YAGNOB VALLEY
The people of the Yaghnob valley occupy a very special place in the ethnic and linguistic mosaic of Tajikistan. They are descendants of the ancient Iranian tribes of Eurasia: Alans, Sarmatians and Scythians and their language is close to ancient Soghdian, of the Scytho-Sarmatian dialect group that was once spoken across Central Asia (the only other surviving member of the group is Ossetic, spoken more than 2,000 km to the west in Ossetia). The first scientific records of the Yaghnobi language were made in 1870 by the Russian scholar Alexander L. Kuhn.
Until the Arab invasions in the 8th century CE, the Soghdians were the main merchants of the Silk Road that passed through their cities of Samarqand and Bukhara. The Soghdians were defeated by the Arabs in 722 CE at Mount Mugh at the confluence of the Zerafshan and Qom rivers and many of them fled further into the mountains, in particular to the Yaghnob valley where the village of Pskon became a de facto capital for Soghdian refugees. Over the years, the Yaghnobis converted to Islam, but – like their Ismaili cousins in the Pamirs – retained some Zoroastrian practices.
The isolation and inaccessibility of the valley has left the Yaghnobis’ way of life relatively untouched by their nominal attachment to Tsarist Russia (from 1870), Bolshevik Turkestan and the Soviet Union (from the late 1920s) and finally independent Tajikistan. During this time there was substantial outward migration, and – in the early 1970s – forced deportation to cotton plantations in what is now Khatlon district. The Tajik government has passed measures to redress the injustices suffered by the Yaghnobis but few have returned to their homeland. Today, there are only some ten small settlements left in the Yaghnob valley. It is as hard to reach as ever, via mountain crossings with heights of more than 4,000m or across the Yaghnob gorge by mountain tracks. The main concentrations of Yaghnobis are now in Zafarabod, on the Uzbek border to the west of Khodjent, in Dushanbe and on the Varzob river.
The Yaghnobi people (Text by Robert Middleton)
