Bishkek

What do St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod (Lower New City), Volgograd, and Bishkek have in common? They were all named after Soviet-era heroes: Leningrad, Gorky, Stalingrad, and Frunze, respectively. You’re probably thinking, “Okay, I’ve heard of the first three guys, but who on earth is Frunze?”

It seems clear that Mikhail Frunze knew exactly what he needed to do to get a city named after him. That is to say, be born in Kyrgyzstan, befriend Lenin, join the Bolsheviks, and lead many a Red Army campaign. But then he made the crucial mistake of crossing Stalin. To quote the Wikipedia entry on Mikhail Frunze:

Frunze died of chloroform poisoning during his surgery on 31 October 1925; the operation was considered very simple and routine even by the standards of medicine in existence at the time. It has therefore been speculated that Stalin arranged his death, but there is no hard evidence to support this.^[8] However, Frunze had been administrated a chloroform dose that many times exceeded the dose normally applied for narcosis.

Frunze was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. All four doctors who had operated on him (Martynov, Grekov, Rozanov and Get'e) died one by one in 1934.

Is there anything more conspiratorial than a controversial Halloween death?

Like Ulaanbaatar, there wasn’t much to Frunze at the onset of Soviet rule. Most would argue this was bad news for both those cities. Once you let the Soviet architects loose on a empty canvas, who really knew what you would end up with. In Frunze’s case: brilliant architecture. Khrushchev and his concrete abominations are eerily absent from the cityscape. Instead you have four and five story apartment blocks lining the wide boulevards and a box-shaped national museum that would rival the world’s greatest mausoleums. The only the missing is a metro. It is said that Frunze was never big enough to justify a metro system.

1991 brought with it the independence of Kyrgyzstan and the change of the capital from Frunze to Bishkek. Bishkek is an ancient hero who is rumored to be buried in the area. The Soviet footprint is still largely intact; you can stroll down Kyrgyz SSR street or get of the bus at the Soviet street stop. Four blocks away from the organization and tree-lined streets is the chaotic Osh Bazaar. It’s a magical place with succulent beef kebab and fragrant spices. All those exotic stories you heard about Central Asia probably came from places like Osh Bazaar.

What the tourists come for, however, are the mountains. Bishkek has a beautiful mountain backdrop, however not quite as nice as Almaty. The next post should detail my foray into said mountains.

Right Now in Baku

Seen in Sofia

Great ad in the train station

Soviet era "Weight Control" at the bazaar

Picking up some tickets

Lineup outside a butcher shop, I believe. If I didn't know any better, I'd think it was a bread line.

Istanbul

Istanbul is Baku on some serious steroids. I was only there for about 36 hours, but I learned some valuable things about the city in that time:

1. Nobody ever seems to sleep.
2. There are more tourists roaming the city on any given day than there are in my hometown.
3. It must’ve been one bad ass place back in the Constantinople days
4. The no smoking indoors law actually works
5. Evidence of modernity is everywhere

The city’s reputation definitely precedes it. Ask almost anyone interested in the Turkic world who has been to Istanbul what they thought of the city and he or she will probably tell you that it’s the greatest city on earth. Those people have obviously not been to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia….

Istanbul has a lot going for it: liberal society, great nightlife, cheap food and alcohol, and a ton of character. You could probably explore the city full-time for six months and still not discover all the little nooks and crannies. And the street food… plentiful and diverse. You could get anything from fish, to mussels, to cow intestines, to “wet burgers”.

But what does the city lack? The whole “popular tourist site” situation doesn’t help. The difference being that Istanbul tourists walk and take public transportation, while their counterparts in Cairo, for example, are mainly on air conditioned buses. Istanbul also lacks the “baladi-ness” of Cairo. Call it my warped sense of charm, but where were all the street cafes with sawdust on the floor? I blame the EU and their strict standards for that.

One thing I do know is that I would give almost anything to be able to be a spice trader in Istanbul in the days when it was the gateway between east and west.

She's a Beaut

The prospective Lada. In all its Soviet glory.

Istanbul - Part 2

Cafe Street

Fish Market

Asian-side Train Station

Istanbul

Backgammon in the Park

Turkish Bazaar

Fisherman

More fisherman

2010

Some new projects will be undertaken early this year in Baku, namely the procurement of a beat up Lada that we will attempt to fix (only after befriending a local Lada guru-mechanic that will lend us tools). We'll see how that goes.

Other things that need to get done:

• an "old timey drinking spot" pub crawl dressed to the nines


• a tour of the local brewery


• more gourmet burgers


• a trip out to the island of Nargin


• a degustation menu


• the list should continue to grow as new ideas arise...

Blogging regularity should also increase, provided the above projects actually get going. I also promise to catch up with all the travelling I have done lately, so look forward to posts on Kyrgyzstan, Tuscany, Turkey, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania, and Greece.

Happy new year!