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- Ab Anbar
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Afghanistan
Afghanistan
i/æfˈɡænɨstæn/ (Persian/Pashto: افغانستان, Afġānistān), officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located in the centre of Asia, forming part of South Asia, Central Asia, and Greater Middle East, it is also considered to be part of a broader West Asia. With a population of about 29 million, it has an area of 647,500 km2 (250,001 sq mi), making it the 42nd most populous and 41st largest nation in the world. It is bordered by Pakistan in the south and the east, Iran in the west, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in the north, and China in the far northeast.
Afghanistan has been an ancient focal point of the Silk Road and human migration. Archaeologists have found evidence of human habitation from as far back as 50,000 BC. Urban civilization may have begun in the area as early as 3,000 to 2,000 BC. Sitting at an important geostrategic location that connects the Middle East with Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent, the land has been home to various peoples through the ages and witnessed many military campaigns, notably by Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and in modern era Western forces. The land also served as a source from which the Greco-Bactrians, Kushans, Saffarids, Ghaznavids, Ghorids, Timurids, Mughals and many others have risen to form major empires.
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Amol
Amol (Persian: آمل – [ɒmol];
pronunciation (help·info);[missing stress] also Romanized as Āmol and Amul) is a city in and the capital of Amol County, Mazandaran Province, Iran. At the 2006 census, its population was 197,470, in 55,183 families. Amol and the old part of town is the first of the four towns that populate the world in which there is Nzamyh. Amol is a city of strategic accounts from beginning to end.Shia state in the world was first built in Amol. In the 5th century AH, Nizam al-Mulk, in his famous book named "Seer-ul-moluok", recommended creation of modern institutions by the name of Nezamiah with academic status in the big famous cities of Islamic world as Balkh, Baghdad, Damascus, Neishabour, and Bukhara. The name of Amol was also included among them.Most of Allameh the scientific world are born in this city and the cultural capital of the world is Amol.Gold and copper have been expensive and time-old Amol, Amol has been the commercial center Iran.
Amol is located on the Haraz river bank. It is less than 20 kilometres (12 mi) south of the Caspian sea and less than 10 kilometres (6.2 mi) north of the Alborz mountains. It is 180 kilometres (110 mi) from Tehran, and 60 kilometres (37 mi) east of the provincial capital, Sari.Amol is Best Nature & History Iran. is a city in and the capital of Amol County, Mazandaran Province, Iran. At the 2006 census, its population was 197,470, in 55,183 families.
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Andijan
Andijan or Andizhan (Uzbek: Andijon / Андижон; Russian: Андижан) is the fourth-largest city in Uzbekistan, and the capital of the Andijan Province. It is located in the east of the country, at 40°47′N 72°20′E / 40.783°N 72.333°E / 40.783; 72.333, in the Fergana Valley, near the border with Kyrgyzstan on the Andijan-Say River. It has a population of 323,900 (1999 census estimate).
Arab geographers from the tenth century and later give the name as Andiyon, Andukan, Andugan, and Andigan. The etymology is unknown; the traditional explanation links it to the Turkic tribal name Andi.
The city of Andijan is located in the eastern point of the chain of the first settlements of the early civilizations of Fergana Valley. Study of the history of Andijan began nearly 100 years ago. At different times in the city was historical-ethnographic and archaeological excavations scientists A.k. Pisarčik, v.i. Kozenkova, b. Abdulgazieva, s. Jalilov and others. Detailed archaeological research of the city were carried out in 80-ies of the last century by the Institute of archaeology of the Academy of Sciences. Information about the structural and spatial location of Andijan, meet on a topographic map, 1893. At stake were the quarters, mosques, mausoleums, the streets of the city. Archaeologists researching historical locations such as Andijan, Čordona, Sarvontepa, Âkkatepa, Koštepa, Ark ichi, Shakhristan.
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Balkh
Balkh (Persian: بلخ Ancient Greek: Baktra or Zariaspa), was an ancient city and centre of Zoroastrianism in what is now northern Afghanistan. Today it is a small town in the province of Balkh, about 20 kilometers northwest of the provincial capital, Mazar-e Sharif, and some 74 km (46 mi) south of the Amu Darya. It was one of the major cities of Khorasan. Marco Polo described Balkh as a "noble and great city".
The ancient city of Balkh was under the Greeks renamed Bactra, giving its name to Bactria. It was mostly known as the centre and capital of Bactria or Takharistan. Balkh is now for the most part a mass of ruins, situated some 12 km from the right bank of the seasonally flowing Balkh River, at an elevation of about 365 m (1,200 ft).
Balkh is one of the oldest cities in the world and is considered to be the first city to which the Indo-Iranian tribes moved from the North of Amu Darya, between 2000 - 1500 BC. The Arabs called it Umm Al-Belaad or Mother of Cities due to its antiquity. The city was traditionally a center of Zoroastianism. The name Zariaspa, which is either an alternate name for Balkh or a term for part of the city, may derive from the important Zoroastrian fire temple Azar-i-Asp. Balkh was regarded as the first place where Zoroaster first preached his religion, as well as the place where he died.
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Banda Aceh
Banda Aceh is the provincial capital and largest city in the province of Aceh, Indonesia, located on the island of Sumatra, with an elevation of 35 meters. The city regency covers an area of 64 square kilometres and according to the 2000 census had a population of 219,070 people. Banda Aceh is located at the northwestern tip of Indonesia at the mouth of the River Krueng Aceh.
The city was originally named Kutaraja, and determined as the provincial capital in 1956. Kuta Raja means "City of the King", in reference to the founding of the Aceh Sultanate from Champa origins. Later its name was changed to Bandar Aceh Darussalam or popularly known as Bandar Aceh, with the first part of the name coming from the Persian bandar (بندر) meaning "port" or "haven". Today the city is spelled Banda Aceh with the lost of "r" in "Bandar". The city is also dubbed to as the "port to Mecca", and Aceh is also referred to as the "porch of Mecca" (Indonesian: Serambi Mekkah), since in the past during the days when the hajj pilgrims travelled by sea, the hajj pilgrim from all over Indonesian archipelago traditionally always make a stop over in the city before continuing their journey to Mecca. It is also known that earliest Southeast Asian Islamic sultanates — such as Samudra Pasai — were first established in Aceh, which means Islam first arrived in Aceh before spreading throughout Southeast Asia.
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Battle of Talas
The Battle of Talas (or Battle of Artlakh) (怛罗斯会战) (معركة نهر طلاس) in 751 AD was an especially notable conflict between the Arab Abbasid Caliphate and the Chinese Tang Dynasty, then under Emperor Xuanzong (together with various other peoples and nations associated with the geographical territory involved) for control not only of the Syr Darya region, but also a strategic area of Central Asia. The Battle of Talas marked the end of the Tang Dynasty's western expansion of their territory, this representing the furthest point of territorial expansion to the west by the Tang, or any prior or subsequent Chinese dynasties. Leading up to this battlefield showdown, the Tang army had proceeded further and further westward, in a series of military events during the course of which various cities and states were conquered or overthrown. Meanwhile, a new power had arisen in the region. Beginning with a revolt against the Umayyad Caliphate, largely centered in Khurasan, not too far from Talas, the rising Abbasid Caliphate decisively defeated the rival Umayyad Caliphate, in the Battle of the Zab, in 750, which thus freed up their armies for other purposes, one of which would be challenge the Tang expansion into the region. In July, 751, both the Tang troops and the Abbasid troops met in the valley of the Talas River, where the Tang forces were defeated. The Battle of Talas is important because of the resulting changes in the political fortunes of the rival sides, and in the region generally, not to mention the economic importance of control over this strategic region along the Silk Road. There is also a tradition that Chinese prisoners captured as the result of the battle allowed for the transference of paper-making technology to the Middle East and eventually Europe.
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Bekabad
Bekabad (Uzbek: Bekobod / Бекобод; Russian: Бекабад) is a city in Toshkent Province, Eastern Uzbekistan. The city was founded in 1945 as Begovat and was renamed Bekabad in 1964. Population: 82,082 (1989 Census). Bekabad lies along both banks of the Syr Darya River at the extreme southern tip of the region. It is an important industrial center, with a large steel mill and cement factory. The Farkhad dam (architect Karakis J.Y.) and hydroelectric plant, just upstream from Bekabad, is a major source of electricity and irrigation water for Uzbekistan.
