Falcons, Mountains, & Panoramic Views: Kyrgyzstan in Photos
Look inside the remote valley life of Central Asia through the photos and memories of four expats who called Kyrgyzstan home.
Photographs by Irina Rozovsky and Mark Steinmetz
Looking at Irina Rozovsky and Mark Steinmetz’s photos of Kyrgyzstan, my mind returned to the summer of 2014, when I thought aloud, “I could live here.” It was the second day of a four-day yurt-to-yurt horseback trip to a lake called Song Köl, and I was nervously watching my horse climb — hoof by hoof — terrain steeper than any I had ever climbed myself. The path, so much as there was one, ascended a treacherous scree field to summit one of many clay-colored peaks. It is not that I am necessarily drawn to extreme situations — although Ethan, my husband, certainly is, and I’m drawn to him — or that I’m particularly fond of being out of cell phone range in a country with surprisingly strong coverage. But there was something inviting about this place — you can see it in these images.
I had no idea how to interact with our generous horseback guide and nightly yurt hosts. Still, I felt that fundamental pleasure world travelers know well of managing to successfully infer things from their body language and the few words that we could share. Ethan knew Russian, which helped. But because Russian isn’t the indigenous language and was only introduced widely to the people of this region in the mid-19th century, many are more comfortable speaking Kyrgyz, which is part of an altogether different linguistic family.
I looked down from my perch atop the mighty horse, whose only expression of exertion was the occasional “herumph” let loose from within. Far, far below me I could see the town where we’d started from the previous morning, the land between here and there rumpled up into magnificent summits and ridges that twisted and turned into the farthest reaches of visibility. Kyrgyzstan is a country of peaks, nestled as it is in the Tian Shan mountains, themselves kind of a distant offshoot of the Himalayas, by way of the Pamirs of Tajikistan. It is also a country interspersed with gorgeous lakes and flanked on the north and south by long, wide valleys that feel almost like the storied steppes of nearby Kazakhstan.
Behind me, Ethan was smiling from his horse. He had first come to Kyrgyzstan in 2003, back when the kiosks in town still served cups of moonshine for a few som (or cents), herds of sheep could be seen grazing outside the presidential building, and in the countryside, people told him he was the first American they had ever seen in person. He loved it so much — the unbounded landscape, remote, yes, but clearly well trodden and even somehow familiar, perhaps because it had been home to generations of nomads. An anthropologist and sometime reporter, he would come back to this place for 15 years, until it became a part of who he was. He reveled in learning tidbits about the people who lived there, like their traditional word for a boat — kayik — reminiscent of the word that came to English from the Inuit centuries ago.
As I thought about what it would be like to live here, we neared the top of the mountain pass. Somewhere beyond was the alpine lake we sought. Ethan told me about coming up here in the winter by horseback, years earlier, with an elder from the village below. As the midwinter sun had set, the old man rode slowly into the darkness, guided only by a lifetime of experience and a far-off light that grew brighter upon their approach. When they had set off that day, he had smiled to Ethan as he added a liter of grain alcohol to the bag of supplies tied to his saddle; it was meant to fortify their hosts. It proved necessary. The hardy ice fishers who lived in the yurt at the lake’s shores brought a bucket of water in at night for cooking, and by morning, the three or four inches of water left were covered with a thick layer of ice. Ethan had slept tightly alongside five or six men who had all anesthetized themselves with drink and burrowed under stacks of thick wool tushuks, the local comforters.
But in the summer of 2015, when we did, in fact, move to the country smaller than my home state of Minnesota, we of course chose an easier life. Ethan and I rented a reasonably comfortable apartment on a tree-lined street in the capital of Bishkek, not far from the offices of the successors to the KGB, in a building reserved for the elite during Soviet times that had not been updated since. On the wall hung a needlepoint in various shades of pink detailing the contours of Marilyn Monroe’s face. It had taken our elderly ethnic-Korean landlady more than a year to finish.
We bought our produce and meat down the street, often from the very people who had produced it. In the winter, when snow fell on the mountains outside the city, we enjoyed the ski scene, where the infrastructure was advancing rapidly. We lived there for a year while Ethan conducted doctoral research with a few nonprofits working on building peace and preventing violent extremism. For all that, the country and its capital felt totally safe to us, pretty much like any big city in the United States, although perhaps one with some manhole covers missing, little street lighting, and no salt or sand on the icy sidewalks in winter.
Rozovsky and Steinmetz didn’t move to Kyrgyzstan, but they were drawn to it for some of the same reasons: the remoteness, the feeling of discovering something new. They came to Kyrgyzstan with a friend of a friend from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, who owned a large falcon preserve on the eastern shores of a lake called Issyk-Köl. As it turned out, it was too warm during their visit for the falcons to train, and so they saw some but not all of what they had hoped to observe. Nonetheless, their lenses caught much more than they had anticipated, a testament to Kyrgyzstan’s steadfast beauty. As we looked through their images, one in particular jumped out at us: A man wearing a white wool hat, a kalpak, sits on a chestnut-colored horse. He points toward the horizon, a wall of mountains rising in the distance. He could just as well have been one of the shepherds we met on our epic horseback climb, a local pausing to welcome two strange travelers and give them a glimpse, with a gesture, of the infinite possibility before them.
About the authors: Steph Opitz is the founding director of The Loft’s Wordplay, a book festival in Minneapolis. Her writing can be found in Marie Claire, Departures, Garden & Gun, and elsewhere. Ethan Wilensky-Lanford practices developmental evaluation when he is not writing his anthropology dissertation through Rice University. Formerly, he was a newspaper journalist for The New York Times, The Moscow Times, and other publications.
