Tajiks

In some ways the Tajiks stand out from the rest of the Central Asian peoples.  Many have distinct Mediterranean features - which some claim are a sign of their descent from the armies of Alexander the Great.  In fact they are descended from an Indo-European people - the Aryans - which makes them relatives of the present day Iranians and, in fact, they speak a form of Farsi - the language of Iran - rather than a Turkic language.  The term 'taj' means "a Persian speaker".

As with the Kyrgyz, there are many different tribes and clans amongst the Tajiks. 

Tajik males normally wear a quilted coat - like the the Kyrgyz chapan - and a black hat embroidered in white - like the Uzbek doparilar, and the women brightly coloured dresses, with trousers underneath, and matching headscarves.   

The borders of Central Asia have been fairly nebulous over the course of time - and nomads would wander freely across, what is today, a national border.  As a result many Tajiks live in the surrounding countries rather than in Tajikistan itself.  Tajiks, for example, can be found in the neighbouring Chinese province of Xingjian - where they have an area designated as an Autonomous County.

There are a little under 50000 Tajiks living in Kyrgyzstan.    Most of them live in the far South where they are farmers. 

To complicate matters even further, the way in which the borders of the different Central Asian republics were delimitated in the 1920s means that there areas in each of them which are totally populated by people of a different nationality and, for example, the Murghab province of Tajikistan is almost entirely populated by ethnic Kyrgyz.  Similarly, Samarkand in Uzbekistan is almost entirely populated by Tajiks - and there have been some calls for it to be "handed back". 

During the civil war in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan received a large number of refugees from that country - approximately 14000.  Originally they settled in camps in the areas around Osh and Djalal Abad - but following tensions rose many were resettled in the North (for example, in Kara Balta and Ivanovka) where they were accommodated in houses left by departing slavs.  After the civil war ended many of the Tajiks returned home.