Murghab

The plateau was crossed by traders and herders long before anyone settled here permanently: branches of the Silk Road used its passes between the Tarim basin and the valleys of the Oxus, and Kyrgyz families grazed yaks and sheep on its summer pastures. Permanent building came with empire. In 1893 Russian forces established the Pamirsky Post on the Murghab river, their most advanced outpost in Central Asia and part of the manoeuvring with Britain over the Pamirs that ended with the boundary agreement of 1895. Accounts differ over exactly where the post stood, and the modern town was laid out under Soviet rule as a stop on the Pamir Highway.

Under Soviet rule the town became the centre of a vast, almost empty district, and the only town of any size in the eastern half of Gorno-Badakhshan. The Pamir Highway was pushed through in the 1930s, tying the plateau to Osh in the north and Khorugh in the west, and Murghab gained a school, a hospital and a military presence, supplied by truck from Kyrgyzstan. Kyrgyz herders were organised into collective farms, and the town's population grew with soldiers, officials and teachers.

Independence in 1991 removed most of that support. Subsidies, supply convoys and jobs disappeared, the civil war of the 1990s cut the region off, the old Soviet outpost closed in 2002, and many residents left for Kyrgyzstan or the lowlands. The town has since lived on herding, cross-border trade with China and Kyrgyzstan, and, in the summer months, travellers on the Pamir Highway. The Aga Khan network and other agencies have funded schools, energy and tourism projects, and homestays have become a significant source of income.

Murghab is a Kyrgyz town in a Tajik country. Most of its people speak Kyrgyz at home and Tajik or Russian in offices and schools, and their customs — yurts on the summer pastures, felt-making, horse riding, hunting with birds of prey in living memory — belong to the Central Asian steppe rather than to the Pamiri valleys to the west. They are Sunni Muslims, unlike the Ismaili Pamiris, and the difference in faith and language is one of the things that sets the eastern plateau apart within Gorno-Badakhshan.

Everything is organised around livestock. Families keep yaks, sheep and goats, move them to high pastures in summer, and cut and store fuel and fodder for a winter that lasts half the year. Wealth is measured in animals, and skills in handling them are prized. Felt shyrdaks and woollen goods are made for use as much as for sale, and a small craft economy has grown around visitors.

Hospitality is taken very seriously: a traveller who arrives at a house will be fed, and refusing tea is difficult. Meals are eaten seated on the floor around a low table, with bread treated respectfully and never placed upside down. The town is remote enough that news travels by word of mouth, and life is organised around the arrival of trucks over the passes. Visitors are common in summer and almost absent in winter, and the seasonal rhythm shapes the whole community.

Murghab has just under 7,500 residents, in a district that covers a vast area of the eastern Pamirs but holds very few settlements. Houses are single-storey, flat-roofed and thick-walled against the cold, built in walled compounds with yards for animals and stores of dung and fuel. The centre holds the district administration, a school, a clinic, a mosque and the bazaar of shipping containers where most trade happens.

Work is herding, trade, government employment, driving and, increasingly, tourism through homestays and guiding. Much of the food comes up by truck from Osh or Khorugh, and prices reflect the distance. Electricity is limited and has long been unreliable, with households relying on solar panels, small generators and stoves burning dung and teresken shrub, whose over-harvesting for fuel has been a real environmental problem on the plateau.

The day is shaped by altitude, cold and light. Water freezes overnight for much of the year, the wind blows steadily across the plain, and outdoor work is done in the middle of the day. Young people leave for Osh, Dushanbe or Russia, and some return in summer. The long winter empties the town of visitors and turns life inward, around stoves, tea and the slow business of keeping animals alive until the pastures green again.

The food of the eastern Pamirs is the food of herders: meat, dairy, bread and tea, with very little that grows locally. Almost nothing can be cultivated at this altitude, so vegetables, rice, flour and fruit arrive by truck, and meals are built around what the herds provide. Yak meat and milk are staples alongside mutton and goat, and yak yoghurt, butter and cream are richer than their lowland equivalents.

Shirchoy, tea boiled with milk and salt and often enriched with butter or cream, is drunk through the day and eaten with bread broken into the bowl. Qurut — dried salted yoghurt balls — is both a snack and the base of sauces, and kaymak, thick clotted cream, appears at breakfast. Soups of meat, potato and noodles are the usual hot meal, and lagman, hand-pulled noodles with meat and whatever vegetables are available, is common, as are steamed dumplings and, for guests, plov.

Bread is baked at home and treated with respect. Meals in homestays are generous, repetitive and served on the floor around a shared table, and a guest is expected to eat well. Dried fruit, nuts and sweets accompany tea, and travellers often carry fresh fruit and vegetables up from Khorugh or Osh, where they are far easier to find than on the plateau.