Bekobad is a railway junction on the national railway network.
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Beruniy
Beruniy also spelled as Beruni (Uzbek: Beruniy / Беруний; Karakalpak: Biruniy / Бируний; Russian: Беруни) is a town and seat of Beruniy District in Karakalpakstan in Uzbekistan.
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Bukhara
Bukhara (Tajik: Бухоро Bukhoro, Persian: بخارا; Uzbek: Buxoro; Russian: Бухара Bukhara), from the Soghdian βuxārak ("lucky place"), is the capital of the Bukhara Province (viloyat) of Uzbekistan. The nation's fifth-largest city, it has a population of 263,400 (2009 census estimate). The region around Bukhara has been inhabited for at least five millennia, and the city has existed for half that time. Located on the Silk Road, the city has long been a center of trade, scholarship, culture, and religion. The historic center of Bukhara, which contains numerous mosques and madrassas, has been listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. Ethnic Uzbek may constitute the largest element in Bukhara, with the native Tajiks being as numerous. The city long has had a mixed population including Jews and other ethnic minorities.
Bukhara was known as Bokhara in 19th and early 20th century English publications and as Buhe/Puhe（捕喝） in Tang Chinese.
Persian-speaking Soghdians inhabited the area, and some centuries later the Persian language became dominant among them. Encyclopædia Iranica mentions that the name Bukhara is possibly derived from the Soghdian βuxārak (Place of Good Fortune).
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Bulungur District
Bulungur District is a district of Samarqand Province in Uzbekistan. The capital lies at Bulungur.
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Chimboy
Chimboy also spelled as Chimbay (Uzbek: Chimboy / Чимбой; Karakalpak: Shımbay / Шымбай; Russian: Чимбай) is a town and seat of Chimboy District in Karakalpakstan in Uzbekistan.
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China
China (i/ˈtʃaɪnə/; Chinese: 中国; pinyin: Zhōngguó; see also Names of China), officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is the world's most-populous country, with a population of over 1.3 billion. Covering approximately 9.6 million square kilometres, the East Asian state is the world's second-largest country by land area, and the third- or fourth-largest in total area, depending on the definition of total area.
The People's Republic of China is a single-party state governed by the Communist Party of China. It exercises jurisdiction over 22 provinces, five autonomous regions, four directly controlled municipalities (Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Chongqing), and two mostly self-governing special administrative regions (Hong Kong and Macau). Its capital city is Beijing. The PRC also claims Taiwan—which is controlled by the Republic of China (ROC), a separate political entity—as its 23rd province, a claim controversial due to the complex political status of Taiwan and the unresolved Chinese Civil War. The PRC government denies the legitimacy of the ROC.
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Chirchiq
Chirchiq also spelled as Chirchik (Uzbek: Chirchiq / Чирчиқ; Russian: Чирчик) is a city (1999 pop. 145,600) in Toshkent Province, Uzbekistan, about 32 km northeast of Tashkent, along the Chirciq River. Chirchiq lies in the Chatkal Mountains.
It is located at latitude 41° 28' 8N; longitude 69° 34' 56E, 582 meters above sea level.
The city was founded in 1935, when several local villages grew together as a consequence of the construction of a hydroelectric power station on the Chirchiq River.
Chirchiq is in the middle of an intensively cultivated area, producing mainly vegetables and fruits, including melons and grapes. A large electrochemical works produces fertilizer for the region's collective farms. Chirchiq's industries also include the production of ferroalloys and machinery for the agricultural and chemical industries.
Chirchiq is also a major winter recreation area in the Tashkent Province. There is a ski resort near the city, named Chimgan, that attract tourists from throughout Central Asia and Russia. A water diversion on the Chirchiq River just outside the city provides the major source of drinking water for Tashkent and other cities to the south.
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Ctesiphon
Coordinates: 33°05′37″N 44°34′50″E / 33.09361°N 44.58056°E / 33.09361; 44.58056 Ctesiphon /tɛsɨfɒn/, the imperial capital of the Parthian Arsacids and of the Persian Sassanids, was one of the great cities of ancient Mesopotamia.
The ruins of the city are located on the east bank of the Tigris, across the river from the Hellenistic city of Seleucia. Today, the remains of the city lies in Baghdad Governorate, Iraq, approximately 35 km south of the city of Baghdad.
The Latin name Ctesiphon or Ctesifon derives from Greek Ktēsiphōn (Κτησιφῶν), a Hellenized form of a local name that has been reconstructed as Tosfōn or Tosbōn. In Iranian sources of the Sassanid period it is attested in Manichean Parthian, in Sassanid Middle Persian and in Christian Sogdian as Pahlavi tyspwn, continuing in New Persian as Tisfun (تيسفون). Syriac sources mention it as ܩܛܝܣܦܘܢ Qṭēsfōn, and in medieval Arabic texts the name is usually Ṭaysafūn (طيسفون) or Qaṭaysfūn (قطيسفون), in Modern Arabic al-Mada'in (المدائن). "According to Yāqūt [...], quoting Ḥamza, the original form was Ṭūsfūn or Tūsfūn, which was arabicized as Ṭaysafūn." The Armenian name of the city was Tizbon (Տիզբոն). Ctesiphon is first mentioned in the Book of Ezra of the Old Testament as Kasfia/Casphia (a derivative of the ethnic name, Cas, and a cognate of Caspian and Qazvin).
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Derbent
Derbent (Russian: Дербе́нт; Azerbaijani: Dərbənd; Lezgian: Кьвевар; Avar: Дербенд; Lak: Чурул, Churul; Persian: دربند; Judæo-Tat: דארבּאנד/Дэрбэнд/Dərbənd) is a city in the Republic of Dagestan, Russia. It is on the Caspian Sea, north of the Azerbaijani border. It is the southernmost city in Russia, and it is the second most important city of Dagestan. Population: 119,961 (2010 Census preliminary results); 101,031 (2002 Census); 78,371 (1989 Census).
Often identified with the legendary Gates of Alexander, Derbent claims to be the oldest city in Russia (8th century BCE) . Since antiquity the value of the area as the gate to the Caucasus has been understood and Derbent has archaeological structures over 5,000 years old. As a result of this geographic particularity the city developed between two walls, stretching from the mountains to the sea. These fortifications were continuously employed for a millennium and a half, longer than any other extant fortress in the world. Over the years different nations gave the city different names, but all connected to the word 'gate'.
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Emirate of Bukhara
The Emirate of Bukhara (Persian: امارت بخارا) was a Central Asian state that existed from 1785 to 1920. It occupied the land between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, known formerly as Transoxiana. Its core territory was the land along the lower Zarafshan River, and its urban centres were the ancient cities of Samarkand and the emirate's capital, Bukhara. It was contemporaneous with the Khanate of Khiva to the west, in Khwarezm, and the Khanate of Kokand to the east, in Fergana. It is now within the boundaries of Uzbekistan.
The Emirate of Bukhara was officially created in 1785, upon the assumption of rulership by the Manghit emir, Shah Murad. Over the course of the 18th century, the emirs had slowly gained effective control of the Khanate of Bukhara, from their position as ataliq. By the 1740s, when the khanate was conquered by Nadir Shah of Persia, it was clear that the emirs held the real power. In 1747 after Nadir Shah's death, the ataliq Muhammad Rahim Bi murdered Abulfayz Khan and his son, ending the Janid dynasty. From then on the emirs allowed puppet khans to rule until, following the death of Abu l-Ghazi Khan, Shah Murad assumed the throne openly.
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Eskişehir
Eskişehir (pronounced [esˈciʃehiɾ]; Turkish: eski "old", şehir "city") (Latin: Dorylaeum; Ancient Greek: Δορύλαιον, Dorýlaion) is a city in northwestern Turkey and the capital of the Eskişehir Province. According to the 2009 census, the population of the city is 631,905. The city is located on the banks of the Porsuk River, 792 m above sea level, where it overlooks the fertile Phrygian Valley. In the nearby hills one can find hot springs. The city is 233 km (145 mi) to the west of Ankara, 330 km (205 mi) to the southeast of Istanbul and 78 km (48 mi) to the northeast of Kütahya. Known as a university town, both Eskişehir Osmangazi University and Anadolu University (which has one of the largest student enrollments in the world) are based in Eskişehir. The province covers an area of 2,678 km2 (1,034 sq mi).
