Cultural life

Daily life and social customs

Tajik cuisine has noticeable similarities to others in the region, including rice, bread, and meat as staples and the use of subtle spices. Meals begin with drinks, usually green tea, and a spread of fruits, nuts, and sweets. Traditional dishes include osh, seasoned rice with meat and carrots or turnips, and qurutob, which is made by pouring cheese over fatir bread and topping it with onions or other vegetables. Non bread accompanies meals and is treated with significant respect—it cannot be dropped, turned upside down, or have anything placed on top of it.

Tajikistanis celebrate both cultural and religious holidays. The New Year celebration, known as Navrūz (Nōrūz), begins on March 21, during the period of the vernal equinox. Smaller festivals are celebrated upon the first flowering of snowdrops and tulips in the spring. Religious celebrations include Idi Ramazon (see Eid al-Fitr) and Idi Qurbon (see Eid al-Adha). International Women’s Day is a national holiday in Tajikistan.

Literature

Writers from this region have made notable contributions to literature since the 10th century ce, and a vigorous folk literature continues. Tajik literature stems from a broader Persian literary tradition that can be traced back to the poet Rūdakī. Tajiks consider the Shāh-nāmeh to be the national epic and cherish the work of Rūmī. A number of Tajik poets and novelists achieved fame during the 20th century. They included Abdalrauf Fitrat, whose dialogues Munazärä (1909; The Dispute) and Qiyamät (1923; Last Judgment) have been reprinted many times in Tajik, Russian, and Uzbek, and Sadriddin Ayni, known for his novel Dokhunda (1930; The Mountain Villager) and for his autobiography, Yoddoshtho (1949–54; published in English as Bukhara). Both Fitrat and Ayni were bilingual, writing in Uzbek and Tajik. Abū al-Qāsim Lāhūtī’s poem Taj va bayraq (1935; Crown and Banner) and Mirzo Tursunzade’s Hasani arobakash (1954; Hasan the Cart Driver) responded to the changes of the Soviet era. The latter’s lyric cycle Sadoyi Osiyo (1956; The Voice of Asia) won major communist awards. A number of female writers, notably the popular poet Gulrukhsor Safieva, circulated their work in newspapers, magazines, and Tajik-language collections.

Cultural institutions

The Tajik National Theatre, which was established in 1929, long presented opera, ballet, musical comedy, and puppetry. Regional theatres and troupes later appeared in towns such as Nau. Tajik studios have produced feature films and documentaries and have dubbed films from elsewhere. Radio and television services expanded during the later decades of Soviet rule, and Dushanbe has had a television centre since 1960. Broadcasting and the performing arts suffered deep cutbacks after 1985, however, when Soviet subsidies diminished and then ceased entirely. The Tajik National Library, constructed to look like an open book, demonstrates the pride Tajiks place in their literary heritage. Housing about six million items and providing about 484,000 square feet (45,000 square metres) of space, it is the largest library in Central Asia. It overlooks the magnificent Rūdakī Park, at the opposite end of which sits the National Museum of Tajikistan, featuring both historical and archaeological exhibits.

Sports and recreation

National sports, with centuries of rich cultural underpinnings, include gushtingiri (traditional Tajik wrestling) and chavgonbozi (a form of polo). Another popular traditional sport is buzkashī—a sport similar to polo that involves seizing and retaining control of a goat carcass instead of hitting a ball. Dilshod Nazarov won the country’s first Olympic gold medal after competing in the men’s hammer throw in the Rio de Janeiro 2016 Olympic Games.

Early history and Islamic period

The Tajiks are the direct descendants of the Iranian peoples whose continuous presence in Central Asia and northern Afghanistan is attested from the middle of the 1st millennium bce. The ancestors of the Tajiks constituted the core of the ancient population of Khwārezm (Khorezm) and Bactria, which formed part of Transoxania (Sogdiana). They were included in the empires of Persia and Alexander the Great, and they intermingled with such later invaders as the Kushāns and Hepthalites in the 1st–6th centuries ce. Over the course of time, the eastern Iranian dialect that was used by the ancient Tajiks eventually gave way to Farsi, a western dialect spoken in Iran and Afghanistan.

The Arab conquest of Central Asia that began in the mid-7th century brought Islam to the region. But tribal feuds weakened the Arabs, and, with the rise of the Sāmānids (819–999), the Tajiks came under the rule of an Iranian dynasty. The first Turkic invaders (from the northeast) seized this area of Transoxania in 999, and, because both conquered and conquerors were Muslim, in time many Tajiks—especially those in the valleys of the Syr Darya and Amu Darya—became Turkicized. This resulted in the transformation of a formerly purely Iranian land into “Turkistan.” The name Tajik, originally given to the Arabs by the local population, came to be applied by Turkic invaders and overlords to those elements of the sedentary population that continued to speak Iranian languages.

Until the mid-18th century the Tajiks were part of the emirate of Bukhara, but then the Afghans conquered lands south and southwest of the Amu Darya with their Tajik population, including the city of Balkh, an ancient Tajik cultural centre.

Russian imperialism and the Soviet era

Russian conquests in Central Asia in the 1860s and ’70s brought a number of Tajiks in the Zeravshan and Fergana valleys under the direct government of Russia, while the emirate of Bukhara in effect became a Russian protectorate in 1868.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, a considerable proportion of the Tajik people was included in the Turkestan A.S.S.R. established in April 1918. In August 1920 the Revolution was extended to the khanate of Bukhara, which embraced most of the territory occupied by modern Tajikistan; the Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic was declared in October 1920, and early in 1921 the Soviet army captured Dushanbe and Kŭlob (Kulyab). Tajikistan was the scene of the Basmachi revolt in 1922–23, and rebel bands under Ibrahim Bek operated in eastern Bukhara until 1931. The Tajik A.S.S.R. was created as part of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic (S.S.R.) in 1925; in January 1925 a Special Pamirs region was created out of the Kyrgyz and Tajik parts of the Pamirs, and in December 1925 this region was renamed the Gorno-Badakhshan autonomous region. In 1929 the status of the Tajik A.S.S.R. was raised to that of a Soviet socialist republic. The change in status marked the first time that the Tajik people had their own state, albeit not a fully independent one, as it was still part of the Soviet Union.

As a full-fledged member of the Soviet Union, the underdeveloped, mountainous Tajik S.S.R. underwent a spectacular social and economic transformation. A sense of nationhood was instilled in the Tajik people—particularly by B.G. Gafurov, the leader of Tajikistan’s Communist Party from 1946 to 1956 and a historian respected in the West. Dams were constructed for electric power generation and irrigation, and industry was developed in the Vakhsh River valley. Soviet health care and education were gradually introduced in the republic. The village of Dushanbe (known as Stalinabad from 1929 to 1961) was transformed into a modern capital city boasting the Tajik State University (1951) and the Tajik Academy of Sciences (1948). Such progress notwithstanding, Tajikistan remained the poorest republic of the Soviet Union.