by Victoria Miroshnichenko

January 20th, 2022

Manas is everything for the Kyrgyz – they have Manas Avenue, Manas Airport, the Manas military base, and, of course, the largest epic in human history. The printed version of the Kyrgyz epic is twenty times larger than Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and five times larger than the Indian Mahabharata. It takes half a year to chant Manas to the komuz (a string instrument) — pretty long, indeed! This was found out in the 1930s when Stalin ordered that the epic be recorded. All the akyn performers were gathered to make the recordings. They worked ten hours a day and the entire process took six months. Interestingly, there were six groups of akyns working and all the six recordings turned out to be identical.

Manas is a trance epic. A performer enters into a special state of mind before reciting the epic. The Altai people and the Far North nomads have similar epics. It is astonishing how nomads tell the legends that trace back thousands of years. Living human memory is a special instrument. While we hope to store information on artificial media such as flash or hard drives, the art of the akyns is a living human memory that is thousands of times more effective and capacious than any artificial device.

In Kyrgyzstan, the manasci (readers of Manas) traditions are more widespread in the north – Bishkek and Talas. Talas has Manas Ordo, a large historical and ethnographic center, and Bishkek plans to open the Manasci Center.

Lada Khasanova believes that a true guide should always pursue creative growth. This is why she is taking a course offered by UNESCO and EU partnership project Silk Roads Heritage Corridors in Afghanistan, Central Asia and Iran: International Dimension of the European Year of Cultural Heritage. Upon its completion, Lada will become one of the professionals working along the Silk Roads and promoting the conservation of the region’s history and rich culture. But even today, Lada is doing her best so that travelers leave with warm memories of Kyrgyzstan.

Today, Osh is known as the southern capital of Kyrgyzstan. It is the second-largest city after Bishkek and one of the most ancient cities in the country and Central Asia. Osh was a transit point on the Silk Road, which connected the West and the East. This great route witnessed the rise and fall of entire civilizations but, for three millennia, Osh was the heart of busy and vibrant life that never stopped.

The city began with small Bronze Age settlements at the western and eastern foothills and on the southern slope of the Sulayman Too Mountain. The artifacts found there were radiocarbon dated and revealed to be more than three thousand years old. Although there was no cohesive city yet, just separate sites, it is obvious that settled life has never stopped in Osh since the 13th or 14th century.

The oldest written accounts that mention the city are those by the great Chinese traveler Zhang Qian, who was the first one to describe the Silk Road. He wrote about Ershi, the capital of Dayuan, defining it as a “city at the revered mountain.” Some artifacts, including the largest sanctuary dating back to the Dayuan times and associated with the cult of the horse, suggest that when Zhang Qian visited this land, the capital of Dayuan was Ershi, not far from today’s Osh.

Due to its advantageous location in the southeastern part of the Fergana Valley, at the northern foot of the Kichi-Alay Range, at an altitude of 1,000 meters above sea level, Osh was part of many states. These included the Samanid, Karakhanid and Timurid states, the Khanate of Kokand, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and finally the independent Kyrgyz Republic.

Illustrated by Roman Zakharov