The name Eskişehir literally means Old City in Turkish; indeed, the city was founded by the Phrygians in about 1000 BOT. Many Phrygian artifacts and sculptures can still be found in the city's archeological museum. There is also a museum of meerschaum stone, whose production remains still notable, used to make high quality meerschaum pipes. In the fourth century AD the city moved about ten km northeast, from Karacahisar to Şehirhöyük.
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Fergana
Coordinates: 40°23′11″N 71°47′11″E / 40.38639°N 71.78639°E / 40.38639; 71.78639 Fergana (Uzbek: Farg'ona/Фарғона; Persian: فرغانه Farghāneh; Russian: Фергана́) is a city (population: 214,000), the capital of Fergana Province in eastern Uzbekistan, at the southern edge of the Fergana Valley in southern Central Asia, cutting across the borders of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Fergana is about 420 km east of Tashkent, and about 75 km west of Andijan.
The fertile Fergana Valley was an important conduit on the Silk Roads (more precisely the North Silk Road), which connected the ancient Chinese capital of Xi'an to the west over the Wushao Ling Mountain Pass to Wuwei and emerging in Kashgar before linking to ancient Parthia, or on to the north of the Aral and Caspian Seas to ports on the Black Sea.
The ancient kingdom referred to as Dayuan (大宛, "Great Yuan", literally "Great Ionians") in the Chinese chronicles is now generally accepted as being in the Ferghana Valley. It is sometimes, though less commonly, written as Dawan (大宛). Dayuan were Greeks, the descendants of the Greek colonists that were settled by Alexander the Great in Ferghana in 329 BCE, and prospered within the Hellenistic realm of the Seleucids and Greco-Bactrians, until they were isolated by the migrations of the Yuezhi around 160 BCE. It has been suggested that the name "Yuan" was simply a transliteration of the words “Yona”, or “Yavana”, used throughout antiquity in Asia to designate Greeks (“Ionians”). Their capital was Alexandria Eschate.
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Gijduvan
Gijduvan or Gizhduvan (Uzbek: G'ijduvon / Ғиждувон; Russian: Гиждуван) is a town in the Bukhara Province of Uzbekistan and the capital of Gizhduvan district (raion). Its population in 1970 was 16,000.
One of the three madrasahs built by Ulugh Beg is in Gijduvan (the others are in Samarkand and Bukhara). The tomb and memorial of a prominent Central Asian philosopher Abduholik Gijduvoni is also located in Gijduvan.
Historically, Gijduvan is used to be an educational, religious, and cultural center for Gijduvan and the province. However, starting from 1930's the population became increasingly secular and today the religion plays a very minor role in everyday life. Modern Gijduvan is a commercial center for not only Gijduvan raion but also for neighboring areas.
Gijduvan is famous for its local cuisine and is considered to have the best fish frying and shashlik making techniques. Shashlik is beef or lamb marinated overnight and grilled on skewers. Many other restaurants in the country, including those in the capital Tashkent copy Gijduvan's fish frying technique. The main difference is that in Gijduvan cooks de-bone the fish before frying while in the rest of the country fish is not de-boned.
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Guliston
Guliston also spelled as Gulistan (Uzbek: Guliston / Гулистoн; Russian: Гулистан), formerly known as Mirzachul (Russian: Мирзачуль, until 1961), is the capital of Sirdarya Province in eastern Uzbekistan. It lies in the southeastern part of the Mirzachül (formerly Golodnaya) steppe, 75 miles (120 km) southwest of Tashkent. It has an approx. population of 77,300. The main industry in the area is cottonpicking.
Population in:
Source: [1]
Guliston. (2007). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved September 28, 2007, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online: http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9038486
Coordinates: 40°29′N 68°47′E / 40.483°N 68.783°E / 40.483; 68.783
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Herat
Herāt (Persian / Pashto: هرات) is the capital of Herat province in Afghanistan. It is the third largest city of Afghanistan, with a population of about 397,456 as of 2006. It is situated in the valley of the Hari River, which flows from the mountains of central Afghanistan to the Karakum Desert in Turkmenistan. The city is linked with Kandahar and Mazar-e-Sharif via highway 1 or the ring road that stretches across the country. It is also linked to the city of Mashad in Iran through the border town of Islam Qala.
Situated in a fertile area, Herāt dates back to the Avestan times and was traditionally known for its wine. The city has a number of historic sites, including the Citadel of Alexander and the Mosallah Complex. During the Middle Ages Herāt became one of the important cities of Khorasan, as it was known as the pearl of Khorasan. It was made independent in 1717 from the Safavid dynasty by the Afghans until 1736 when the Hotaki dynasty was defeated by the Afsharids, which finally became part of the Durrani Empire in 1747. It saw some actions during the 19th century Anglo-Afghan wars. Much of the city has been spared from destructions that occurred in other cities of Afghanistan during the 1978-present wars.
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India
India (i/ˈɪndiə/), officially the Republic of India (Bhārat Gaṇarājya), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the south-west, and the Bay of Bengal on the south-east, it shares land borders with Pakistan to the west;China, Nepal, and Bhutan to the north-east; and Burma and Bangladesh to the east. In the Indian Ocean, India is in the vicinity of Sri Lanka and the Maldives; in addition, India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands share a maritime border with Thailand and Indonesia.
Home to the ancient Indus Valley Civilisation and a region of historic trade routes and vast empires, the Indian subcontinent was identified with its commercial and cultural wealth for much of its long history. Four of the world's major religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism—originated here, whereas Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam arrived in the 1st millennium CE and also helped shape the region's diverse culture. Gradually annexed by and brought under the administration of the British East India Company from the early 18th century and administered directly by the United Kingdom from the mid-19th century, India became an independent nation in 1947 after a struggle for independence that was marked by non-violent resistance led by Mahatma Gandhi.
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Indonesia
Indonesia (i/ˌɪndəˈniːʒə/ IN-də-NEE-zhə or /ˌɪndoʊˈniːziə/ IN-doh-NEE-zee-ə), officially the Republic of Indonesia (Indonesian: Republik Indonesia Indonesian pronunciation: [rɛpʊblɪk ɪndɔnɛsɪa]), is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is an archipelago comprising approximately 17,508 islands. It has 33 provinces with over 238 million people, and is the world's fourth most populous country. Indonesia is a republic, with an elected legislature and president. The nation's capital city is Jakarta. The country shares land borders with Papua New Guinea, East Timor, and Malaysia. Other neighboring countries include Singapore, Philippines, Australia, and the Indian territory of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Indonesia is a founding member of ASEAN and a member of the G-20 major economies. The Indonesian economy is the world's 17th largest economy by nominal GDP.
The Indonesian archipelago has been an important trade region since at least the 7th century, when Srivijaya and then later Majapahit traded with China and India. Local rulers gradually absorbed foreign cultural, religious and political models from the early centuries CE, and Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms flourished. Indonesian history has been influenced by foreign powers drawn to its natural resources. Muslim traders brought Islam, and European powers brought Christianity and fought one another to monopolize trade in the Spice Islands of Maluku during the Age of Discovery. Following three and a half centuries of Dutch colonialism, Indonesia secured its independence after World War II. Indonesia's history has since been turbulent, with challenges posed by natural disasters, corruption, separatism, a democratization process, and periods of rapid economic change.
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Iran
Coordinates: 32°N 53°E / 32°N 53°E / 32; 53
Iran (i/ɪˈrɑːn/ or /aɪˈræn/;Persian: ایران [ʔiˈɾɒn] (
listen)), officially the Islamic Republic of Iran (Persian: جمهوری اسلامی ایران Jomhuri-ye Eslāmi-ye Irān), is a country in Southern and Western Asia. The name "Iran", which in Persian means "Land of the Aryans", has been in use natively since the Sassanian era. It came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was known to the Western world as Persia ( /ˈpɜrʒə/ or /ˈpɜrʃə/). Both "Persia" and "Iran" are used interchangeably in cultural contexts; however, "Iran" is the name used officially in political contexts.
