Spring in Khujand, Tajikistan: Sunshine, Travels, and Holidays

The immaculate gardens of Kamal Khujandi Park in Khujand's city center.

Spring has been beautiful and busy.  Back in March I wrote about Khujand's spectacular spring weather.  My praise held up well, but now the heat of (early) summer is here.  The sweet spot was nice while it lasted.  The great weather also meant that I've been out doing a lot and not inside writing.

The primary "doing" I've been doing is traveling.  Anna and I recently took two separate but similar trips.  In March my sister, Meg, and her boyfriend, Zach, visited.  Anna and I met them in Tashkent and traveled to the cities of Bukhara and Samarkand, two of Uzbekistan's more popular tourist destinations.  

We returned to Tajikistan via Panjakent, a small city in the country's west, and then continued on to Khujand, which is a four-hour drive through the mountains.  

A couple of weeks ago we essentially repeated this loop in reverse with Anna's dad, Roger.  

Our destinations were great but our company was even better.  These were both such special visits.  Sharing our experience here with family was fun and so precious.  In a couple of future posts--one on Uzbekistan, the other on Tajikistan--I'll reflect on these trips and our other travels here through a more touristic lens. 

Spring has also been a time of year for holidays, as I wrote about in that same March post.  The big ones that have recently passed are Navruz and Ramadan.  Navruz happened toward the end of that month.  An ancient, equinox holiday with Zoroastrian roots, Navruz--also translated in English as Nowruz--is Persian new year and is observed on March 22 in most celebrating countries, including Tajikistan.  Navruz is arguably Tajikistan's most important holiday.  Workers tend to have two or more days off and schools hold a spring break around the holiday.  Beyond Tajikistan, Navruz is celebrated across a fair bit of Asia, but especially so in Central Asia, with this region's long long and deep Persian history.

Image credit: MHadiJF, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Anna stirring a big pot of sumalak outside a
restaurant in Tashkent. 

I honestly don't know much more about Navruz then I did before coming here, but I know that there are traditional dances and foods, including sumalak, a sweet paste made from wheat and wheat flour.  The basic idea of an equinox ritual and celebration is easy enough to understand and pretty great.  I wish there was a similar celebration in American culture.  (Apart from Easter.)  

Maybe Anna and I just have to hold our own Navruz celebrations back in the US in future years!  It would be a fun way to share Tajik culture and food with others.

While Navruz is a Zoroastrian tradition that's now been woven into Islam, as well as generally secularized, Ramadan is the pinnacle of Islamic celebration.  As a month in the lunar Islamic calendar, Ramadan can fall any time of year.  This year it started March 22 and ended April 20.  It was interesting to spend Ramadan in a Muslim country.  Let me begin my saying, because I don't think I've written about this prior, but I've never experienced hostility or really even discomfort in as far as being a non-Muslim here.  I think this is really important to share.  I truly hope and believe that the US has moved beyond the nadir of Islamophobia in aftermath of 9/11, but there's still a lot of prejudice and ignorance about Islam.  

The main way that Ramadan impacted me was that many people I interacted with were fasting, abstaining from all food and drink from sunrise to sunset.  Plenty of people weren't fasting but I think most were.  I made some adjustments to my own lifestyle as well.  I tend to drink a fair bit of water when I teach--especially on those days with speaking exercise!--but I made a point of not doing so publicly during this time.  I also tried to avoid using food as lesson themes in English class, which wouldn't seem that difficult, but a month is a long time!  As for my eating habits, I don't get lunch out much, so skipping that wasn't a big deal.  For dinners out, we kept some awareness of sunset times, as much for politeness as for better people-watching.  There's a great spirit around town during iftar, the fast-breaking evening meal.

Beyond eating habits, the kids I worked with were definitely more lethargic.  To make matters worse, I teach in the late afternoon.  I know I was fighting some serious "hangry" at times! 

It's important to note that Tajikistan is a secular country.  While 97 percent of the population report being Muslim, Islam isn't a state religion, as it is in most of the Middle East and North Africa, nor is Tajikistan an Islamic republic like say Iran or Pakistan.  My Ramadan experience would probably be very different in a country such as those.  For example, in Tajikistan restaurants can remain open during Ramadan and it is not mandatory for citizens to fast.  Like so each else in this big and beautiful world of ours, the Muslim world is large and diverse.

Two other recent holidays were Labor Day (May 1) and Victory Day (May 9).  Both holidays are directly routed in Tajikistan's Soviet past.  Labor Day isn't a national holiday here and didn't seem like a big deal.  In contrast, Victory Day is a national holiday.  In a sign of the continued political dynamics of this region, all five Central Asian heads of state were in Moscow for the holiday, joining Putin for the traditional holiday military march.

I'm going to sign off here for this post.  I'm actually heading back to the US soon.  I have a lot of writing queued up in the draft folder, so while I'm at the end of my time here, I'm far from finishing this blog.  In fact, Anna has signed on for another year of teaching here through the same program, the State Department's English Language Fellows.  Next year she'll be in Panjakent, a much smaller city in the west of the country.  You might recall from the beginning of this post that we went to Panjakent on both of our recent trips.  We're still figuring out our plans for next year, but, unlike this year, I won't join Anna for the full ten months of her contract.  I plan to live at our house in New Hampshire.  I certainly hope to make a visit back to Tajikistan, and a long one at that.  All in all, whether or not I'm "in Tajikistan" I'll still be "trailing," and definitely writing about my experiences.  I'm ending this post a bit abruptly and dumping a big plot twist at the last minute but, rest assured, I'll be back on here soon enough.