Kyrgyzstan
A mountain republic of the Tian Shan, where alpine lakes meet nomad tradition
Kyrgyzstan is a country written in stone and snow. More than ninety percent of its territory is mountain, dominated by the soaring Tian Shan ranges that wall it off from China, and its people retain one of Central Asia's strongest living nomadic traditions, still moving herds to high summer pastures called jailoo. Crowning the landscape is Issyk-Kul, a vast alpine lake that never freezes despite the altitude. Small, poor in oil but rich in water and scenery, the republic has been the most politically turbulent and arguably the most open of the former Soviet states in the region.
The Tian Shan dominate, rising in the east to Jengish Chokusu, at 7,439 meters the highest point in the country and one of the loftiest in the former Soviet Union. Glaciers feed rivers that the entire region depends on, and the spectacular Issyk-Kul, ringed by peaks, is one of the largest and deepest mountain lakes on Earth. The fertile Fergana Valley in the southwest, shared with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, is the population and agricultural heartland. Winters are long and harsh in the highlands, summers warm in the valleys.
Kyrgyz tribes, whose epic poem Manas runs to half a million lines, were absorbed into the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century and made a Soviet republic in 1936. Independence in 1991 was followed by genuine but unstable democracy, with popular uprisings toppling governments in 2005, 2010, and 2020. The economy leans on gold mining at Kumtor, agriculture, and remittances from labor migrants in Russia. The Manas epic, the felt-art tradition, and eagle hunting anchor a cultural identity that prizes the freedoms of the herder and the horse.