Central Asia XI: Peering into Afghanistan

 Today, October 18, 2021, we visited the Back of Beyond--Termiz, on the southern tip of Uzbekistan.  We looked across the river into Afghanistan.

The map above shows Tashkent on the top right of Uzbekistan, Fergana (Farghona) in the extreme east of the country, and Termiz in the very south.  We then drove north, over the mountains, to Sharisabz and then north to Samarkand.  After our time in Termiz, we drove west to Bukhara, took the train to Khiva (still farther west, near Urgench), and drove eight hours to Nukus, in the extreme west of the country.  Our last visit was to Muynaq, on the coast of the Aral Sea.  The English spellings of these cities differ from one map, signpost, and book to another.

Our plane from Tashkent to Termez left at 10 a.m.  We savored our last elegant buffet breakfast at the Lotte Hotel.  I had one last crispy croissant with black currant jam and the still unidentified (probably quince) brown jam; one last sip of fresh carrot juice; one last pork sausage, glistening with fat; one last bite of savory, thyme scented roasted potatoes.  

The Tashkent domestic airport was sleek and modern.

Our plane was full of slick-looking young Uzbek men talking intently into their cell phones.  Uzbekistan is ripe with opportunities for development, and I pictured them plotting new condo buildings or chains of retail stores.   Abdu said that the Uzbek government gives large tax breaks to businessmen who change cotton fields to products with higher value, less water-needy crops like pomegranates.  It is fall in Uzbekistan, and pomegranates and quinces, persimmons and apples are sold at the bazaars and roadside stands.

We were met, at the Termez airport, after our 1 ½ hour flight, by Rihann.   She is a curator at the Surkhandarya Regional Museum and also a professor.  She is a short lady with jet-black hair and eyes, lots of eye makeup, and a commanding air about her.

Rihann led us through the nine exhibit areas of the Museum, each displaying artifacts from a particular historic period, from the Neolithic to the Russian occupation.  

I was most interested in the artifacts from the Buddhist and Greek eras.  Alexander the Great traveled through Termiz, and a bust of him was in a niche at the museum.  There were also remains of pillars, showing the Greek acanthi leaves mixed with Zoroastrian or Buddhist symbols.  There were also coins with heads of the Greco-Bactrian rulers who presided over southern Uzbekistan for more than a century after Alexander the Great died.  

Buddhists arrived in Termiz around the time of Christ and stayed for several hundred years, building elaborate monasteries filled with caves.

The Arab conquest of Uzbekistan extended through the 700s.

We ate shish kebab and talked at lunchtime with Abdu, Rihann, and our driver.

We spent an hour at the Fayez Tepe and Kara Tepe Buddhist sites.  The Fayez Tepe consists of a 1^st century Buddhist monastery with a freestanding brick stupa.  Two life-size figures of the Buddha are sculpted on the grounds, and murals of people in Kushan dress (the empire of that period) adorn the walls. A series of aqueducts over 2 kilometers long supplied the site with water from the Amu Darya (Oxus River).

The Buddhist monastery of Kara Tepe was built in the 2^nd century AD on three hills in Old Termiz.  The cave walls have been adorned with graffiti through the ages: there are inscriptions from the Bactrian, Sogdian and Middle Persian eras, among others.  We explored the small rooms that each monk lived in during the summer and the caves that they moved into during the winter, when living inside the earth protected them from the bitter cold.  

Rihann directed us through the Buddhist ruins with authority and precision, calling us back to the important ruins at hand (“Come here!”) whenever we veered off into peering at the Afghan border or empty shell casings from the 1979-1986 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.  She marched about on the sand in a dress, nylons, and heels, while we trudged in trainers (tennis shoes?) and levis.

We were distracted by shell casings from that long ago fight over Afghanistan, when Russians controlled Termiz.

We could see Afghanistan across the Oxus River, which forms the boundary.

We finished the day with a visit to the Sultan Saodat Complex.  The buildings date from the 11th to the 15th centuries, but like most of the ancient buildings in Uzbekistan, they have been restored.

Abdu took us to an Afghan restaurant for dinner and talked with the waiter in Dari, which is the Afghan language.  Abdu is a Tajik, one of the many ethnicities in Uzbekistan, and Tajiks originally came from Persia (Iran).  Abdu says that Farsi, the Iranian language which he also knows, is similar to Dari.

It was a very big day.

We spent the night at the Termez Palace Hotel.