Bazar

Las multitudes en el mercado de Osh se empujan y zarandean de un puesto a otro, tal como llevan haciéndolo en esta ciudad del confín oriental del valle de Fergana, casi en la frontera de Kirguistán con Uzbekistán, desde hace 3.000 años. Un trajín sin descanso de carretas, mujeres con bolsas y hombres con pesados ​​sacos apresurándose sobre los antiguos fragmentos de piedra o en el polvo seco que sirve de acera. El aroma de las parrillas humeantes con shashlik –pinchos de carne– se mezcla con el olor a sudor y con el humo de las casas de té donde sirven tazones grasientos de laghman rebosantes de eneldo fresco y montones de manty cubierto de cebolla a rodajas. Pero también se multiplica, avivada por el calor, una sorprendente variedad de olores, demasiado numerosos para recordarlos o intentar siquiera describirlos. La luz del sol y el baile de colores, las músicas populares de la zona que suenan en todos los rincones desde infinitos casetes portátiles: tayikos, uzbekos, kirguises, rusos y otros muchos acentos, cada personaje con su variante particular de ropa y sus tocados para la cabeza, todo revuelto ante nuestros sentidos.



Sherali Joʿraev, Birinchin mukhabbatim

Los toldos de tela brillante dan algo de sombra en la vía que serpentea enhebrando puesto tras puesto de productos locales, ropa china barata, sombreros hechos a mano, zanahorias y gruesas patatas, grandes sacos de arroz abiertos, y de otros granos, y todos cuantos materiales y bienes variopintos puedan imaginarse en la vida del Asia Central. La gente sonríe y frunce el ceño, se sientan hoscos, ríen a carcajadas, miran fijamente, desvían la vista, y con una palabra que suena como 'boosh' instan a la gente a apartarse para poder avanzar con sus pesados fardos.

Hay un destello cegador de luz solar cuando los grupos apretados se disgregan para volver a juntarse enseguida y marchar como una riada, el ondear de las telas floreadas y el cabello negrísimo de los niños, mujeres con largos pañuelos y vestidos estampados que llegan hasta los pies, y hombres serios de rostro ni asiático ni europeo, como en un punto medio.

Nos detenemos en un puesto de venta de cintas de casete regentado por un chico con un exraño corte de pelo, largo en la frente y muy corto en la nuca. Parece desconcertado por mi solicitud de «música tradicional», que intento pedir con mi mejor pronunciación, salvando mi mal ruso. «¿Disco? ¿Hip-hop?», indaga sin alcanzar a entenderme. Pone varias cintas en su propio aparato y oigo breves pasajes que rechazo por completo. Por último pone a Sherali Jo’raev y compro varios de este artista. Partimos satisfechos con la transacción.



Sherali Joʿraev, Olis yullar

Le pregunto a un anciano particularmente pintoresco si me permite sacarle una foto. No tiene inconveniente, y cuando le muestro la imagen en mi cámara insiste en que imprima una para él de inmediato. Le explico delicadamente que no es posible y sólo me permite salir después de haber encontrado a un chico con un lápiz y un papel que anota su dirección postal para que le envíe la foto en cuanto llegue a casa. Apretando la nota en mi mano insiste: «¡No te olvides!» Y no me olvidé, pero por desgracia el garabato era completamente ilegible.


Nos detiene un hombre con uniforme de policía, con un extravagante sombrero ancho al estilo de la policía persa. «Vengan conmigo», nos dice. Nos introduce en habitaciones separadas. Después de un examen minucioso de mi pasaporte, toma la pequeña bolsa bandolera que siempre llevo conmigo y empieza a sacar las cosas una por una.

«¿Qué es esto?» Inquiere, sosteniendo un inhalador para el asma.

«Es para el asma», respondo en mi menguado ruso.

Tch, tch. Su rostro duro se suaviza a medida que expresa simpatía. Pasa al objeto siguiente.

«¿De dónde son?» Muestra un par de billetes checos. «De Chequia», le contesto.

«¿Dónde queda eso?» - «Cerca de Alemania». Asiente al entenderlo.

«¿Cuánto vale?» Señala un billete de 200 coronas. «Unos 10 dólares», digo sin demasiada precisión.

De golpe parece perder todo interés y concluye la entrevista. Mi compañero ya está esperando afuera y podemos seguir nuestra inspección del bazar de Osh.

Bazaar

The crowds in the Osh market jostle and push, always moving on to the next thing, as perhaps they have always done in this 3,000-year-old city at the eastern end of the Fergana Valley, near the Kyrgyz border with Uzbekistan. A restless flow of handcarts, women with bags, and men with burdens of heavy sacks on their shoulders pound the ancient fragments of stone and dust that pass for pavements here. The aromas from the smoky shashlik grills mingle with the odor of sweat and the steamy tea houses, serving greasy bowls of laghman heaped with fresh dill, or piles of manty covered in sliced onions. In addition to these are a startling array of other odors, activated in the heat, and too numerous to remember, much less describe. The sunlight and dancing colors, and the local popular music playing everywhere from portable casette players, as Tajiks, Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, Russians, and no doubt others, each in their own variant of local clothing and headwear, all commingle here.



Sherali Joʿraev, Birinchin mukhabbatim

Awnings of bright fabric provide some shade for the thoroughfare that wends past stall after stall of local produce, cheap clothes from China, handmade hats, fat carrots and potatoes, huge open sacks of rice and other seeds, all the staples and sundries of a Central Asian life. People grin and scowl, sit sullen, laugh boisterously, stare, avert their eyes, and with a word that sounds like 'boosh' urge the crowd to part so their heaving loads can pass.

