Kyrgyzstan: Where dumplings are king, horses are milked, and movies remind you to chill
Of all the possible combinations of letters, how did one of the roughly 200 countries in the world end up called “Kyrgyzstan”? The answer is relatively simple — it is a blend of the Turkic phrase “we are forty” and the Persian word “of the land”. Its flag is also a celebration of the coming together of forty tribes and if you played it as a word in Scrabble it would be worth 26 points. But far, far more important is the fact that its national dish is Oromo (capitalised like it is a God), which might just be the biggest dumpling in the world. Easy to make and delicious to eat, it is a relatively simple thin pastry filled (in my case) with pumpkin and vegan bacon bits, rolled into a sausage, steamed and then covered in chilli oil and sour cream (though we opted for vegan coconut yoghurt). MAKE YOURSELF ONE NOW!
Avid readers of this blog will know that last week I tried, with mounting horror, the Kuwaiti speciality — camel milk. It tasted like I imagine cow milk would be if it had a urinary tract infection. My heart therefore sank when I read that the Kyrgyzs speciality is kumiss — fermented horse milk. This should not have been a surprise given the many links between Kyrgy and Mongolia (where I once drank home-brewed horse milk liquor and lived to tell the tale). Luckily, perhaps, try as I might, I could not find anywhere selling koumiss in Birmingham, or “shubat” (fermented camel’s milk), “bozo “(a frothy drink made from boiled and fermented millet or other grain), so I settled for a nice simple of rye kvass — bread in a bottle, which tastes like alcohol-free beer tasted before the craft revolution.
It was much easier to find this week’s film Beshkempir, the story of the Director Aktan Abdykalykov’s childhood, played, remarkably by his son. It is a slow, meditative film, the kind I love to wind down to. I would try to outline the plot but that would be to miss the point as watching this film is to experience a time now gone, to become part of adoption and death rituals, to listen to bird song and to let your brain relax. Other worlds existed, and other worlds still exist where the life goes slow enough to allow us to think, and where humans are more than the productivity machines described by Oliver Burkeman in his fantastic book, 4000 weeks, time management for mortals (4000 weeks being the average human life).
Another wise meditation on human transience is this week’s book Jamila. Narrated by a young boy coming of age and set in Soviet times when the men are off at war and the women holding the home fort together, this novelette brings the reader to the steppe and allows them to wander around with those left behind. Despite being the shortest book I’ve yet read for the armchair travels, it left a long-lingering after taste, which is perhaps why it has already been turned into a film. The author Chinghiz Aitmatov’s parents were murdered by the Soviet state for “bourgeois nationalism” and yet still he wrote and wrote. If I ever get control of my 4000 weeks, I shall read another.
I had planned on spending the whole of this blog musing on the Ukrainian-American rapper Your Old Droog’s song Kyrgyzstan, as it is a belter, but then I found this 6 hour playlist of joy. It is a series of albums all made by Kyrgyz musicians and I think it is fair to say that there is not a single bad tune on there. Though I have left this Stan behind I still listen to the playlist whenever I want to step back onto the steppe and imagine I am living in a yurt, getting drunk on horse milk and chowing down on giant dumplings. There can surely be no better life available… though maybe Laos is going to be even better! Find out next week with another exciting episode of The Armchair Traveller.
