The photograph is by Daniel Malikyar. He has traveled to 55 countries, with many trips to his birthplace, Afghanistan. Daniel speaks fluent Dari, and that allows him to connect and understand with the people of Afghanistan.
That Guardian photograph is wonderful because it quietly overturns a lot of people’s mental picture of Afghanistan.
That Guardian photograph is wonderful because it quietly overturns a lot of people’s mental picture of Afghanistan.
The Context of the Photo
This photograph took place in a remote village in the Pamir Mountains, one of the highest inhabited elevations in the world, where a very small population of Kyrgyz nomads still exists. The Kyrgyz move three to four times throughout the year, following the grazing lands for their livestock. It’s a very undocumented place. The people do not have visitors very often, so they have no reference points or agendas for posing or presenting themselves. They’re just honestly going about their day, and that’s why they look so effortless in the photographs.
While staying in the villages, there’s salted yak milk every morning for breakfast and yoghurt made with yak milk as a side dish for dinner. You stay warm at night on the floor in the yurt burning yak dung in the furnace. This photograph documents a girl named Shargha, looking calm and casual as she milks a stoical-looking yak. In this region, the women wear red veils before marriage and white ones after – the clothing is very visually distinctive and made for an interesting juxtaposition against the beautiful landscape.
That enormous yak isn’t a novelty. In the high country, yaks are the equivalent of a pickup truck, dairy cow, furnace, and pantry rolled into one. They provide milk, butter, yogurt, cheese, meat, hair for rope and tents, hides, and dung for fuel where there are few trees.
The girl’s calmness is striking. To someone raised around livestock, a 500 kg (1,100 lb) yak is simply “the family milk cow.” Familiarity has a way of shrinking giants.
The landscape dictates everything. Much of central Afghanistan sits between 2,500 and 4,000 meters (8,000 to over 13,000 feet). Winters are long and severe. Crops are limited. Animals that thrive in cold, thin air become priceless partners.
Guillaume, a French photographer, has a beautiful photo essay of the people of the remote Pamirs region in Central Asia, including northeast Afghanistan.
Pamirs are a mountain range in Central Asia at the junction of the Himalaya, Hindu Kush and Karakoram ranges. But the word “Pamir” actually is translated from ancient Persian as “rolling pastureland” and refers to a fertile valley formed when a glacier or ice field melt and leave a rocky plain.
This type of terrain is principally found in the north east of Afghanistan, an area known as Wakhan Corridor and at the south west of Tajikistan known as Wakhan Valley.
In Afghanistan, the Wakhi people live in the year-round villages extending from Qazideh at the western part of the Wakhan Corridor to Sarhad-e Broghil at the eastern end. In the region, there are no government services, large parts of the area have no roads, and people are left to their own. They are agropastoralists cultivating wheat, barley, peas and potatoes but the production is rarely sufficient because of the climate. Wakhis depend on their livestock to supplement agriculture.
Guillaume is a French photographer based in Brussels, Belgium. His work covers a wide range of subjects, with a focus on travel, cultural, social, and environmental documentary. As a photojournalist and visual storyteller, he explores themes such as nature conservation, cultural preservation, sustainability, and environmental protection. https://guillaumepetermann.com/about.html
Adventure.com has another beautiful photo essay of this region. (photos by Tracey Croke and Helen Spencer)
Around 10,000 nomadic people of the Wakhi and Kyrghiz tribes live in the Wakhan Corridor. Here, women and children pose in traditional clothes, men pose with their yaks, and one man smiles for the camera with a particularly photogenic camel.
Yaks play a major role in the nomads’ survival, providing food and transport. Wool is turned into felt for lining yurts and dung is dried for fuel. The few traders who journey here barter supplies for livestock.
Hikers traverse the dramatic, changeable landscapes of the Wakhan Corridor. Photographer: Helen Spencer Adventure.com
Yak Cheese
Yak cheese, locally known as churpi, is a traditional hard cheese made from yak or cow milk. While widely consumed by humans in the Himalayan regions, it is best known in the US as a long-lasting, highly digestible, and rawhide-free chew for dogs. – Gemini
Chhurpi (Nepali: छुर्पी, Tibetan: ཆུར་བ།, THL: churwa), otherwise known as durkha and chogo/chugo, is a traditional cheese consumed in Nepal, Bhutan, Tibet and parts of Northeastern India. The two varieties of chhurpi are a soft variety (consumed usually as a side dish with rice) and a very hard variety. Chhurpi is considered one of the hardest cheeses in the world.
To prepare the hard variety, the soft chhurpi is wrapped in a jute bag and pressed hard to get rid of the water. After it dries, it is cut into small cuboidal[1] pieces and hung over fire to harden it further.
