Back to my favourite realm (nuristan, turkmenistan, and elsewhere)

[lobelia321]

In the last few days, I have bought:

• Marco Polo's Travels

• George Scott Robertson, The Kafirs of the Hindu-Kush

• Thesiger, Arabs of the Marshes

• Afghanistan: A Companion and Guide

• John Man, Genghis Khan

• Jean-Paul Roux, Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire

• Firdausi (Ferdowsi), The Shahnameh (my icon is taken from an illustraton to the Shahnameh; I've had the icon for years but never read the book)

• Cally Oldershaw, Philip's Guide to Gems, Stones and Crystals

I'm 1/3 of the way through Marco Polo. It's marvellous, in all senses of that word.

Literature on the Karakum Desert is thin on the ground but trust the Volk to have come up with a children's adventure story set there, no less!

ETA: And it seems that the Germans (again!) made a film based on this children's book! Extraordinary.

Besides Karakum (an area invaded by the Mongols between 1219 and 1221), I am also fascinated by the Afghan province of Nuristan, formerly known as Kafiristan. The people there were forcibly converted to Islam only in 1895 (!) and had managed to remain idolatrous pagans until then. Well, we wouldn't say idolatrous pagans now; they seem to have had some sort of ancestor cult-cum-early form of Hinduism.

They are very remote; this is how they managed to resist conversion for so long. Because they are remote, they are also ethnically and genetically different from surrounding areas. A lot of them, apparently, have red hair and blue eyes.


Wooden effigies of Kafir ancestors by a burial ground.


Another figurine.



Then there are also the Kalash, a similar non-Muslim and possibly Zoroastrianesque minority in Pakistan, across the border.

And look, there is even a movie with a lesbian theme (of course!), set in Kafiristan. It is made by Germans -- by whom else? Has anyone seen it?

And yes, there's The Man Who Would Be King with S.Connery/M.Caine, based on R.Kipling.

Comments

[sheldrake.livejournal.com]

This is fascinating! I love remote places.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

I love them absurdly, too. It is a form of escapism.

Places always seem remote but then you do some googling and research and you find out, they are totally interconnected with other places, just as are we here. Maybe the only truly remote places are the uninhabited ones and the new settlements in the New World.

[tansu.livejournal.com]

Central Asia gives me lovely yearnings. Has done for a long time.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

I want to go so much. How much longer, I wonder, before Afghanistan is safe? 10 years? 15?

[minavox.livejournal.com]

I never heard about this movie. But there was an article about Annemarie Schwarzenbach in a recent copy of Spiegel magazine. Seems she was a gifted writer and quite the outstanding lesbian in her time and travelled like Marco Polo himself. Oh, and destroyed herself with drugs before she turned 40, but who can be astonished by that? There's a new biography of her out.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Who has heard about this movie? It is totally obscure! But I had heard of one of the women because she came up in one of my travel anthologies! Drugs, eh? Plenty of that in Afghanistan, I should imagine.

[msilverstar]

I just finished The Road to Oxiana, a slightly wonky travel book about Persia and Afghanistan in the late 30s. It was the perfect right-before-sleep book. I like reading about situations I'd hate to actually experience.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Duh, yes, it's The Road to Oxiana I bought, not the Kafiristan one which is out of print. I've not read it yet.