The 18th-largest country in the world in terms of area at 1,648,195 km2 (636,372 sq mi), Iran has a population of around 79 million. It is a country of particular geopolitical significance owing to its location in the Middle East and central Eurasia. Iran is bordered on the north by Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan. As Iran is a littoral state of the Caspian Sea, which is an inland sea, Kazakhstan and Russia are also Iran's direct neighbors to the north. Iran is bordered on the east by Afghanistan and Pakistan, on the south by the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, on the west by Iraq and on the northwest by Turkey. Tehran is the capital, the country's largest city and the political, cultural, commercial and industrial center of the nation. Iran is a regional power, and holds an important position in international energy security and world economy as a result of its large reserves of petroleum and natural gas. Iran has the second largest proven natural gas reserves in the world and the fourth largest proven petroleum reserves.
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Isfahan
Isfahan (Persian: اصفهان Esfahān), historically also rendered in English as Ispahan, Sepahan or Hispahan, is the capital of Isfahan Province in Iran, located about 340 km south of Tehran. It has a population of 1,583,609 and is Iran's third largest city after Tehran and Mashhad. The Isfahan metropolitan area had a population of 3,430,353 in the 2006 Census, the second most populous metropolitan area in Iran after Tehran.
The cities of Zarrinshahr, Fooladshahr and Najafabad, Se-deh , Shahin-shahr, Mobarakeh, Falavarjan and chiarmahin all constitute the metropolitan city of Isfahan.
Isfahan is located on the main north-south and east-west routes crossing Iran, and was once one of the largest cities in the world. It flourished from 1050 to 1722, particularly in the 16th century under the Safavid dynasty, when it became the capital of Persia for the second time in its history. Even today, the city retains much of its past glory. It is famous for its Islamic architecture, with many beautiful boulevards, covered bridges, palaces, mosques, and minarets. This led to the Persian proverb "'Esfahān nesf-e jahān ast" (Isfahan is half of the world).
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Ishtikhon District
Ishtikhon District is a district of Samarqand Province in Uzbekistan. The capital lies at Ishtikhon.
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Istanbul
Istanbul (Turkish: İstanbul) is the largest city in Turkey, forming the country's economic, cultural, and historical heart. With a population of 13.4 million, the city is at the center of the second-largest urban area in Europe after Moscow, and among the world's largest cities by population within city limits. Istanbul's vast area of 5,343 square kilometers (2,063 sq mi) is coterminous with Istanbul Province, of which the city is considered capital. Straddling the Bosphorus—one of the world's busiest waterways—in northwestern Turkey, between the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea, Istanbul is a transcontinental city, with one third of its population living in Asia but its commercial and historical center in Europe.
Founded around 660 BC as Byzantium on the Seraglio Point, the city now known as Istanbul developed to become one of the most significant cities in history. For nearly sixteen centuries following its reestablishment as Constantinople in 330 AD, it served as the capital of four empires — the late classical Roman Empire (330–395), the Eastern Roman ("Byzantine") Empire (395–1204 and 1261–1453), the Latin Empire (1204–1261), and the Ottoman Empire (1453–1922). It was instrumental in the advancement of Christianity during Roman and Byzantine times, before the Ottomans conquered the city in 1453 and transformed it into an Islamic stronghold from which the last caliphate ruled. Although the Republic of Turkey established its capital elsewhere, in Ankara, remnants of Istanbul's previous central role still remain highly visible across the city, with palaces and imperial mosques lining its hills.
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İzmir
Coordinates: 38°25′19″N 27°07′44″E / 38.422°N 27.129°E / 38.422; 27.129
Izmir (Turkish: İzmir) is a large metropolis in the western extremity of Anatolia. The metropolitan area in the entire Izmir Province had a population of 3.95 million as of 2010, making the city third most populous in Turkey. Izmir metropolitan area extends along the outlying waters of the Gulf of İzmir and inland to the north across Gediz River's delta, to the east along an alluvial plain created by several small streams and to a slightly more rugged terrain in the south. The ancient city was known as Smyrna, and the city was generally referred to as Smyrna in English, until the Turkish Postal Services Law of 1930 made "Izmir" the internationally recognized name.
The city of Izmir is composed of several metropolitan districts. Of these, Konak district corresponds to historical Izmir, this district's area having constituted the "Izmir Municipality" (Turkish: İzmir Belediyesi) area until 1984, Konak until then having been a name for a central neighborhood around Konak Square, still the core of the city. With the constitution of the "Greater Izmir Metropolitan Municipality" (Turkish: İzmir Büyükşehir Belediyesi), the city of Izmir became a compound bringing together initially nine, and since recently eleven metropolitan districts, namely Balçova, Bayraklı, Bornova, Buca, Çiğli, Gaziemir, Güzelbahçe, Karabağlar, Karşıyaka, Konak and Narlıdere. Almost each of these settlements are former district centers or neighborhoods which stood on their own and with their own distinct features and temperament. In an ongoing processus, the Mayor of Izmir was also vested with authority over the areas of additional districts reaching from Aliağa in the north to Selçuk in the south, bringing the number of districts to be considered as being part of Izmir to twenty-one under the new arrangements, two of these having been administratively included in Izmir only partially.
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Jizzakh
Jizzakh (Uzbek: Jizzax / Жиззах; Russian: Джизак) is a city (population 138,400 in 2004) and the center of Jizzakh Province in Uzbekistan, northeast of Samarkand.
Jizzakh was an important Silk Road junction on the road connecting Samarkand with Fergana Valley. It is at the edge of Golodnaya Steppe, and next to the strategic Pass of Jilanuti (Timur's Gate) in the Turkestan Mountains, controlling the approach to the Zeravshan Valley, Samarkand and Bukhara.
The name Jizzakh derives from the Sogdian word for "small fort" and the present city is built of the site of the Sogdian town of Osrūshana. After the Arab conquest of Sogdiana, Jizzakh served as a market town between the nomadic raiders and settled farmers. The Arabs built a series of rabats (blockhouses) at Jizzakh, housing ghazis to protect the people. By the 19th century, these blockhouses had evolved into a major fortress for the Emirate of Bukhara. Russian General Mikhail Chernyayev, the “Lion of Tashkent” failed in his first attempt to take Jizzakh, but succeed in his second try, with a loss of 6 men, against 6000 dead for the defenders. The old town was mostly destroyed, its remaining inhabitants evicted, and Russian settlers brought in.
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Jomboy District
Jomboy District is a district of Samarqand Province in Uzbekistan. The capital lies at Jomboy.
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Kairouan
Kairouan (Arabic: القيروان Al Qairawān), also known as Kirwan or al-Qayrawan, is the capital of the Kairouan Governorate in Tunisia. Referred to as the Islamic Cultural Capital, it is a UNESCO World Heritage site. The city was founded by the nomads of Tunisia around 200 to 250 BC and soon Romans occupied it and built a huge Claussium which is still standing and is one of the most complete of its kind around the Mediterranean sea, The word Qir is in fact Persian and means Bitumen which at those days used to be a center for import and export of this material for ship making and has nothing to do with Caravan. Arabs later on demolished the central temple and made a mosque instead. Some of the stones are still visible with Roman alphabets hacked on them. Arabs around 670. In the period[citation needed] of Caliph Mu'awiya (reigned 661-680), it became an important centre for Islamic and Quranic learning, and thus attracting a large number of Muslims from various parts of the world, next only to Mecca and Medina. The holy Mosque of Uqba is situated in the city. It is considered by many Muslims to be Islam's fourth holiest city.
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Kashan
Kashan (Persian: کاشان, also Romanized as Kāshān and Kachan) is a city in and the capital of Kashan County, in the province of Isfahan, Iran. At the 2006 census, its population was 248,789, in 67,464 families.
The etymology of the city name comes from Kasian, the original inhabitants of the city, whose remains are found at Tapeh Sialk dating back 9,000 years; later this changed to Kashian, whence the town name.[citation needed] Between the 12th and the 14th centuries Kashan was an important centre for the production of high quality pottery and tiles. In modern Persian, the word for a tile (kashi) comes from the name of the town.
