Dervishes and Dyevushkas (6/25/2006)

I was ready for hell in Tajikistan. The poorest Soviet republic, one that decended into bloody civil war almost the day after secession from Moscow, and one so hard to reach that globalization doesn't bother (take that, Friedman), I had mentally written this travelogue before I arrived. The intro to Les Mis - the greatest prologue in literary history, by the way - was my first paragraph, and I was ready to rant about how you can take a republic out of communism, but not vise-versa.

Pleasantly, Dushanbe surprised me. Not that I would recommend it for a holiday -- indeed, there is next to nothing to do downtown, each day is about 99 degrees with no breeze, and there is virtually no infrastructure to cater to tourists. But therein lies the charm. Glance beyond the hassles: the lack of customer service; the ain't-going-away Soviet bureaucracy; and the hot, stagnant air; and you get a purely "local" experience -- free of the fabrications of the great world capitals.

Tajikistan is the former USSR's oddball, a Persian race dwarfed by Turkic neighbors. It lacks Kazakhstan's oil, Kyrgyzstan's "don't worry be happy"ness, Uzbekistan's historical allure, and Turkmenistan's "North Korea of Central Asia" draw. Its borders are artifically concocted - one of Stalin's greatest hits - and to this day pit rival clans against each other. Gotta give Joe credit, though, he did a helluva job -- mines along the Tajik-Uzbek border increase daily.(Interesting addendum here: Joe also renamed the city "Stalinabad" in a typical fit of self-flattery. But when Khrushchev publicly proclaimed "Stalin: a bad", The Party re-christened the city "Dushanbe" ... which is simply the local word for "Monday". No one ever accused the Bolsheviks of being creative.)

The lack of globalization is due to a number of factors, most noticably the civil war that tore through the country immediately after the Fall. Most of the Russian colonists (and their "1917" chant) pulled out, leaving the communist infrastructure with a Persian facade. Perhaps the lack of material goods makes the city charming -- it is far cleaner than any other Soviet city I've visited, and it doesn't drown in the haze of industrial waste.

Tajikistan is resoundingly Muslim, though Soviet Islam differs distinctly from Sunni and Shi'a. While those schools bicker over Caliph authorities, Tajiks are too busy swigging vodka and simmering pork. I only saw two mosques in town, and the calls to prayer that echo throughout the rest of the Middle East are resoundingly absent. That said, most women are covered in shoulder-to-ankle, single-piece dresses, with the occasional few covering their head as well. When it's culture and not oppression, though, the decor lends an air of timelessness -- after all, if the Soviets couldn't enforce a dress code, perhaps no one will.

A last word on Dushanbe. Although the city is banal, strolling around can be quite pleasant. The number of trees is staggering -- most streets have two full rows on each side (which, when it's 98 and dry, how do the trees survive? Perhaps that's where the Aral Sea went...), and large parks stretch through downtown. The mountains aren't far away, and escapes into alpine air are quite refreshing after baking downtown. Of course, when you return to your hotel tired and hot, ready to shower the city away, you can't be surprised if the water or power aren't there to meet you. So it goes.

So no, Dushanbe is far from hell. But come unprepared, and you'll wind up with far more than another case of the Mondays.