Kazakhstan

I'm fortunate to be able to travel with my work.  From time to time I may share notes from my travels, beginning with some details of a current trip with you.  While this information isn't primarily spiritual, I have been pretty productive in a spiritual, creative sense since I've been here.  I've also included some details on a religious holiday you may not have heard of.  I've learned a great deal about a remote, interesting part of the world.

General

I’m currently in the middle of a three week business trip located in the Northeastern part of Kazakhstan, staying in the town of Kurchatov.  I work for a U.S. agency involved in a three-way project with the Kazakhs and the Russians to help clean up old nuclear test sites.  Something the US has been involved for the past 15 years.  This is one way the U.S.  is actually trying to make the world a better place, and succeeding.

The town of Kurchatov is named after a man named Igor Kurchatov, the "father" of the Soviet/Russian atomic bomb.  This area is where the Soviets did their final research/testing of their initial bomb and tested most of their subsequent nuclear weapons.  If Kurchatov is the father of the bomb, then the Uncle Sam should be considered the Grandfather.  Without the aide of a huge Soviet spy ring operating in the US during WWII that passed on all pertinent details on the development of our first weapons to the Russians in a matter of weeks (many of the stolen documents flown out of the US to Russia on US sponsored lend-lease flights) the Russians probably wouldn't have had a bomb until at least 10 years after their first test in 1949.  Check out the book “Dark Sun” if you want to read more.

Anyway, during the bomb-building hey-day, Kurchatov was a bustling city of 50,000 folks.  After the break up of the Soviet Union, the newly independent Kazakhstan didn't want any more Russian testing on their home turf, and the population here dwindled to about 1000.  Now it's back up to about 8000.  Think a foreign version of "The Hills have Eyes".  An mostly desolate landscape with a good-sized town mostly deserted.  The town consists of large, Soviet era (grey, concrete, ugly) buildings, many of them caving in.  Of course, there are no mutants here, the people are all quite nice.
 
The landscape on the drive to the old Soviet test area south of Kurchatov reminds me of the flat part of Montana or North Dakota  (we're on about the same latitude).  Wide open spaces, big sky, not much green.  Our work area is nestled up near a pile of smallish rugged mountains, maybe only a couple thousand feet taller than the surrounding plains.  This is where the Soviets did a significant portion of their underground (more like under-mountain) nuclear testing.  There are a couple hundred tunnels scattered throughout the small mountain range.  As you got close to the mountains, you can actually see that nearly all the surface rock on them has been broken off and turned to loose rubble caused from the many, large, explosions that shook them violently.  The mountains themselves appeared slumped, sagged and settled -- kind of how I envision myself in another 50 (hopefully not 20) years I guess. 

Often we take different routes through the mountains and the views are spectacular.  Im a big fan of the deserted landscape, with mountains in the distance, but I’m from Utah.  If you love trees, this is not the place for you.  There is some wildlife here though, I've seen eagles, hawks, and a gray/white fox running through a snowy meadow, he was beautiful.

Too Weird

After my first day at work, on the return trip to town from the mountains, I decided to listen to my Ipod shuffle, to provide a soundtrack to the mad-dash car chase along rough roads.  It really made the drive much more entertaining, just like at the movies.  I believe my shuffle as about 250 songs on it.  Get this, the first time I listened to this thing since arriving in Kazakhstan and my ears were greeted with "Back in the USSR" by the Beatles.  I shit you not people!!   

Note: For the under-25 crowd: I know you know who the Beatles are, but you may not have heard the song "Back in the USSR" before, it doesn't get a lot of play time these days.  Download it and give it a listen!! Kazakhstan was one of the 15 former Soviet republics that made up the USSR.
Anyway, the song kind of made me feel like I was really meant to be here, at this time, in this place, boring you to tears at a last desperate attempt at sanity.

River Irtysh

The town of Kurchatov lies along the river Irtysh.  I must admit I'd never heard of the Irtysh before this trip.  It actually begins in the mountains of Mongolia, flows through western China (Xinjiang Province) and then into Kazakhstan.  It flows slowly through the wide plains of NE Kazakhstan, into Russia through Siberia, where it joins the Ob river and flows into the Arctic Ocean.  The river is over 2600 miles long and can be navigated through all of Russia and some of Kazakhstan, in the warmer months.
Our hotel sits next to the river, which is quite wide, shallow and also quite frozen. 
I'm hoping it will thaw before I leave.   There are some nice marshes alongside the banks.  It really is amazing how being next to a river can spruce things up.  If you turn your back to Kurchatov and the rather desolate steppe to the west and look out across the river and to the virgin landscape on the other side, it really is beautiful.  There are green trees in the distance.  And the people I've met and talked with in town are quite nice, just like small town people you meet anywhere in the US.  You see lots of families out together and people enjoying walks along the river or the main street in town, because there really isn't that much else to do, and you know what?  They all seem pretty damn happy.  I don't think America is necessarily any better than other places, we just have more stuff.

Nauryz

On March 22nd, Kazakhstan celebrated "Nauryz Meyrami", listed in English as a "traditional Spring Holiday".  We had heard from one of the local workers that Nauryz was tied to the Muslim New Year…but that didn't make sense as the Muslim lunar calendar couldn't be tied to Vernal Equinox.  So what's the real deal anyway?

The day following a "county fair” type celebration of Nauryz on the town's main square, I was out for a walk along the Irtysh  and I saw something rather out of the ordinary.  A middle-aged woman had a small metal plate that held some burning incense.  She proceeded to wave the burning incense all around a young man and a young woman.  It appeared to be some type of religious ritual cleansing.  I thought at first it might be marriage related, (ward off the bad spirits before the ceremony...sorry but after that you're stuck with each other and on your own).  However, as they got in their car to leave, it didn't appear the young folks were a couple, more like brother and sister with their mom giving them the blessing.  Anyway, a bit of a mystery and definitely not something you see every day.

When I got back to the hotel, I did a little more research on Nauryz (thank you Wikipedia).  Turns out what Kazakhs call Nauryz is their word for an ancient Persian (present day Iran) holiday called Norouz, which means "new day".  And is celebrated in areas of the world where the old Persian empire held sway.  The holiday has been celebrated for over 3000 years (Islam has only been around for about 1400), and is considered the Persian New Year's day.  Nauryz may also be one of the original religious holidays as well, with ties to the very ancient religion of Zoroastrianism (originating sometime between 1000 and 2000BC).  Which in turn heavily influenced subsequent Jewish and Christian teachings.  The "wise men" from the East are thought by some to have been Zoroastrian.

One of the major symbolic acts of Zoroastrianism is to use fire as a weapon of good to defeat evil.  In some countries, people jump over fires at the time of Norouz to cleanse themselves from evil.  I think what I witnessed along the river was an "old believer" using fire/incense to cleanse her children from evil for the coming year.  Some of the confusion about the origins of Nauryz among the locals may stem from the fact that under Communism, all local religions were banned.  Everything was either suppressed or secularized.  I'm sure a lot of the traditions and meanings have been lost over the past 70 years.

Well, that's about it.  Sorry for the length of this post, but I wanted to share what I encountered.