Archeological discoveries in the Sialk Hillocks which lie 4 km west of Kashan reveal that this region was one of the primary centers of civilization in pre-historic ages. Hence Kashan dates back to the Elamite period of Iran. The Sialk ziggurat still stands today in the suburbs of Kashan after 7000 years.
The artifacts uncovered at Sialk reside in the Louvre in Paris and the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Iran's National Museum.
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Kattakurgan District
Kattakurgan District is a district of Samarqand Province in Uzbekistan. The capital lies at Paishanba.
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Khiva
Khiva (Uzbek: Xiva / Хива; Persian: خیوه / Khiveh; Russian: Хива; alternative or historical names include Khorasam, Khoresm, Khwarezm, Khwarizm, Khwarazm, Chorezm, and Persian: خوارزم) is a city of approximately 50,000 people located in Xorazm Province, Uzbekistan. It is the former capital of Khwarezmia and the Khanate of Khiva. Itchan Kala in Khiva was the first site in Uzbekistan to be inscribed in the World Heritage List (1991).
In the early part of its history, the inhabitants of the area were from Iranian stock and spoke an Eastern Iranian language called Khwarezmian. Subsequently the Iranic ruling class was replaced by Turks in the 10th century A.D, and the region gradually tuned into an area with a majority of Turkic speakers.
The city of Khiva was first recorded by Muslim travellers in the 10th century, although archaeologists assert that the city has existed since the 6th century. By the early 17th century, Khiva had become the capital of the Khanate of Khiva, ruled by a branch of the Astrakhans, a Genghisid dynasty.
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Khujand
Khujand (Tajik: Хуҷанд,خجند) (Greek: Alexandria Eschate (Ἀλεξάνδρεια Ἐσχάτη)), also transliterated as Khudzhand, Russian: Худжанд, formerly Khodjend or Khodzhent until 1936 and Leninabad (Leninobod, Ленинобод, لنینآباد) until 1991, is the second-largest city of Tajikistan. It is situated on the Syr Darya River at the mouth of the Fergana Valley. The population of the city is 149,000 (2000 census), down from 160,000 in 1989. It is also the capital of the northernmost province of Tajikistan, now called Sughd.
The population in the city and the countryside around it, are heavily Persian speaking. Except for the towns of [Kasan] and Akhsikat in the Uzbek northeastern Fergana Valley, and the town of Baghistan, northeast of Tashkent, city of Khujand is the most northerly Persian-speaking city in the world.
This is the site of Cyropolis, or the City of Cyrus. In his last expedition against the Saka tribe of Massagetae and shortly before his death in that battle, king Cyrus the Great the founder of the Persian Empire founded a city here which he named after himself. Greek authors maintain that later in time, Alexander of Macedon built a Greek settlement near Cyropolis (Khujand) in 329 BC and named it Alexandria Eschate (Ἀλεξάνδρεια Ἐσχάτη) or "Alexandria The Furthest". It would have formed a bastion for the Greek settlers against the Scythian tribes to the north of the Syr Darya, which the Greeks called the Jaxartes River. It became a major staging point on the northern Silk Road. Some famous Persian poets and scientists come from this city. Khujand is an integral part of the Iranic world and culture.
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Kokand
Kokand (Uzbek: Qo‘qon / Қўқон; Tajik: Хӯқанд; Persian: خوقند; Chagatai: خوقند; Russian: Коканд) is a city in Fergana Province in eastern Uzbekistan, at the southwestern edge of the Fergana Valley. It has a population of 192,500 (1999 census estimate). Kokand is 228 km (142 mi) southeast of Tashkent, 115 km (71 mi) west of Andijan, and 88 km (55 mi) west of Fergana. It is nicknamed “City of Winds”, or sometimes “Town of the Boar".
Kokand is on the crossroads of the ancient trade routes, at the junction of two main routes into the Fergana Valley, one leading northwest over the mountains to Tashkent, and the other west through Khujand. As a result, Kokand is the main transportation junction in the Fergana Valley.
Kokand has existed since at least the 10th century, under the name of Khavakend and was frequently mentioned in traveler’s accounts of the caravan route between India and China. The Mongols destroyed Kokand in the 13th century.
The present city began as a fort in 1732 on the site of another older fortress called Eski-Kurgan. In 1740, it became the capital of an Uzbek kingdom, the Khanate of Kokand, which reached as far as Kyzylorda to the west and Bishkek to the northeast. Kokand was also the major religious center of the Fergana Valley, boasting more than 300 mosques.
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Koshrabot District
Koshrabot District is a district of Samarqand Province in Uzbekistan. The capital lies at Koshrabot.
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Kosonsoy
Kosonsoy also spelled as Kasansay (Uzbek: Kosonsoy / Кoсoнсoй; Tajik: Кoсoнсoй; Russian: Касансай) is a town in Uzbekistan. Kosonsoy in Namangan Province is different from the town of Koson of the Qashqadaryo Province of Uzbekistan. Kosonsoy is named after the River "Koson" which flows from high mountains of Kyrgyzstan to Turakurgan District of Namangan Province of Uzbekistan, the word "soy" in Tajik means "small river".
Kosonsoy is an ancient place, its first settlements date back to times of Kushan Empire. The word "koson" came out from the word Kushan. Kosonsoy was an essential part of Kushan Empire together with ancient city Akhsikent, near Namangan city. There are still remains of ancient Mug Castle of Kushanids in the north part of the city But in other books were written that the "Koson" means "Big town","strong castle".
Kosonsoy has a population about 43,684 inhabitants. The centre of district is town of Kosonsoy. The majority of population in Kosonsoy are ethnic Tajiks.
There are five Secondary Special Education Colleges (SSEC) and one Academic Lyceum in Kosonsoy. SSECs include medical College, pedagogical College, transport and communication College, Technical college and few others. There are about 46 secondary schools in Kosonsoy,two or three of them are Tajik schools and one Russian and Uzbek school.
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Lahore
Lahore (Punjabi: لہور, Urdu: لاہور) is the capital of the Pakistani province of Punjab and the second largest city in the country. With a rich history dating back over a millennium, Lahore is a main cultural centre of Pakistan. One of the most densely populated cities in the world, Lahore remains an economic, political, transportation, entertainment, and educational hub.
Lahore successively served as regional capital of the empires of the Shahi kingdoms in the 11th century, the Ghaznavids in the 12th century, the Ghurid State in the 12th and 13th centuries the Mughal Empire in the 16th century, the Sikh expansion in the early 19th century, and it was the capital of the Punjab region under the British Raj in the mid 19th and early 20th century. The traditional capital of Punjab for a thousand years, Lahore was the cultural center of the northern Indian subcontinent which extends from the eastern banks of the Indus River to New Delhi. Mughal structures such as the Badshahi Mosque, the Lahore Fort, Shalimar Gardens, and the mausolea of Jehangir and Nur Jehan are tourist attractions. Lahore is also home to many British colonial structures built in the Indo-Saracenic style, such as the Lahore High Court, the General Post Office, Lahore Museum and many older universities including the University of the Punjab. The Lahore Zoo, thought to be the fourth oldest in the world, is also situated here.
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Lviv
Lviv (Ukrainian: Львів L’viv, IPA: [lʲwiu̯] ( listen); Polish: Lwów, pronounced [lvuf]; Russian: Львов, L'vov; German: Lemberg and Yiddish Lemberg, לעמבערג; Latin: Leopolis; see also other names) is a city in western Ukraine. The city is regarded as one of the main cultural centres of today's Ukraine and historically had also been a major Polish and Jewish cultural center; as Poles and Jews comprised a demographic majority of the city for a period leading up to the outbreak of World War II, the Holocaust, and Polish population transfers (1944–1946) that followed. The historical heart of Lviv with its old buildings and cobblestone roads has survived World War II and ensuing Soviet presence largely unscathed. The city has many industries and institutions of higher education such as the Lviv University and the Lviv Polytechnic. Lviv is also a home to many world-class cultural institutions, including a philharmonic orchestra and the famous Lviv Theatre of Opera and Ballet. The historic city centre is on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Lviv celebrated its 750th anniversary with a son et lumière in the city centre in September 2006.
