Spring Break - Kazakh Style

I finally had my first real spring break. Since 9th grade, I’ve always wanted to go traveling with friends during the school year. So for the last two weeks of March, during the break between the third and fourth school term, I did just that. My site mate Andrew and I threw a few things in a bag, spray painted on T-shirts a map of Kazakhstan and ВЕСЕННИЕ КАНИКУЛЫ, 2008! (Spring Break 2008), and took a 17-hour bus ride to the southern oasis of Shimkent.
Every year, nearly a hundred Peace Corps volunteers go to Shimkent at the end of March. Shimkent is one of the three largest cities in Kazakhstan and it is the heart of Kazakh culture. It is a non-descript city, but there were two things that immediately struck me upon arrival. The first was the heat, which I had completely forgotten about during winter in the steppe, and the second was the grass. Grass is one of those things that are completely unappreciated when common. But after five months living in a city where the smog kills anything that grows and which is surrounded by brown and yellow steppe, the lush green color of grass seemed grossly unnatural.
The first day was spent basically going from outdoor café to outdoor café drinking cold beer, eating delicious plov and shashlik, and hanging out with the other volunteers. But being the cultured individual that I am, I did take a short break from this hedonism to visit the Museum of Repression.
The next day, we went to the historic and holy city of Turkistan (the word Turkistan was also used in the 19th century to describe most of Central Asia). The city is famous for the mausoleum of Khwaja Ahmad Yasavi, who founded the Yasavi order, which is a type of Sufism (Islamic mysticism). It was built in the early 15th century by Tamerlane, who despite raping most of Asia, was actually quite the aesthetic ruler and built stunning monuments in the area. In my opinion, this mausoleum is the most beautiful structure in Kazakhstan (though better examples of this style exist in Uzbekistan). The mausoleum is an enormous building with a front entrance that is more imposing that the rest of the structure. Most walls are covered with tiles in different shades of blue. The top is crowned by a large dome, also decorated with blue tiles. Tamerlane died before it was completed and so the imposing entrance is plain brick with the original scaffolding still in place. I am bad at describing things, but you should definitely look it up on Google.
Turkistan is perhaps the most holy site in Kazakhstan and it is said that three pilgrimages to the mausoleum counts as one to Mecca. So I am one third of the way to becoming a hajji! But strangely, the site isn’t treated with as much respect as it deserves. There were few people praying and visitors were allowed to enter with their shoes! I’ve been to many mosques and Muslim mausoleums in the world, and that was the first time I’ve seen that. Well after a few hours of spiritual meditation, we returned to Shimkent for some beers.
The next day was Nauryz, the Kazakh New Year. As I mentioned earlier, Kazakhstan has many new years and this was the fifth that I celebrated in the country. Nauryz is the most traditional of Kazakh holidays and since independence, it has been used to revitalize Kazakh culture. Since Shimkent prides itself on being the center of Kazakh culture, Nauryz is celebrated with much greater fanfare there. At the hippodrome, the city funded an enormous festival to accompany the traditional Kazakh horse games. The festival included free food such as heaping portions of plov, flat bread, sweets, and drinks; traditional music concerts; and a number of yurts (traditional Kazakh nomadic homes, which look like flattened teepees). The whole festival attempted to recreate the feel of nomadic Kazakh culture and I guess, also instill national pride in Kazakh-ness that was suppressed under the Soviets. But it felt artificial. It seemed people were mostly fetishizing the culture and they seemed disconnected from the yurts they dined in and they dombra (Kazakh string instrument) music to which they listened.
However, the main attraction of the day was the horse games. Whereas most of the Kazakh culture displayed at the festival was just for show, people were seriously engaged in the horse games. The hippodrome in which the games took place was just a colossal depression in the steppe with people observing only on one side. There were hundreds of people there, including an unusual North Carolina family who were touring Kazakhstan just for fun (who does that?!).
The horse games were exciting. There were many games, but I’ll just describe the three most interesting. The first was wrestling on horseback. In a small circle, two guys on horses try to knock each other off by just using their arms. In the next game, Kyz Kuu, a man on horseback tries to overtake a girl on horseback. Whenever he gets close, the girl can lash him with her whip. If the guy wins, he gets a kiss from the girl; but if he fails, then the two race the other way, but this time the girl gets to whip the boy the entire length of the track! The game was played twelve times and each time, the guy lost and received some brutal lashings. The last and most popular game is called Kokpar. This game is supposedly similar to polo, but instead of a ball they use a dead goat carcass, which they must grab with their hands while on horseback. Once a team gets a hold of the bloody goat, they try to place it on the other side of the field. Around 70 horsemen participated in the game. The main thing I got out of this Nauryz celebration was that Kazakhs like their horses.
For the next ten days, we all went to Almaty where Peace Corps conducted more technical and language training. But in reality, it was Peace Corps telling us things would get better and that we shouldn’t quit. They did a good job motivating us, but now that I only have a month left of teaching, I can’t wait for summer vacation!