Uzbekistan's Secret Ancient City

[Guest guest]

Uzbekistan's Secret Ancient City

By Monica Whitlock

BBC Correspondent

4-20-4

 

UZBEKISTAN -- Kampyr-Tepe, in southern Uzbekistan, was built at the

time of Alexander the Great's empire and occupied for about 500 years

until it fell into decline.

 

Since it was discovered, a generation ago, it has been closed to the

public because it stands in a sensitive and tightly guarded military

zone, right on the Afghan border.

 

The city perched on a high shelf of land - cut into clay walls that

dropped sheer into the plains below.

 

Caught in the light of a winter afternoon, an entire city spread as

far as we could see, the dun-coloured dust touched with gold.

 

It was here that Alexander raised his capital more than 2,000 years

ago. This was the furthest conquest, then, of the Greeks in Asia.

 

>From our vantage point, we could see why. Far below, beneath a swirl

of starlings, we could see the plains melt into those of Afghanistan,

Alexander's route here from Persia.

 

At our feet spread the whole of the south.

 

Relics

 

There was not a sound but the birds flocking and turning across the

precipice, wheeling and turning back.

 

The small houses were in the nearest part of the city. Square rooms

opened on to a grid of narrow passages, criss-crossing to make

streets.

 

Stacks of pots and plates sat outside, as though the people of Kampyr-

Tepe had left the washing up one evening after dinner.

 

Great round platters and bowls, made of the same ochre dust as the

plain.

 

At first we were amazed. Why had they not been taken off to some

museum? Dated, labelled... or stolen even?

 

But the more we looked, we realised there were just so many, they

were ordinary, just part of the land.

 

When two boys - hard and tough as men - drove their handful of sheep

through the city, they did not waste a glance on the pots. Why would

they?

 

Foreigners though, now that was interesting; they spend the rest of

the day following shyly and smiling.

 

Security

 

Kampyr-Tepe was a fortified city in Alexander's time, and remains a

military base to this day for a reason as old as the land - its

special position at this crossing between central and south Asia.

 

It is patrolled by the army of modern Uzbekistan.

 

Special permission to visit can only be granted by the government in

Tashkent.

 

The way in is through a military checkpoint, at the time specified.

 

Turn up late and the soldiers will bar the way and you will never see

Kampyr-Tepe, just the plain around pitted with pill-boxes and fenced

with barbed wire.

 

The deep south of Central Asia has a feel all its own.

 

It has a special stillness and a scent of new bread from the intense

sun beating on the straw, that, mixed with mud, is the building

material used 1,000 years ago... and now.

 

Buried treasure

 

It wears its past casually. Kampyr-Tepe is just one of its treasures.

 

There are sights here, in this quiet and private place, that almost

anywhere in the world would have bus-loads of visitors trooping to

and fro, buying souvenirs and cups of tea.

 

"You see that big pit there," said an old farmer, Hamrah Baba, living

on the plains to the north of Kampyr-Tepe.

 

"When I was a boy, we used to lower each other down there in turns,

hanging on a rope. We did not think it was special.

 

 

 

"Then, these men came from Tashkent and found all sorts of things.

They found gold and those chessmen."

 

The gold was 35kg of solid gold jewellery, set with turquoises. The

chess pieces may be the oldest on earth.

 

The pit where Hamrah Baba once played is in the citadel of Dalverzin-

Tepe. Capital of the Kushan empire, it was one of the richest on the

planet.

 

There was not a sound but the starlings, wheeling and flocking,

wheeling and turning over the edge of Afghanistan.

 

Unearthed

 

There are secrets buried with the past... long dead secrets, and

recent political secrets.

 

One night in the Soviet time, archaeologists got a call at their dig

at a sunken palace right on the Afghan frontier by the river Amu,

that some people call Oxus.

 

It was an urgent order from Moscow. "Move fast," they said. "Get the

stuff out, now."

 

They dug as fast as they could, grabbing from the ground a frieze of

marble musicians, and a hoard of daggers - relics of an army that had

once passed that way.

 

They were right to feel that something was up.

 

It was the winter of 1979 and a few days later, Soviet tanks rolled

into Afghanistan, across the palace, crunching what was left.

 

Inhabitants

 

Long before the Arabs came here with their new religion of Islam,

Buddhist monks lived in Central Asia, the conduit through which

Buddhism travelled from India to the East.

 

The giant Buddha statues at Bamian in Afghanistan lay on the same

road.

 

They have been destroyed, but a wonderful sleeping Buddha, 16m long,

still lies peacefully in Tajikistan.

 

And near Kampyr-Tepe, we were invited to the site of a Buddhist

lamasery, where the mendicant monks lived underground in a labyrinth,

to protect them from the terrible heat and cold of the plain.

 

One could almost feel their soft steps in their sunken corridors and

imagine them rinsing their begged rice at the stone bowl that still

stands in their kitchen.

 

They left no gardens, no orchards, no grand palaces.

 

What they left was something simpler.

 

"They left some very special papers," said our guide excitedly. "We

found them in sealed jars."

 

"What did they say?" I asked.

 

"Oh they said that we too lived here."

 

- From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 17 April,

2004 at 1130 BST on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules

for World Service transmission times.

 

© BBC MMIV

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/36301

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