There is a blinding flash of sunlight as bodies sway first apart then again together, walking in halting streams, glimpses of floral fabric and black-haired children, women in scarves and printed frocks that reach to their shoes, and serious men with faces neither Asian nor European, but something in between.

We stop at a stall selling cassette tapes, watched over by a boy with a strange haircut, long in front but very short in the back. He seems baffled by my request for “traditional music,” which I phrase as best I can, considering my inadequate Russian. “Disco? Hip-hop?” he probes, not quite getting the gist. He pops a few cassettes in his portable machine and I hear brief passages, rejecting most of them outright. Finally, he puts in a cassette by Sherali Joʿraev, and I purchase several by this artist, and we part, both satisfied with the transaction.



Sherali Joʿraev, Olis yullar

I ask a particularly picturesque elderly gentleman if I may take his picture. He agrees, and when I show him the image on my digital camera, he insists that I print one for him on the spot. I explain to him delicately that it is not possible, and I am only permitted to leave once he has fetched a young boy with a pencil and paper to write down his postal address for me to send it once I arrive back home.  Shoving the note into my hand, he reminds me, “Do not forget!” And I did not forget, but unfortunately the scrawl is completely illegible.


We are stopped by a man in policeman’s uniform, with an extavagantly broad Pershing-style policeman’s hat. “Come with me,” he says to us. We are lead to separate rooms. After a close inspection of my passport, he takes the small shoulder bag I always carry and begins to take items out of it, one by one.

“What is this?” he inquires, holding up an asthma inhaler.

“It is something against asthma,” I reply, in my limited Russian.

Tsk, tsk. His hard face softens as he expresses sympathy. He goes on to the next item.

“Where are these from?” He holds up a few Czech banknotes. “They are from Czechia,” I reply.

“Where is that?” “Near Germany.” He nods, understanding.

“How much is this worth?” indicating a 200-crown note. “About 10 dollars,” I say, without excessive precision.

He suddenly appears to lose interest, and concludes the interview. My companion is already waiting for me outside, and we continue on our inspection of the Osh bazaar.

Tengri, the blue sky

The theme of Lenin statues has already been raised several times here on the blog, for example in connection with labor movement songs, the children’s cult of dictators, or recycled pedestals, indicating that one of the many strands of Río Wang is the analysis of a youth of which these sculptures were emblematic figures.

The encounter between the rejection of the classical canon and the ingenuity of folk crafts inspired a large number of surprising statues of Lenin during the seventy years of the genre’s flourishing. However, one of the most astonishing examples is that opus which, in an ingenuous way, builds up the figure of Lenin not out of an ephemeral material, but of the endless blue of the sky and the majestic mountain ranges of the Alay, offering only the contours to it that were cut out of a rolled iron plate on a Communist Saturday.


The almost six meters high Lenin head is enthroned on the rocks of the Alay mountains, high above the little town of Aravan, just south of the Kyrgyz industrial city of Osh. Strangely enough, the blog Все памятники Ленину dedicated to all the Lenin statues of the world does not list it among the monuments of Kyrgyzstan, and there are almost no photos of it in the Internet.

The “big head” was a typical genre of the iconography of Lenin, and a very practical one at that, because, on the principle of pars pro toto and by sparing remarkably much raw material and many working hours, it indicated how gigantic we should imagine the full statue represented by its mere head. Among the many well-known examples of the genre a 14 meters and 12 tons piece stands to this day not far from here, on the main square of Ulan-Ude in Buryatia, commonly called “the head” by the inhabitants of the city.




The genre also existed in several subtypes, such as the one at the Dzhambul train station.



This, however, by trying to say too much, and putting the kitchen stool with the bust of Lenin on the top of the whole globe, in the end says too little. With half of the material they could have produced more, by carving one single head of it. More monumental is the effect of the piece in Voznesene, which built the pedestal of the head from a material that is just as non-perishable as the one used to fill the contours of the head in Kyrgyzstan:


The statue and its base were recently repainted, and thus Lenin, obeying to the spirit of the times, now is standing on the basis of the capital, without any hint to any obscure author’s name.


But let us return to the Lenin head of Kyrgyzstan, whose suprising effect, one would think, cannot be enhanced any further. But it can be. The other day we came across it in such an unusual context on which even its creators – or, to be more precise, primarily they – would have never thought.


I found the 2008 Kyrgyz feature film “Tengri, the blue sky” on the Chinese internet with the title 騰格里之愛 Ténggélí zhi ài, that is “Tengri’s love”. Tengri, the Sky Father, the chief god of nomadic Turkic peoples is another name for Allah in many modern Turkic languages, and one can only guess in what kind of relation the Hungarian word “tenger” (‘sea’) of Turkic origin stands with this name, the endless blue water with the endless blue sky.

Street name table in the Uyghur provincial capital: “Tengri Street”

The film speaks about the hopeless situation of contemporary Kyrgyz villages. Temur, the thirty years old hero returns from the desiccated lake Aral to his home village to start a new life, but the village’s conservative Islamic leaders watch him with suspicion. The young Amira is waiting in vain for her husband who went to the Afghan war as a mujaheed, while suffering from her mother-in-law’s oppression. From the situation without prospects there is only a dream-like way out: the two lovers elope from the village, and start a new, nomadic life among the ranges of the Alay. Here’s an excerpt from the movie:

And it is one of the symbolic moments of the movie that when the lovers arrive to the feet of the Alay and leave the civilization behind, the landmark is nothing else but the statue of Lenin enthroned above Aravan, composed out of the blue sky. The surreal image, the gigantic rusty figure towering beside the nomadic horsemen symbolizes at the same time the failure of the past empire and way of life, but also the fact that this empire has not disappeared without a trace. The return to nature and to the ancient roots, even if possible for the lovers in a romantic film, is no longer practicable in the reality.