Hard Chhurpi By Sumit Surai – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58209022
Hard chhurpi is usually consumed by keeping it in the mouth to moisten it, letting parts of it become soft, and then chewing it like a gum. In this manner, one block of chhurpi can last anywhere from 30 minutes to up to five hours.
[1]Cuboidal – our new favorite word. We pledge to use it at least ten times today.
We also challenge WLBOTT’s Poet Laureate, Elder JimZim, to craft an epic saga around the word “cuboidal.” For his convenience, here are a list of rhyming words:
Yak Butter
Yak butter (Standard Tibetan: འབྲི་མར།; Chinese: 酥油) is common in regions where the domestic yak is the primary source of dairy products. Whole yak’s milk has nearly twice the fat content of whole cow’s milk, producing butter with a texture closer to that of cheese. Among herder communities in Central, North, and East Asia, yak butter is a staple food and a trade commodity. It is integral to several culinary traditions in China (Tibet), India, Mongolia, Nepal, and Pakistan (Gilgit–Baltistan).
Yak butter for sale at a street market in Lhasa, Tibet By Carla Antonini – File:Yak_butter.JPG, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15703148
In western Tibet, yak’s milk is first allowed to ferment overnight. In summer, the resulting yogurt-like substance is churned for about an hour by plunging a wooden paddle repeatedly into a tall wooden churn. In winter, yogurt is accumulated for several days, then poured into an inflated sheep’s stomach and shaken until butter forms.
Fresh yak butter is preserved a number of ways, and can last for up to a year when unexposed to air and stored in cool dry conditions. It is sewn into sheep-stomach bags, wrapped in yak skin, or wrapped in big rhododendron leaves. Once the container is opened, yak butter will begin to decompose; producing veins of blue mold similar to blue cheese.
Tibetan Yak Butter Sculpture
Other non-food uses include fueling yak-butter lamps, moisturizing skin, and the traditional butter sculptures for Tibetan New Year. Such yak-butter sculptures may reach nearly 10 meters in height.
The wild yak is among the largest extant bovid species. Adults stand about 160 to 205 cm (63 to 81 in) tall at the shoulder, and weigh 0.5–1.2 t (0.55–1.32 short tons)[1]. The head and body length is 240 to 380 cm (94 to 150 in), not counting the tail of 60 to 100 cm (24 to 39 in). The females are about one-third the weight and are about 30% smaller in their linear dimensions when compared to bull wild yaks. Domesticated yaks are somewhat smaller.
By Jim, the Photographer – https://www.flickr.com/photos/jcapaldi/8570800378/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=54045209
The primary habitat of the wild yak consists of treeless uplands between 3,000 and 5,500 m (9,800 and 18,000 ft), dominated by mountains and plateaus. It’s most common in alpine tundra with a relatively thick carpet of grasses and sedges rather than the more barren steppe country.
By User:מנחם.אל – IUCN map, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=54484781
Wild yaks are herd animals. Herds can contain several hundred individuals, although many are much smaller. Herds consist primarily of females and their young, with a smaller number of adult males. On average female yaks graze 100m higher than males. Females with young tend to choose grazing ground on high, steep slopes. The remaining males are either solitary, or found in much smaller groups, averaging around six individuals. Groups move into lower altitude ranges during the winter. Although wild yaks can become aggressive when defending young, or during the rut, they generally avoid humans, and may flee for great distances if approached.
[1] Let’s Talk Tons Adult [yaks] stand about 160 to 205 cm (63 to 81 in) tall at the shoulder, and weigh 0.5–1.2 t (0.55–1.32 short tons) – Wikipedia
Imagine if your doctor recorded your weight in tons. “Good job, Sister Magdalena! You’ve lost 0.0075 tons!”
Farsi Dari – the Afghanistan Variety of Persian
Dari, also known as Farsi Dari, Dari Persian, Eastern Persian, or Afghan Persian, is the variety of the Persian language spoken in Afghanistan. Dari is the Afghan government’s official term for the Persian language; it is referred to as Afghan Persian or Eastern Persian in many Western sources. The decision to rename the local variety of Persian in 1964 was more political than linguistic to support an Afghan state narrative.
Dari is the official language for approximately 30.6 million people in Afghanistan and it serves as the common language for inter-ethnic communication in the country.
As defined in the 2004 Constitution of Afghanistan, Dari is one of the two official languages of Afghanistan; the other is Pashto. Dari is the most widely spoken language in Afghanistan and the native language of approximately 25–50% of the population. Dari serves as the lingua franca of the country and is understood by up to 78% of the population.