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Margilan
Margilan (Uzbek: Marg‘ilon / Марғилон; Russian: Маргилан) is a city (2009 pop 197,000) in Fergana Province in eastern Uzbekistan. It is located at latitude 40°28' 16 N: longitude 71°43' 29 E. at an altitude of 487 meters.
According to European legend, Margilan was founded by Alexander the Great. On a lunch stop, he was given chicken (murgh; in Persian مرغ) and bread (nan; in Persian نان), from which the town took its name. More reliable records indicate that Margilan was an important stop on the Silk Road by the 9th century AD, along the route going across the Alay Mountains to Kashgar.
Writing in the early 16th century, the founder of the Mughal dynasty, Babur, mentioned that “the pomegranates and apricots are superb .... the game in Margilan is good; white deer may be found nearby. The people are Sarts. They are a feisty people, ready with their fists. The custom of exorcism is widespread throughout Transoxiana, and most of the renowned exorcists of Samarkand and Bukhara are Margilanis. The author of the Hidaya (Burhan ud-din Ali ben Abu Bakr al-Marghilani) was from a Margilan village called Rishtan”. . This reputation for toughness extends to modern times. Margilan merchants were key players in Central Asian commerce, and were said to be a law unto themselves during Soviet days, when Margilan was the heart of Uzbekistan’s black market. Margilan today is also a stronghold of conservative Islam.
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Mashhad
Mashhad (Persian: مشهد) is the second largest city in Iran and one of the holiest cities in the Shia Muslim world. It is also the only major Iranian city with an Arabic name. It is located 850 kilometres (530 mi) east of Tehran, at the center of the Razavi Khorasan Province close to the borders of Afghanistan and Turkmenistan. Its population was 2,427,316 at the 2006 population census. It was a major oasis along the ancient Silk Road connecting with Merv in the East.
Now Mashhad is notably known as the resting place of the Imam Reza. A shrine was later built there to commemorate the Imam, which in turn gave rise to increasing demographic development.
Mashhad is also known as the city of Ferdowsi, the Iranian poet of Shahnameh, which is considered to be the national epic of Iran.
The city is located at 36.20º North latitude and 59.35º East longitude, in the valley of the Kashaf River near Turkmenistan, between the two mountain ranges of Binalood and Hezar-masjed. The city benefits from the proximity of the mountains, having cool winters, pleasant springs, mild summers, and beautiful autumns. It is only about 250 km (160 mi) from Ashgabat, Turkmenistan.
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Merv
Merv (Persian: مرو, Marv), formerly Achaemenid Satrapy of Margiana, and later Alexandria and Antiochia in Margiana (Greek: Αντιόχεια της Μαργιανής), was a major oasis-city in Central Asia, on the historical Silk Road, located near today's Mary in Turkmenistan. Several cities have existed on this site, which is significant for the interchange of culture and politics at a site of major strategic value. It is claimed that Merv was briefly the largest city in the world in the 12th century. The site of ancient Merv has been listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. (See List of World Heritage Sites in Turkmenistan)
Merv's origins are prehistoric: archaeological surveys have revealed many survivals of village life as far back as the 3rd millennium BC. Under the name of Mouru, Merv is mentioned with Bakhdi (Balkh) in the geography of the Zend-Avesta (commentaries on the Avesta). Under the Achaemenid dynasty Merv is mentioned as being a place of some importance: under the name of Margu it occurs as part of one of the satrapies in the Behistun inscriptions (ca 515 BC) of the Persian monarch Darius Hystaspis. The ancient city appears to have been re-founded by Cyrus the Great (559 - 530 BC), but the Achaemenid levels are deeply covered by later strata at the site. (See also Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex.)
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Namangan
Namangan (Uzbek: Namangan / Наманган; Russian: Наманган) is the third-largest city in Uzbekistan (2011 pop. 449,200.). It is the capital of Namangan Province, in the northern edge of Fergana Valley of north-eastern Uzbekistan.
Namangan is about 300 km east of Tashkent, about 65 km west of Andijan, and about 75 km north of Fergana. It is located 1561 feet (476 meters) above sea level. The Qoradaryo and Naryn Rivers join together to form the Syr Darya just outside the southern edge of the city.
Namangan was originally a settlement of the native Uyghur Turkish[citation needed] population of central Asia.[citation needed] After the destructive earthquake in Akhsikanth city, the population of the city moved to Namangan.
Namangan was part of the Uyghur Empire, the Karakhanid State and was known to have been a settlement in the 15th century and a part of the Khanate of Kokand by the middle of the 18th century. It takes its name from the local salt mines (in Persian: نمککان namak kan).[citation needed] At the time of the Russian occupation, Namangan was a center of Islamic learning, with 20 madrassahs and over 600 mosques.[citation needed] After annexation by the Russians in 1876, cotton production and food processing became the dominant economic activity. Namangan suffered a destructive earthquake in 1926. The primary language of the people of the Namangan region is Uzbek; Tajik is spoken partially in Chust and Kasan-sai districts.
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Narpay District
Narpay District is a district of Samarqand Province in Uzbekistan. The capital lies at Oqtosh.
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Navoiy
Navoiy also spelled as Navoi (Uzbek: Navoiy / Навоий; Russian: Навои) is a city (pop 125,800 in 2007) and the capital of Navoiy Province in the southwestern part of Uzbekistan. It is located at latitude 40° 5' 4N; longitude 65° 22' 45E, at an altitude of 382 meters. The city is named after Ali-Shir Nava'i.
Originally known as Kermine ("Karmana") under the Emirate of Bukhara, the city was re-founded in 1958, under the name of the great Uzbek poet and statesman Alisher Navoi, who wrote in Persian and Chaghatai at the court of Emir Husein Boykara (or Husayn Bayqaro) in Herat.
Navoiy Region has large stocks of natural gas and deposits of precious metals, as well as large stocks of raw materials for production of construction materials. Among these enterprises are Navoi and Zarafshan Gold Mining and Metallurgical Complexes, which extract one of the purest gold in the world. The enterprise NavoiyAzot is the largest producer of mineral fertilizers in the country.
Navoiy Free Industrial Economic Zone (FIEZ)
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Nishapur
Nishapur or Nishabur (Persian: نیشاپور, also Romanized as Nīshāpūr, Nīshābūr, and Neyshābūr), is a city in the Razavi Khorasan province in northeastern Iran, situated in a fertile plain at the foot of the Binalud Mountains, near the regional capital of Mashhad. Nishapur derived its name from its alleged founder, the Sasanian king Shapur.
The region's economy is largely agricultural, based on grain and cotton, and it is also the second industrial city in Khorasan, and it is one of the most prosperous localities in Iran, although somewhat blighted by drug smuggling from nearby Afghanistan. It had a population of 205,972 people according to 2006 census. The main east-west railway line through Iran passes through the town. The region is very prone to earthquakes, with the most recent significant ones occurring in 1986 and 1997.
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Nukus
Nukus (Uzbek: Nukus / Нукус; Karakalpak: No‘kis / Нөкис; Russian: Нукус) is the sixth-largest city in Uzbekistan, and the capital of the autonomous Karakalpakstan Republic. It has a population of 260,000 (2004 estimate). The Amu Darya river passes west of the town.
The city is best known for its world-class Nukus Museum of Art.
Nukus developed from a small settlement in 1932 into a large, modern Soviet city with broad avenues and big public buildings by the 1950s. The city's isolation made it host to the Red Army's Chemical Research Institute, a major research and testing center for Chemical Weapons.
With the fall of the Soviet Union and the growing environmental disaster of the Aral Sea, the city's situation has deteriorated. Contamination of the region by wind-borne salt and pesticides from the dry Aral Sea bed have turned the surrounding area into a wasteland, with very high rates of respiratory disorders, cancer, birth defects and deformities.
Nukus is host to the Nukus Museum of Art (also known as the State Art Museum of the Republic of Karakalpakstan, named after Igor V. Savitsky) and State Museum. The State Museum houses the usual collection of artifacts recovered from archaeological investigations, traditional jewelry, costumes and musical instruments, but more interestingly, displays of the area's now vanished or endangered flora and fauna, and on the Aral Sea issue. The Art Museum is noted for its collection of modern Russian and Uzbek art from 1918-1935. Stalin tried his best to eliminate all non Soviet art from this period, and sent most of the artists to the gulag. Both Savitsky himself and the collection at Nukus survived because of the city's remoteness. The documentary film The Desert of Forbidden Art is all about the collection and its history.
