Read Online Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age by Sam Tranum - Free Book Online
Authors: Sam Tranum
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carefully.
Already in his late 60s, Raphael Pumpelly had a bushy white beard that made him look a little like Charles Darwin. His excavations uncovered evidence of human habitation stretching back 7,000 years. 24 During that time, Anew had developed from a small rural settlement into an urban center. From roughly the second through the fifteenth centuries A.D., it had served as a stop for Silk Road caravans traveling between China and India in the east, and Mediterranean ports in the west. 25
One day while Pumpelly’s men were digging, locusts began crawling out of the ground: first a scattered few, then thousands. “The whole surface of the oasis became at once covered with an endless insect army, always twenty or more per square foot …At last, when they accumulated in our excavation pits faster than men could shovel them out …we had to stop work and flee,” he recalled. 26 As the archaeologists retreated, the locusts gorged themselves on the surrounding wheat fields, creating a regional famine.
***
When Allen and I reached the nearest of the two mounds, we saw no evidence of locusts, trenches, ancient civilizations, or Silk Road caravans. Just a lot of dust, some empty bottles and an old tire. On top, though, we discovered two ragged pillars surrounded by rubble. We’d found the mosque.
Old photographs of the Shaykh Jamal al-Din Mosque show a soaring, arched entrance (a pishtaq) inlaid with two sinuous dragons, surrounded by geometric patterns and Arabic script. It looks about five stories tall and might once have been flanked by two minarets reaching even higher into the sky. The mosque was apparently built for a local notable sometime in the mid-15th Century. One scholar called it, “one of the most unusual and spectacular monuments of Islamic Central Asia.” 27
By the time we arrived, though, there wasn’t much left. The graceful pishtaq had collapsed and what remained of the famous dragons had been taken to a museum in Ashgabat. All that remained were the two pillars – the sides of the pishtaq. The mosque had been destroyed during a massive earthquake that struck the Ashgabat area in 1948. The quake measured 7.3 on the Richter scale and may have killed as many as 110,000 people in and around the Ashgabat area, 28 making it the ninth most destructive earthquake documented by the US Geological Survey. 29
Two men kneeled on carpets before the ruined mosque, praying. I squatted on my heels nearby, looking out over the patchwork of vineyards, cotton fields, and villages spread out below the mound. Gray-black clouds swirled overheard and the wind blew down from the mountains. The ruins had become a shrine where people came to make wishes, tying scraps of fabric to the scrubby trees nearby, leaving amulets in niches in the crumbled brick walls, propping fallen bricks up into teepee shapes. I rolled a scrap of cotton I’d pocketed in the field into a piece of yarn, tied it to a shrub, and made a wish.
The earthquake that destroyed the mosque was so powerful, the destruction it caused so complete, that there were rumors an atomic bomb had gone off in Ashgabat. A. Abaev, who lived through the quake, wrote about it years later. He was a child, sleeping on the veranda of his family’s one-story home in Ashgabat. The quake woke him. There was silence for a moment and then people started screaming – first a few and then thousands. The earthquake had lasted only a few seconds. In that time, nine of the 17 people in his extended family had been killed. 30
The seven-year-old Saparmurat Niyazov was among the children orphaned that night. His house collapsed and killed his mother and two brothers, according to the Rukhnama . (His father had died a few years earlier, fighting in the Red Army during World War II.) Niyazov sat alone by his ruined home for six days, weeping, before his family was pulled from the wreckage and buried. 31 After the Soviet Union fell and Niyazov became Turkmenistan’s
Already in his late 60s, Raphael Pumpelly had a bushy white beard that made him look a little like Charles Darwin. His excavations uncovered evidence of human habitation stretching back 7,000 years. 24 During that time, Anew had developed from a small rural settlement into an urban center. From roughly the second through the fifteenth centuries A.D., it had served as a stop for Silk Road caravans traveling between China and India in the east, and Mediterranean ports in the west. 25
One day while Pumpelly’s men were digging, locusts began crawling out of the ground: first a scattered few, then thousands. “The whole surface of the oasis became at once covered with an endless insect army, always twenty or more per square foot …At last, when they accumulated in our excavation pits faster than men could shovel them out …we had to stop work and flee,” he recalled. 26 As the archaeologists retreated, the locusts gorged themselves on the surrounding wheat fields, creating a regional famine.
***
When Allen and I reached the nearest of the two mounds, we saw no evidence of locusts, trenches, ancient civilizations, or Silk Road caravans. Just a lot of dust, some empty bottles and an old tire. On top, though, we discovered two ragged pillars surrounded by rubble. We’d found the mosque.
Old photographs of the Shaykh Jamal al-Din Mosque show a soaring, arched entrance (a pishtaq) inlaid with two sinuous dragons, surrounded by geometric patterns and Arabic script. It looks about five stories tall and might once have been flanked by two minarets reaching even higher into the sky. The mosque was apparently built for a local notable sometime in the mid-15th Century. One scholar called it, “one of the most unusual and spectacular monuments of Islamic Central Asia.” 27
By the time we arrived, though, there wasn’t much left. The graceful pishtaq had collapsed and what remained of the famous dragons had been taken to a museum in Ashgabat. All that remained were the two pillars – the sides of the pishtaq. The mosque had been destroyed during a massive earthquake that struck the Ashgabat area in 1948. The quake measured 7.3 on the Richter scale and may have killed as many as 110,000 people in and around the Ashgabat area, 28 making it the ninth most destructive earthquake documented by the US Geological Survey. 29
Two men kneeled on carpets before the ruined mosque, praying. I squatted on my heels nearby, looking out over the patchwork of vineyards, cotton fields, and villages spread out below the mound. Gray-black clouds swirled overheard and the wind blew down from the mountains. The ruins had become a shrine where people came to make wishes, tying scraps of fabric to the scrubby trees nearby, leaving amulets in niches in the crumbled brick walls, propping fallen bricks up into teepee shapes. I rolled a scrap of cotton I’d pocketed in the field into a piece of yarn, tied it to a shrub, and made a wish.
The earthquake that destroyed the mosque was so powerful, the destruction it caused so complete, that there were rumors an atomic bomb had gone off in Ashgabat. A. Abaev, who lived through the quake, wrote about it years later. He was a child, sleeping on the veranda of his family’s one-story home in Ashgabat. The quake woke him. There was silence for a moment and then people started screaming – first a few and then thousands. The earthquake had lasted only a few seconds. In that time, nine of the 17 people in his extended family had been killed. 30
The seven-year-old Saparmurat Niyazov was among the children orphaned that night. His house collapsed and killed his mother and two brothers, according to the Rukhnama . (His father had died a few years earlier, fighting in the Red Army during World War II.) Niyazov sat alone by his ruined home for six days, weeping, before his family was pulled from the wreckage and buried. 31 After the Soviet Union fell and Niyazov became Turkmenistan’s
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