Naryn

The valley has been a corridor for as long as people have crossed these mountains: the road from the Fergana valley to Kashgar runs through it, and caravans, armies and herders all used the Naryn river's course as the easiest line east. Kyrgyz clans grazed the high pastures around it, and the fortress ramparts at Koshoy Korgon on the At-Bashy plain, tied in local tradition to the epic of Manas, show that the plain was fortified long ago.

The town itself was founded by the Russian Empire as a garrison and customs post. A fort was established here on the caravan route in 1868, after the Kyrgyz tribes of the region came under Russian rule, to watch the caravan route and the approaches to the Chinese frontier. A small settlement of soldiers, officials and traders grew along the single road beside the river, hemmed in by the valley walls, which is why the town still stretches for kilometres and is barely a few streets deep. The 1916 revolt against conscription reached this region, and its suppression drove many families over the passes into China.

Under Soviet rule Naryn became the centre of an oblast covering the country's highest and emptiest country, with collective farms based on sheep and wool, apartment blocks, schools and a wool-processing industry. It was a closed border zone for much of that period. The end of subsidies after 1991 hit the region hard, and Naryn became known as one of the poorest parts of Kyrgyzstan. Since then the opening of the Torugart road to Chinese trade, a growth in trekking and yurt-stay tourism, and the opening of the University of Central Asia's campus in 2016 have given the town new roles.

Naryn Region is the most thoroughly Kyrgyz part of the country. Kyrgyz is the language of daily life, Russian is heard much less than in the north, and the population is overwhelmingly Kyrgyz and Muslim. The region is often described within Kyrgyzstan as the keeper of nomadic tradition, and it is a common source of musicians, manaschi reciters of the Manas epic, and wrestlers and horsemen who compete nationally.

Herding shapes the calendar and the manners that go with it. Families still move animals to the jailoo, the summer pastures, and set up yurts there from June to September, and the skills that support that life — felt-making, saddlery, dairying, breaking horses — remain ordinary rather than nostalgic. Naryn is known for shyrdak and ala-kiyiz felt carpets, worked in bold cut-out patterns by women's co-operatives that now sell to visitors as well as locally. Horse games are taken seriously: kok-boru matches, races and displays of horseback wrestling fill holidays.

Hospitality here follows older rules than in the cities. A guest is fed whatever the household has, refusing outright is an insult, and the seat of honour opposite the door of a yurt belongs to the eldest or the visitor. The threshold and the hearth are not stepped over. Conservative dress is usual, alcohol is less visible than in Bishkek, and the extended family, with its obligations at weddings, funerals and memorial feasts, is the centre of social life.

About 40,000 people live in Naryn, which makes it a small town spread very thin: houses with yards, Soviet apartment blocks and public buildings line a single avenue for several kilometres between the river and the hills. Water, heating and road repair are perennial municipal problems, and coal smoke settles over the valley on still winter days.

Livestock is the economy. Sheep, horses, yaks and cattle from the surrounding pastures supply meat, wool and dairy, and trade in animals at the district markets is the main source of household cash. Public-sector work — administration, schools, the hospital — employs much of the rest, alongside transport and trade on the Torugart road to China and, since 2016, the university. Tourism is a growing seasonal earner through guesthouses, drivers, guides and yurt camps. Money sent home by relatives working in Russia and Kazakhstan matters here as much as anywhere in the country, and outward migration of young people is the region's long-running problem.

The year is organised around the animals: lambing in spring, the drive up to the jailoo in June, haymaking through the summer, and the return before the first snow, which can fall in September. Winter is long, dark and very cold, and households lay in coal, flour and meat for it. Daily life is early and unhurried, the bazaar is the social centre as much as the commercial one, and the arrival of students has slightly changed the rhythm of the eastern end of town.

Naryn eats the food of herders. Mutton, horsemeat, yak and dairy dominate, and vegetables are fewer than in the valleys below. Beshbarmak, the national dish, is made here for every important occasion: mutton or horsemeat boiled and shredded over broad flat noodles, moistened with the cooking broth and onion, eaten with the hands. Chuchuk, a sausage of horsemeat and fat, is served in slices at feasts, and kuurdak, fried meat, offal and potato, is an everyday dish.

Dairy from the summer pastures is central. Kymyz, fermented mare's milk, is drunk in quantity from about May to August and is regarded locally as a cure as much as a drink; kaymak, a thick clotted cream, is spread on bread; ayran and suzma thicken soups; and kurut, hard salt-dried balls of strained yoghurt, keep for a winter and are eaten as a snack or crumbled into broth. Yak's milk and meat appear in the higher valleys.

Bread is baked in tandyr ovens and in pans, and boorsok, small squares of fried dough, are piled in the middle of any table set for guests, often with honey from the gorges. Laghman and manty are the reliable restaurant meals, and shorpo, a plain mutton and potato soup, is the standard lunch. Tea, green or black and sometimes with milk and salt, accompanies everything and is poured in small amounts as a sign of attentiveness.