On the Trail of Buzkashi, Susannah Walden

On the day of the traditional Persian New Year the population of Dushanbe, dressed in their finest, flooded into the botanical garden for the official Navruz celebration. At least the women were well dressed, almost every one was decked out in a brightly colored national dress, high heels, full makeup and sparkling hair ornaments.

The Persian New Year corresponds with the first day of spring and the themes of new life, fire and newlyweds ring true with ancient and modern Beltane celebrations of my home in Scotland. Ironically, the first day of spring was rainy and cold following a week of warm sunshine and while the President Rakhmon and thousands of Dushanbe citizens stood in the drizzle for a few hours then hurried home to eat osh and naan my compatriots and I ventured into the Tajik countryside to catch a game of Buzkashi.

Buzkashi seems to have a hold on the imagination of people who have enough interest in central Asia to have heard of this bizarre sport. It has been compared to polo but I would fear for the life of a polo player thrown into the writhing mass of hardened riders wielding small weighted wips and flogging any horse or man that is between them and the goat carcass at the center of the scrum. Perhaps if rugby players rode they would be at home in this fray. There are many versions of the game but the version we saw was every man for himself and as soon as one man got a hold of the goat he took off with the pack in pursuit and tried to make it from one end of the playing area to the other, an area whose borders are in no way strictly defined making the game almost as dangerous for the spectators as it is for the players, without losing the goat.

Starting from a week or so before Navruz there are regular matches held just outside of Dushanbe but our excursion took us well out of city and even further than we thought because, as we learned from a random man on the street of the town where the game should have been, the night before about 200 horses plodded out of the town and headed north. When we finally tracked down the game, only about 10km away from the Uzbek border, horses were still arriving. The game was held in a dried riverbed framed with hills dressed in the shy green shoots of the first weeks of spring that all together formed a brash emerald blanket that defied the thick gray clouds filling the vast sky.

Almost as interesting as the game itself was just watching the goings on of the spectators. Granted they were watching us just as curiously as we were they. Like so many capital cities Dushanbe is a different world from the rest of the country and one could especially see the Uzbek influence so close to the border. Men wandered around carrying rugs, TVs or dragging a goat – prizes their friends had won; horses of many levels of dishevelment pulled against their reigns anxious to get in on the action on the ravine floor; and most men carried around a little plastic bag of sunflower seeds but one could also sample the ‘restaurant’ food of eggs and kielbasa roughly deep fried in a vat of oil over a gas can - just another delight of a day out in the countryside of Tajikistan.
 

Susannah Walden is currently studying Farsi in Dushanbe, Tajikistan during the Spring 2010 semester.