How my love affair with history took me on a wild trip to the Central Asian lands
This is the first installment of a two-part travel blog.
Many international travel agencies advertise tours to The Stans. Usually it is to ‘The Five -stans’, namely, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, all located in what is called Central Asia.
This region, which comprised of a number of derelict, feuding khanates and emirates at the time, was conquered by Tsarist Russia and annexed to the Russian empire in the second half of the 19th century. As such, all five became a part of the Soviet Union (USSR) and remained so until it went bust in 1991.
Depending on time and cost factors, some tours go for fewer than the five Stans, or combine them with Iran (to the south) and/or Xinjiang (to the east). Xinjiang, the western-most province of China, was historically known as Eastern Turkestan.
Some travelers extend their tour to include Azerbaijan, to the west of the Stans, across the Caspian Sea. Azerbaijan has nearly everything in common with the five Stans, except the suffix ‘stan’.
If there is any logic to the suffix ‘stan’, then Azerbaijan should have been named Azeristan. Turkey should be Turkestan, being on the western extremity of the Turkic-speaking lands. One may even argue that Iran ought to be Iranistan, for ‘stan’ is a part of the Persian vocabulary more than of any other.