8 Quotes by Erika Fatland

He shook his head and waved me on to his colleague, who was responsible for moral checks. "Do you have any porn with you miss?" The customs officer looked at me with interest.

There are very few lazy people in Uzbekistan now" he said. "I describe as lazy those who go to Moscow and sweep its streets and squares." - President of Uzbekistan

As it is sufficient in Sunni Islam for a man to repeat Talaq, the word for divorce, three times for a couple to be divorced, many Tajik women have received the following text message from their husbands in Russia: 'Talaq, Talaq, Talaq'. In 2011, the Council of Ulema in Tajikistan banned divorce by mobile telephone.

Ala kachuu, 'snatch and run', is what the tradition of bride kidnapping is called in Kyrgyz… around one third of all marriages in Kyrgyzstan occur in this way… thirty per day. More than ninety percent of these wives stay with their kidnapper.

W gruncie rzeczy nie wyobrażam sobie lepszej ilustracji szczytu melancholii niż pesymista czytający Schopenhauera w Pamirze.

Nearly half the Turkmens in central Asia live outside of Turkmenistan, many of them in Afghanistan and Iran. there are more Tajiks in Afghanistan than in Tajikistan. In Samarkand and Bukhara, both in Uzbekistan, the main language is Tajik. The Uzbeks for their part, account for a sixth of the population of Kyrgyzstan and at least a fifth of the population of Tajikistan.

The Soviet cartographers did not have an easy task of creating order out of the Central Asian patchwork of different peoples, languages and clans. Until 1924, the Russians treated Central Asia as one big region which they called Turkestan - the land of the Turks - as most people who lived there spoke Turkic languages.

People did often not know which nationality they were. In the 1926 consensus, people could name their tribe and family, but could not always answer if they were Uzbek, Kyrgyz or Tajik.