New Year in Osh
It was undoubtedly part of the attraction that the Foreign Office is advising people not to travel to Osh but, having asked local teachers at the school, I was pretty confident that it was a perfectly safe place to visit, and so, along with colleages Brian and Dan I booked a plane ticket for the post-Christmas break and set off on Wednesday morning.
The plane was a small propeller-driven affair, and I wouldn’t have fancied hearing the engines conk out over the mountains separating Bishkek with its southern neighbour, but we arrived safely at a guest house that had been recommended by a one of our friends, Will, and it was very comfortable – with a private banya.
We dropped off our stuff and headed for Suleiman, the sacred Muslim mountain overlooking the town. It was our first experience of being stared at by virtually everyone we passed, which was something we experienced for the whole visit, although every single person we talked to was incredibly friendly.
We were walking past a partly built mosque near the mountain, and one of the builders, Rashid, let us look round inside. Then we had a quick look round the bazaar, and began to get a sense of the scale of the destruction wrought in June – literally dozens and dozens of gutted buildings
The next day we took a trip to nearby Ozgon, to see its famous mausoleums. For the first time, driving out of the town, we saw the sheer scale of the devastation;a two-mile stretch of road, where virtually every building had been razed to the ground.
Public gatherings had been banned in Osh for fear of more uprisings (in the market every time we visited, there were armed soldiers and police literally every 50 yards) and so with the help of the CBT we went to Gulcha, a village in the Alay valley, to see in the new year. We took a taxi (the Uzbek driver showed me the enormous vertical scar on his stomach; a legacy of the fighting in June) and stayed with Alaybeck and his wife Almkhan and their family. They made us feel incredibly welcome, with a huge new year feast and we toasted in the new year with Champagne, watching the fireworks down in the town before going to bed.
Rashid in the mosque near Souleiman, Osh
Children at our New Year homestay, Gulcha
Atop Souleiman
Almkhan and Alaybeck
Life goes on, Osh
