it pays much better than working in town”. In the evening, the flock is driven into the pen, and everyone sleeps with one eye open: with winter approaching, the wolves are hungry.
In the valley, yurts and nomads are scattered, but among neighbours, people form “one big family”.
Tourgounaly’s family goes down to the village only in spring and autumn; the rest of the year, it lives on the high plateaus.His wife gets up between half past six and seven. She milks the yaks and the mares, skims the milk, ferments the yoghurt, makes the fresh cheese, the kurut and the butter, lights the fire, bakes the bread. A female yak gives two and a half litres, three at most; cows, brought up from below, would give almost nothing at this altitude, it is far too cold. In summer, everything is prepared for winter, and in winter people rest. Their two sons live with them, their daughter works in town; tradition has it that the youngest son stays, attached to his father. Christophe turns the cream separator: the twenty litres of the morning milking will yield two litres of cream. Once a week, the shepherds of the valley gather for a feast. A sheep is killed and the skin kept; the back and hindquarters are the piece of honour, and the head goes to the youngest guest. Borsok is fried, intestines are braided for sausage, and the history of the people is sung to the sound of the komuz, a small three-stringed instrument. It is the last feast of the summer. The first snows will arrive in a few days: the yurt is taken down and loaded onto the animals, and they set off for the winter quarters, where the grass is greener.
“Nothing holds together without effort,” says Tourgounaly’s wife, up before seven; “it is not so hard once you are used to it”.
With independence, the Kyrgyz suffered from a market economy they were not prepared for; recently, people have been coming back to live in the valley.“My dream would be for them to start a family and become shepherds, like me.”Tourgounaly