General facts on Kyrgyz land

The Kyrgyz Republic occupies territory that hides a great deal of history, although not all of that history is obvious.   

For example, most of the great cities of the Silk Road, have disappeared - there is little evidence remaining that will conjure up the impressions that can be gained in places like the Registan in Samarkand.  However, evidence of human habitation exists which dates back thousands of years - The settlement at Tosor may well be 50,000 years old and it is claimed that Osh was established over 3000 years ago and as would be one of the world's oldest cities, "Older than Rome", as local tradition proclaims.

Indeed, great civilizations flourished here - the city of Nevkat was reputedly as large as Rome was when Rome was the capital of a mighty empire;  The armies of Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane marched and campaigned over the land, little of all this survives for the visitor to see.

As for the Kyrgyz, as nomads, they had no written language ... and so what we know about the people and their life down through the centuries comes from mainly either external sources, artefacts and archaeological discoveries, or through the epics and stories passed down from generation to generation by oral tradition.

On the other hand, the evidence is there ... from the petroglyphs of Saimaluu Tash, the Caravanserai of Tash Rabat, to the more recent statues of Lenin which still stand in various places around the country, and so forth.

This is a land for those with imagination ... who do not need the physical evidence of ruins and artefacts to feel the atmosphere and experience the sense of history. 

In this section we try to give a glimpse of the events that occurred in the land now known as Kyrgyzstan and the peoples that occupied this part of Central Asia:

• A potted history  - a brief of the history of Kyrgyzstan
• Timeline  - to try and put events into a chronological framework
• Ancient Times - Archaeology  - evidence of mankind's sojourn in Kyrgyzstan from earliest times
• The Silk Road  - traders, soldiers, pilgrims and travellers on one of the world's oldest and greatest trade routes
• Empires, Kingdoms, Khanates and City States  - from familiar names such as the Mongols, to more
• The arrival of the Russians - from requests for protection to tragic events of 1916  
• The Soviet Period - from the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991  
• Independent Kyrgyzstan - from 1991 onwards

Some of the names of people and places will be familiar, others less so, and some (except for experts in the history of Central Asia) may well seem exotic and bizarre ... like from the annals of fantasy ...