Ishkashim

The Panj valley here has been settled for a very long time, watered by channels led off side streams onto terraces above the river. The area belonged to Wakhan, one of the small Pamir principalities ruled by local mirs, and the forts and watchtowers strung along the valley to the east — among them Yamchun, high above the river — show how routes through these mountains were controlled. Branches of the Silk Road used the valley between the Tarim basin and the lands of the Oxus, and Buddhism left traces here, including the stepped structure at Vrang usually described as a stupa.

Ismaili Islam reached the Pamirs by the 11th century, and tradition credits its spread to the poet and missionary Nasir Khusraw. The decisive change came in the late 19th century, when Russia and Britain fixed their frontier in the Pamirs. The boundary agreement of 1895 made the Panj the border with Afghanistan and created the Wakhan corridor as a buffer between the empires, dividing the Wakhi- and Ishkashimi-speaking communities and leaving a village of the same name on each bank.

Under Soviet rule the settlement became the centre of Ishkoshim district, with a school, clinic, administration and collective farms, supplied along the road from Khorugh. Independence and the civil war of the 1990s brought hardship and isolation, eased by relief and later development work organised through the Aga Khan network. In the 2000s a bridge across the Panj and a cross-border market brought contact with the Afghan side for a time. Since then the border has tightened again, and the village lives on farming, government jobs and the summer traffic of travellers heading into the Wakhan.

Ishkashim is a Pamiri village, and the distinctions that set the western Pamirs apart from the rest of Tajikistan are all present here. People are Ismaili Shia Muslims who follow the Aga Khan; religious life takes place in the jamoatkhona, the prayer house, and the calendar and ceremonies differ from those of the Sunni lowlands. The Aga Khan's institutions have shaped schooling, health care and energy supply for a generation, and education is valued highly for a place of this size.

Language marks the valley too. Ishkashimi, a small Eastern Iranian language, is spoken in a handful of villages near by, Wakhi is the language of the settlements up the corridor, and Tajik and Russian serve for school, office and trade. Most of these tongues belong to a different branch of Iranian from Tajik itself, and few of them are written in daily use.

The Pamiri house, the chid, is the centre of social life: a single room with five wooden pillars and a stepped skylight, each element carrying religious meaning, where meals, celebrations and funerals all take place. Music is part of gatherings, from devotional maddoh singing to dance tunes at weddings. Hospitality is an obligation rather than a courtesy — a traveller will be fed and given the best seat — and families across the river in Afghan Ishkashim are in many cases relatives, a fact that colours how the border is felt here.

The village is small, home to a few thousand people, and serves a district of roughly thirty thousand spread along the Panj and its side valleys. Life runs on irrigated agriculture: wheat, barley, potatoes, fodder and vegetables on the terraces, apricot and apple trees, and cattle, sheep and goats taken to higher pastures in summer. Households store fuel, dried fruit and flour for a winter that closes the valley in on itself.

Paid work is scarce. The district administration, the school, the clinic and development organisations provide most salaries, alongside driving, small shops and, in summer, guesthouses and guiding for travellers on the Wakhan route. As across Tajikistan, many working-age men spend part of the year in Russia, and the money they send home is a mainstay of village budgets. Electricity comes from small hydroelectric schemes and is limited in winter.

The day begins early with animals and irrigation, slows in the heat of the afternoon and ends with families indoors. Children walk to school, tea is drunk constantly, and news travels between houses faster than by telephone. The border is a constant presence: guard posts, permits and checks are routine, and contact across the river has become far more limited than in the years after the bridge opened. Young people leave for Khorugh, Dushanbe or abroad, returning in the summer months.

Food here is Pamiri mountain food, built on bread, dairy and what the terraces produce. Qurutob, considered a national dish, is made by soaking dried yoghurt balls, qurut, into a sauce that is poured over torn flatbread and topped with fried onion, herbs and sometimes meat, then eaten by hand from a shared platter. Shirchoy — tea boiled with milk and salt, often with butter and with bread broken into it — is the usual breakfast and a defence against cold mornings.

Bread is baked at home in flat rounds and treated with respect. Dairy runs through the diet: sour milk, fresh cheese, kaymak, a thick clotted cream, and qurut eaten hard and salty as a snack. Soups of barley, potato and mutton are everyday meals, noodles and dumplings appear regularly, and plov is cooked for guests and celebrations, with rice carried up from the lowlands and treated as a small luxury. Meat is mostly mutton and goat, eaten sparingly.

The orchards of the valley give apricots, apples, walnuts and mulberries. Mulberries are eaten fresh in summer, dried by the sack for winter and sometimes ground into a sweet flour; dried apricots and walnuts accompany tea at any hour. Fresh vegetables are strongly seasonal, and what the bazaar holds depends on when a truck last came up from Khorugh, so meals are repetitive by late winter and generous in the months after the harvest.