Kyrgyzstan - a vanishing culture

Young men and women have abandoned the herds and plains of Kyrgyzstan for work beyond its borders. Photo / Supplied

For generations, life in Temir Kanat has stood still. High in the Tian Shen mountains, 1000 once-nomadic villagers lead the timeless life of the jailoo, the alpine pastures grazed by prized horse herds and stalked by tamed hunting eagles.

It is an ancient existence which has withstood a succession of invaders, from the Mongol hordes to the armies of Soviet Russia.

But there is alarming evidence that poverty and an enforced re-awakening of the wandering instincts of the Kyrgyz people - taking an entire generation of young men out of the countryside to find work abroad - is imperilling centuries of tradition and culture as never before.

With rural unemployment at epidemic levels and the once-booming economies of neighbouring Russia and Kazakhstan sucking in migrant labourers, some 800,000 Kyrgyz, in particular men aged 18 to 35, have left.

The community of Temir Kanat, where 75 per cent of those of working age have already departed, is bitter testimony to what happens to those left behind.

At this time of year, in temperatures that regularly reach -40C, the burden of sustaining the village falls on its ranks of wizened grandmothers or babushkas and their meagre pensions.

As a result, Temir Kanat is a ghost village. So are thousands of places like it. These are places populated almost uniquely by the very old and the very young, where the certainties of an age-old existence defined by livestock and the production of such staples as kumys, a drink made from fermented mare's milk, appears to be dying out.

Kaken Kyrgyzova, 74, said: "My son has left to work in the city. I look after my three grandchildren. It is my duty. My son cannot send money so we survive on my pension of 1600 som ($53) each month. It is hard.

"We eat noodles and tea because I can no longer tend the crops. Our fire is heated by animal dung. This is what our lives have become."

Kaken co-habits in a single room with neighbours and struggles to send her two granddaughters and grandson to school, each attending on alternate days.

Bolsunbek, 13, her grandson, is clear about what he wants to do as soon as he is old enough to earn a living. He said: "I want to join my father as a builder. I will leave here."

The cycle of departure, and debt, is beginning to erode the communal customs that hold together a culture in one of central Asia's least-known countries.

The departure of so many young men, a trend critics of Kyrgyzstan's increasingly autocratic Government claim the authorities are happy to accept because it removes the strata of society most likely to lead a political rebellion, means there are diminishing numbers in the jailoo ready to continue such traditions.

Already, families have to make up for their absence by paying shepherds to tend animals, including herds of horses kept as much for meat as riding, duties that would have been looked after within the extended clan.

Kyrgyzstan has been called "the Switzerland of central Asia" because of its unspoilt mountainous terrain that shares borders with Kazakhstan, China, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

But beyond a preponderance of snowy peaks, the legendary land of the 40 tribes of the Kyrgyz bears little resemblance to its European alpine counterpart.

The country is ranked in the United Nations' poverty index below Equatorial Guinea and Guyana. Its per capita GDP of US$951 ($1383) for its population of 5.2 million is comparable to Haiti or Chad.

But between 2004 and 2008, about 800,000 Kyrgyz men, and increasingly women, scratched together the US$100 to US$500 required to make the journey from Kyrgyzstan's agricultural hinterland to work in often wretched conditions on building sites, tobacco farms and sweatshops from St Petersburg to Siberia.

With up to 90 per cent of migrants working illegally in their host country, the true figure could be higher. The annual sum sent home by the country's diaspora rose from US$481million in 2004 to US$1.2 billion in 2008, accounting for 27 per cent of GDP.

Put another way, a third of Kyrgyz households are reliant on money earned outside the country.

Attempts to counteract the corrosive effects of migration are at a fledgling stage. The Government last month added an extra 200 som to pensions to help offset a proposed tripling in electricity prices, and 400 per cent rise in electricity costs.

There are plans to increase tourism to bolster what remains an agrarian economy.

But the elders of Temir Kanat and the surrounding area are resigned to the ebbs and flows of global capitalism and seek merely to survive.

Rosa Konobyava, 70, a Russian Tartar who cares for her four grandchildren and has not heard from her two sons in Kazakhstan since they left six months ago, said: "I love them. I can hug them and kiss them. They bring only good things.

"But our way of life has changed and we are losing things that were once certain. There is an old Russian proverb, 'Old age is not happiness and youth is not life'. There are many who feel that way."

- INDEPENDENT