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Olmaliq
Olmaliq also spelled as Almalyk (Uzbek: Olmaliq / Олмалиқ; Russian: Алмалык) is a city (2004 pop est 138,000) in the Tashkent Province of central Uzbekistan, approximately 65 km east of Tashkent. It is located at latitude 40° 50' 41N; longitude 69° 35' 54E; at an altitude of 585 meters.
Almalyk is a company town developed by the Soviet Union in the 1930s, to exploit local reserves of copper, lead, zinc, gold, silver and barite. The town contains several enormous smelting facilities and related industries operated today by JSC Almalyk MMC, one of the largest mining-metallurgical enterprises in Uzbekistan.
The smelter operations have extensively contaminated Almalyk, which is considered one of the most polluted places on earth. The air has high concentrations of sulphuric acid fumes and the ground has hundreds of tons of toxic waste. The Uzbek government has resisted calls to close the plant, arguing that the country's economy cannot afford to do so: The plant employs around 25,000 residents of the city, and accounts for a substantial share of the region's economy. However, in January 2005 the government announced plans to clean up the area, with a target of 2010.
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Oqdarya District
Oqdarya District is a district of Samarqand Province in Uzbekistan. The capital lies at Laish.
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Pakhtachi District
Pakhtachi District is a district of Samarqand Province in Uzbekistan. The capital lies at Ziadin.
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Pakistan
Pakistan (
i/ˈpækɨstæn/ or i/pɑːkiˈstɑːn/; Urdu: پاکستان) (Urdu pronunciation: [paːkɪˈst̪aːn] (
listen)), officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan (Urdu: اسلامی جمہوریۂ پاکستان), is a sovereign country in South Asia. It sits at the crossroads of the strategically important regions of South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. It has a 1,046-kilometre (650 mi) coastline along the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman in the south and is bordered by India to the east, Afghanistan to the west and north, Iran to the southwest and China in the far northeast. It is separated from Tajikistan by Afghanistan's narrow Wakhan Corridor in the north, and it shares a marine border with Oman.
The territory of modern Pakistan was the site of several ancient cultures, including the Neolithic Mehrgarh and the Bronze Age Indus Valley Civilisation, and has undergone invasions or settlements by Hindu, Persian, Indo-Greek, Islamic, Turco-Mongol, Afghan and Sikh cultures. Thus the area has been ruled by numerous empires and dynasties, including the Indian Mauryan Empire, the Persian Achaemenid Empire, the Arab Umayyad Caliphate, the Mongol Empire, the Mughal Empire, the Durrani Empire, the Sikh Empire and the British Empire. As a result of the Pakistan Movement led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah and India's struggle for independence, Pakistan was created in 1947 as an independent nation for Muslims from the regions in the east and west of India where there was a Muslim majority. Initially a dominion, Pakistan adopted a new constitution in 1956, becoming an Islamic republic. A civil war in 1971 resulted in the secession of East Pakistan as the new country of Bangladesh.
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Pastdargom District
Pastdargom District is a district of Samarqand Province in Uzbekistan. The capital lies at Juma.
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Payariq District
Payariq District is a district of Samarqand Province in Uzbekistan. The capital lies at Payariq.
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Persepolis
Persepolis (Old Persian تخت جمشید Pārsa, Takht-e Jamshid or Chehel Minar) was the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire (ca. 550-330 BCE). Persepolis is situated 70 km northeast of the modern city of Shiraz in the Fars Province of modern Iran. In contemporary Persian, the site is known as Takht-e Jamshid (Throne of Jamshid). The earliest remains of Persepolis date from around 515 BCE. To the ancient Persians, the city was known as Pārsa, which means "The City of Persians". Persepolis is a transliteration of the Greek Πέρσης πόλις (Persēs polis: "Persian city").
UNESCO declared the citadel of Persepolis a World Heritage Site in 1979.
Archaeological evidence shows that the earliest remains of Persepolis date from around 515 BC. André Godard, the French archaeologist who excavated Persepolis in the early 1930s, believed that it was Cyrus the Great (Kūrosh) who chose the site of Persepolis, but that it was Darius the Great (Daryush) who built the terrace and the great palaces.
Darius ordered the construction of the Apadana Palace and the Council Hall (the Tripylon or three-gated hall), the main imperial Treasury and its surroundings. These were completed during the reign of his son, King Xerxes the Great (Khashayar). Further construction of the buildings on the terrace continued until the downfall of the Achaemenid dynasty.
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Persian gardens
The tradition and style in the garden design of Persian gardens (Persian باغ ایرانی) has influenced the design of gardens from Andalusia to India and beyond. The gardens of the Alhambra show the influence of Persian Garden philosophy and style in a Moorish Palace scale from the era of Al-Andalus in Spain. The Taj Mahal is one of the largest Persian Garden interpretations in the world, from the era of the Mughal Empire in India.
From the time of the Achaemenid Dynasty the idea of an earthly paradise spread through Persian literature and example to other cultures, both the Hellenistic gardens of the Seleucids and the Ptolemies in Alexandria. The Avestan word pairidaēza-, Old Persian *paridaida-, Median *paridaiza- (walled-around, i.e., a walled garden), was borrowed into Greek in the form Ancient Greek: παράδεισος parádeisos, then rendered into the Latin paradīsus, and from there entered into European languages, e.g., French paradis, German Paradies, and English paradise. The word entered Semitic languages as well: Akkadian pardesu, Hebrew pardes, and Arabic firdaws.
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Peru
Perui/pəˈruː/ (Spanish: Perú; Quechua: Perú;Aymara: Piruw), officially the Republic of Peru (Spanish: República del Perú, pronounced: [reˈpuβlika ðel peˈɾu] ( listen)), is a country in western South America. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the south by Chile, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean.
Peruvian territory was home to ancient cultures, spanning from the Norte Chico civilization, one of the oldest in the world, to the Inca Empire, the largest state in Pre-Columbian America. The Spanish Empire conquered the region in the 16th century and established a Viceroyalty, which included most of its South American colonies. After achieving independence in 1821, Peru has undergone periods of political unrest and fiscal crisis as well as periods of stability and economic upswing.
Peru is a representative democratic republic divided into 25 regions. Its geography varies from the arid plains of the Pacific coast to the peaks of the Andes Mountains and the tropical forests of the Amazon Basin. It is a developing country with a high Human Development Index score and a poverty level around 31%. Its main economic activities include agriculture, fishing, mining, and manufacturing of products such as textiles.
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Qarshi
Qarshi (Uzbek: Qarshi / Қарши; Persian: نخشب / Nakhshab; Russian: Karshi / Карши; Mongolian: Kharsh-khot / Харш-хот) is a city in southern Uzbekistan. It is the capital of Qashqadaryo Province and has a population of 197,600 (1999 census estimate). It is about 520 km south-southwest of Tashkent, and about 335 km north of Uzbekistan's border with Afghanistan. It is located at latitude 38° 51' 48N; longitude 65° 47' 52E at an altitude of 374 meters. The city is important in natural gas production, but Qarshi is also famous for its production of woven flat carpets.
Originally the Sogdian city of Nakhshab, and the Islamic Uzbek (Turkic) city of Nasaf, and the Mongolian Uzbek (East Asian) city of Kharsh-khot, Qarshi was the second city of the Emirate of Bukhara. It is in the center of a fertile oasis that produces wheat, cotton, and silk and was a stop on the 11 day caravan route between Balkh and Bukhara. The Chagatai's Mongolian Khans Kebek and Qazan built palaces here on the site of Chinggis Khaan's summer pasture. In 1364, Timur also built a fortified palace with moats in what is now the southern part of the city. The modern name "Qarshi" means fort.
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Qom
Qom (Persian: Qom [ɢom], also known as Q'um or Ghom) is a city in Iran. It lies 156 kilometres (97 mi) by road southwest of Tehran and is the capital of Qom Province. At the 2006 census, its population was 957,496, in 241,827 families. It is situated on the banks of the Qom River.
