Arslanbob

Arslanbob's history is bound up with its forest. The walnut woods on the slopes above the village are ancient and were valued long before any state took an interest in them: local tradition holds that the trees were planted or tended by a holy man, and the village takes its name from the saint Arslanbob, whose shrine stands near the centre and draws pilgrims from across the Fergana Valley. The nuts were traded down into the valley towns and onwards along the Silk Road, and they are said to have been among Kyrgyzstan's earliest exports to Europe.

The settlement itself is Uzbek, part of the belt of farming villages that ring the Fergana Valley, and it grew on irrigated terraces where walnuts, apples and hay could be raised on steep ground. Russian and later Soviet foresters studied the woods closely, and the autumn harvest has long been organised around plots of trees worked by particular families.

Since independence the village's economy has been rebuilt around the same two things, nuts and visitors. Community-based tourism has spread the income from guests among village households, and Arslanbob became one of the best-known homestay destinations in Central Asia. Labour migration to Russia has taken many of its young men away, and the forest's future under grazing, cutting and a warming climate is a running concern.

Arslanbob is an Uzbek village in a Kyrgyz country, and that shapes almost everything: the language heard in the lanes, the walled courtyard houses with their gardens, the flat bread and plov, and a more conservative religious life than in the Kyrgyz highlands. Mosques are well attended, women in the village wear headscarves, and Friday prayers empty the square.

The shrine of the saint is the centre of local devotion. Pilgrims come to it from the valley towns, and the prayer caves by the waterfall east of the village have their own stories attached. Hospitality is a matter of pride rather than commerce, which is why the homestay model took root so easily: guests are folded into the household, fed at the family table and given the best room, and refusing food is harder than accepting it.

The forest gives the village its calendar and its shared culture. In September whole families move up into the trees with bedding, tarpaulins and donkeys, camp for weeks, and gather nuts from plots that pass down through families; children are taken out of the routine of the school year, and the harvest is spoken about all year in terms of good and bad seasons. Horses matter here too, both for work in the woods and for carrying visitors up to the waterfalls, and horsemanship is admired.

Something over 15,000 people live in Arslanbob, which makes it a large village by Kyrgyz standards, spread over terraces rather than gathered in a single centre. Households are big and often multi-generational, and the shops, school, mosques and tea houses of the square serve a population that lives along several kilometres of lanes.

The economy rests on walnuts, farming and visitors. Families keep cows and a few sheep, grow potatoes, apples and hay on small terraced plots, and take their main annual income from the autumn nut harvest, which is sold on to traders in Bazar-Korgon and beyond. Homestays and guiding add cash income for many households, and, as across southern Kyrgyzstan, money sent home from men working in Russia underpins many budgets.

Days start early with animals and irrigation, the middle of the day is quiet, and the evenings bring people to the square and to each other's courtyards. Roads, water supply and the state of the forest are the standing local issues, along with pressure on pasture and the loss of young people to migration. Mobile signal is decent in the centre and patchy above it, and electricity cuts are not unknown in winter.

Arslanbob's food is the Uzbek village table. Plov — rice with mutton, carrot and onion cooked in a kazan — is the dish for guests and celebrations, and everyday meals run to shurpa, a meat and vegetable soup; laghman, hand-pulled noodles in broth; manty, steamed dumplings; and fried potatoes with tomato and cucumber salad. Samsa, mutton pastries baked against the wall of a tandoor, are sold around the square, and round nan bread comes from the same ovens.

Dairy comes from the household cow: chalap and ayran, sour milk drinks; kaymak, thick cream eaten with bread and jam at breakfast; and kurut, hard salty balls of strained yoghurt carried as a snack into the forest. Jams and preserves are made from the village's apples, apricots and plums, and honey is produced in the valleys around.

Walnuts are the local ingredient above all others. They are eaten fresh and green in late summer, dried through the winter, pressed for oil, crushed into sweets and halva, mixed into salads and sold by the sack in autumn. Green tea, poured from a pot into small bowls and refilled constantly, accompanies every meal and every conversation, sweetened with jam or sugar at the guest table. Alcohol is largely absent from village life.