Saying goodbye to Azerbaijan and ...

... getting ready for our tour of the Stans.

It has been a whirlwind visit to Azerbaijan (country #79 on my quest), a quick stopover on route to the starting point of our tour of the Silk Roads. We thoroughly enjoyed our time in Baku, learned a lot and would love to see more of the country and meet it's people.

We enjoyed a lovely afternoon along the Caspian Sea, stopping at Dopamine for a drink before wandering back in the early evening light for the next adventure.

Now we are embarking on a part of the world that is even more unknown to us - the alphabet, the language, the religion, the culture and certainly the history.
So over the last few weeks, I have been doing some reading ...

There are a few things I can remember ...
☝️the suffix *stans comes from Persian and means 'place' or 'land' clearly indicating the key influencers of the culture. The post-Soviet Central Asian Republics (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan) are simply known as the Stans but despite the common suffix, the five Stans are supposedly remarkably different.
👉 Turkmenistan is more than 80% desert, whereas Tajikistan & Kyrgyzstan are more than 90% mountains.
👉 Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan have vast oil and gas reserves with KZ being the richest country in the region whereas Turkmenistan is wealthy on paper but it's all state-controlled.
👉 Tajikistan on the other hand is poor as a church mouse and is heavily dependent on worker remittances (primarily from Russia) with people in many towns and villages having electricity for only a few hours each day.
👉 The regime in Turkmenistan is extremely insular with strict political isolation almost comparable with North Korea, there is no free press and the president is omnipotent.
👉 Kyrgyzstan on the other hand has even ousted one of its presidents and is moving move towards a democratic nation.
👉 While most of th Stans speak Turkic tongues, Tajiks speak an Iranian language closely tied to Persian.

Although the five countries are in many ways very different, they also share the same origin and fate: for almost seventy years, from 1922 to 1991, they were part of the Soviet Union, a gigantic social experiment without parallel in history. The Bolsheviks abolished private ownership and other individual rights. Their goal was a communist, classless society and they stopped at nothing to achieve it.

2026 marks the 35th anniversary of independence from 'Sovietstan' - it will be interesting to see how different the countries has developed.

Bring it on!Read more