Dushanbe, Khatlon & Central Tajikistan

The south of this region was part of ancient Bactria. At Takhti-Sangin, near the meeting of the Vakhsh and Panj rivers, archaeologists excavated a temple to the river god Oxus, and the famous Oxus Treasure of Achaemenid gold is thought to have been found near by in about 1877–1880. Buddhism later flourished in the Vakhsh valley, and Ajina-Tepe is a monastery of the 7th and 8th centuries.

Hisor was for centuries the main town of the valley west of today's capital, a seat of local rulers and, from the 16th century, of a bek governing for the Emirate of Bukhara. Kulob, the other old centre, holds the tomb of Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani, a 14th-century Sufi teacher from Hamadan in Persia. Dushanbe itself was only a village named for its Monday market when the last emir of Bukhara took refuge there in 1920 before fleeing to Afghanistan.

The Soviets made the village the capital of the Tajik republic in the 1920s; it was called Stalinabad from 1929 to 1961 and grew with textile mills and the settlement of Russians and others. The Vakhsh valley was irrigated for cotton, and the Nurek Dam was completed in 1980. The 1992–97 civil war was fought largely here: Kulob supplied the government side, while the Rasht valley around Gharm was an opposition stronghold, and the Khatlon lowlands saw some of the worst killing. President Rahmon comes from Danghara, near Kulob, and people from the Kulob area have dominated national politics since.

Regional identity runs deep here, and origins still matter: people from Kulob, Gharm, Hisor and the Vakhsh valley are quick to identify one another. Many Khatlon families also descend from mountain villagers moved down to the cotton farms in Soviet times. Uzbek communities live in the Hisor valley and parts of Khatlon, and Dushanbe's Russian population, large before 1992, has mostly left.

Kulob is known for chakan, bold embroidery sewn in bright thread on cotton or silk. Chakan shirts and embroidered skullcaps are worn at weddings, and women and girls wear chakan clothing at national festivals and holidays.

Religious practice is Sunni Islam, but the state keeps it tightly controlled: the opposition Islamic Renaissance Party was banned in 2015, and beards, headscarves in schools and children's mosque attendance are discouraged or restricted. Weddings and Nowruz remain the great social events.

Dushanbe has more than a million people and is growing fast, as the old Soviet centre of low buildings and plane trees is replaced by high-rise flats, a huge new mosque, a national library and a theatre. Khatlon is the most populous region, with Bokhtar, formerly Kurgan-Tyube, and Kulob as its main towns of around 100,000 people each.

Khatlon's economy is irrigated farming: cotton, wheat, melons and fruit, with much field work done by women because so many men work in Russia. The TALCO aluminium smelter at Tursunzoda, west of Dushanbe, uses much of the country's electricity. The Rogun Dam under construction in the mountain districts of the Vakhsh, designed to be the world's tallest, dominates national planning.

Days start early in the south to avoid the heat, and evenings are spent in chaikhonas and parks. Winter power rationing, fewer jobs than young people and the long absence of migrant workers are the main household concerns.

The central table is the Tajik national table at its fullest. Oshi palov is cooked in huge cauldrons for weddings and other gatherings, and qurutob, torn flatbread soaked in a sauce of dissolved qurut and topped with onions, is eaten by hand from a shared dish. Chaikhonas in Dushanbe serve shashlik, sambusa from the tandoor, laghmon noodle soup and shurbo.

Khatlon's lowlands grow melons, watermelons, apricots, figs, pomegranates and grapes, which fill the Dushanbe bazaars in summer and are dried for winter. Chakka, a sour milk preparation, is eaten with bread and herbs, and fatir, a flaky layered bread, is baked for guests.

Green tea is poured at every meal. Dushanbe has cafés, beer and Russian-style bakeries, while in Khatlon, alcohol is less visible.

Dushanbe is best seen along Rudaki Avenue, its main boulevard: the Palace of the Nation with the 165-metre Dushanbe Flagpole in front of it, the Museum of Antiquities and the National Museum, which displays Ajina-Tepe's reclining Buddha, about 13 metres long. The Navruzgoh, billed as the largest chaikhona in Central Asia, rounds out the city. About 15 kilometres west, Hisor fortress has a rebuilt gateway between round towers, with old madrasas and the Makhdumi Azam mausoleum near by.

North of the capital, the Varzob gorge leads to riverside picnic spots and the Anzob tunnel. Beyond it, just over the boundary in Sughd, Iskanderkul lake in the Fann Mountains is the classic excursion from Dushanbe, about 134 kilometres from the capital.

To the south, Ajina-Tepe stands near Bokhtar in the Vakhsh valley, and Kulob has the Hamadani mausoleum and a regional museum. The Tigrovaya Balka nature reserve protects riverine forest where the Vakhsh meets the Panj. East of Dushanbe lie the Nurek Reservoir and, further up the Vakhsh, the Rasht valley, where Gharm is the centre and the Lakhsh district, formerly Jirgatol, lies further east on the Kyrgyz border, in mountains that see few visitors.