Qom is considered holy by Shi`a Islam, as it is the site of the shrine of Fatema Mæ'sume, sister of Imam `Ali ibn Musa Rida (Persian Imam Reza, 789–816 AD). The city is the largest center for Shi'a scholarship in the world, and is a significant destination of pilgrimage.
Qom is counted as one of the focal centers of the Shi'a both in Iran and around the globe. Since the revolution the clerical population has risen from around 25,000 to more than 45,000 and the nonnclerical population has more than tripled to about 700,000. Substantial sums of money in the form of alms and Islamic taxes flow into Qom to the ten marja-i taqlid or "Source of Imitation" that reside there. The number of seminary schools in Qom is now over 50, and the number of research institutes and libraries somewhere near 250.
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Qorasuv
Qorasuv (also transliterated as Korasuv, Karasu, Kara-Soo, Kara-Sui; Uzbek: Qorasuv / Қорасув; Russian: Карасу) is a town in Andijan Province in eastern Uzbekistan, about 50 km from the district capital of Andijan. The town's name means "black water" in Uzbek (qora - black, suv - water). It lies in the politically volatile and religiously conservative Fergana Valley, along the border with Kyrgyzstan. In 1989 it had a population of 19,500.
It is essentially one town with Kara-Suu in Kyrgyzstan, but is separated from the latter by a Soviet-era border which today is tightly controlled by Uzbekistan. Korasuv was the second town in Uzbekistan to be sealed off during the Andijan massacre in spring 2005, when some 6,000 people fled across the border. A border town, it is an important market town, especially for cottonseed oil trading.
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Registan
The Registan was the heart of the ancient city of Samarkand of the Timurid dynasty, now in Uzbekistan. The name Registan (ریگستان) means "Sandy place" in Persian.
The Registan was a public square, where people gathered to hear royal proclamations, heralded by blasts on enormous copper pipes called dzharchis - and a place of public executions. It is framed by three madrasahs (Islamic schools) of distinctive Islamic architecture.
The three madrasahs of the Registan are: the Ulugh Beg Madrasah (1417–1420), the Tilya-Kori Madrasah (1646–1660) and the Sher-Dor Madrasah (1619–1636). Madrasah is an Arabic term meaning school.
The Ulugh Beg Madrasah, built during the Timurid Empire era of Timur—Tamerlane, has an imposing Iwan portal with lancet arch facing the square. The corners are flanked by the high well-proportioned minarets. The mosaic panel over the iwan's entrance arch is decorated by geometrical stylized ornaments. The square courtyard includes a mosque, lecture rooms, and is fringed by the dormitory cells in which students lived. There are deep galleries along the axes. Originally the Ulugh Beg Madrasah was a two-storied building with four domed darskhonas (lecture rooms) at the corners.
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Robat
Robat (Persian: رباط, also Romanized as Robāţ; also known as Robāţ-e Māhīdasht, Robāţ-e Māhī Dasht, Robaţ ‘Olyā, and Māhīdasht) is a city in and the capital of Mahidasht District, in Kermanshah County, Kermanshah Province, Iran. At the 2006 census, its population was 996, in 248 families.
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Russia
Russiai/ˈrʌʃə/ or /ˈrʊʃə/ (Russian: Россия, tr. Rossiya; IPA: [rɐˈsʲijə] ( listen)), also officially known as the Russian Federation (Russian: Российская Федерация, tr. Rossiyskaya Federatsiya; IPA: [rɐˈsʲijskəjə fʲɪdʲɪˈratsɨjə] ( listen)), is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects. From northwest to southeast, Russia shares borders with Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland (both via Kaliningrad Oblast), Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia, and North Korea. It also has maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk, and the US state of Alaska by the Bering Strait. At 17,075,400 square kilometres (6,592,800 sq mi), Russia is the largest country in the world, covering more than one eighth of the Earth's inhabited land area. Russia is also the eighth most populous nation with 143 million people. It extends across the whole of northern Asia and 40% of Europe, spanning nine time zones and incorporating a wide range of environments and landforms. Russia has the world's largest reserves of mineral and energy resources and is the largest producer of oil and natural gas globally. Russia has the world's largest forest reserves and its lakes contain approximately one-quarter of the world's fresh water.
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Samarkand
Coordinates: 39°39′15″N 66°57′35″E / 39.65417°N 66.95972°E / 39.65417; 66.95972
Samarkand (Tajik: Самарқанд; Persian: سمرقند; Uzbek: Samarqand; from Sogdian: "Stone Fort" or "Rock Town") is the second-largest city in Uzbekistan and the capital of Samarqand Province. The city is most noted for its central position on the Silk Road between China and the West, and for being an Islamic centre for scholarly study. In the 14th century it became the capital of the empire of Timur (Tamerlane) and is the site of his mausoleum (the Gur-e Amir). The Bibi-Khanym Mosque remains one of the city's most notable landmarks. The Registan was the ancient center of the city.
In 2001, UNESCO added the city to its World Heritage List as Samarkand – Crossroads of Cultures.
The city was known by an abbreviated name of Marakanda when Alexander the Great took it in 332BC. There are various theories of how Marakanda evolved into Samarkanda/Samarkan. One derives the name from the Old Persian asmara, "stone", "rock", and Sogdian kand, "fort", "town". Others less convincingly derive the name from the old Turkic "Semiz-Kent" meaning "Rich City".[citation needed]. Since the name Marakanda was already in existence 2300 years ago and long before anyone had heard of Turks in that region of Transoxiana, this version is likely a folk etymology.
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Samarqand District
Samarqand District is a district of Samarqand Province in Uzbekistan. The capital lies at Gulabad. The district was established in 1930.
As of 1 January 2011, the district contains two urban citizen's assemblies Gulabad and Hoja Ahror Wali and the rural citizens' assemblies:
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Samarqand Province
Coordinates: 39°50′N 66°15′E / 39.833°N 66.25°E / 39.833; 66.25
Samarqand Province (Samarkand Province) (Uzbek: Samarqand viloyati) is a viloyat (province) of Uzbekistan located in the center of the country in the basin of Zarafshan River. It borders with Tajikstan, Navoiy Province, Jizzakh Province and Qashqadaryo Province. It covers an area of 16,400 km². The population is estimated to be around 2,322,000, with some 75% living in rural areas.
Samarqand Province was established on January 15, 1938, and is divided into 14 administrative districts. The capital is Samarqand (pop est 368,000 inhabitants). Other major towns include Bulung‘ur, Juma, Ishtixon, Kattaqo‘rg‘on, Urgut, and Oqtosh.
The climate is a typically arid continental climate.
Samarkand is the 2nd largest center for economy, science, and culture in Uzbekistan, after Tashkent. The Institute of Archeology at the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Uzbekistan is based at Samarqand. The Province's UNESCO World Heritage Site architectural monuments are world famous, and make Samarkand the largest center for international tourism in the country.
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Shahrisabz
Shakhrisabz (Uzbek: Шаҳрисабз Shahrisabz; Persian: شهر سبز shahr-i sabz; Russian: Шахрисабз), is a city in Uzbekistan located approximately 80 km south of Samarkand with the population of 53,000 (1991). It is located at the altitude of 622 m. Once a major city of Central Asia, it is primarily known today as the birthplace of 14th century Turco-Mongol conqueror Timur. Its name (شهر سبز) means "green/verdant city" in Persian.
Formerly known as Kesh (i.e., "heart-pleasing") and tentatively identified with the ancient Nautaca Shahrisabz should be counted among Central Asia’s most ancient cities. It was founded more than 2700 years ago.
From the 6th to 4th centuries BC it was a part of Akhemenid empire.
Alexander the Great's general Ptolemy captured the satrap of Bactria and pretender to the Persian throne, Bessus, at Nautaca thus ending the once great Achaemenid Empire. Alexander the Great chose to spend his winters and met his wife Roxanna in the area in 328-327 BC.
From 4th to 8th century Kesh was one of urban centers of Sogdiana.
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Sirdaryo
Sirdaryo also spelled as Syrdarya (Uzbek: Sirdaryo / Сирдарё; Russian: Сырдарья) is a city in Uzbekistan.
Coordinates: 40°51′N 68°40′E / 40.85°N 68.667°E / 40.85; 68.667
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Susa
Coordinates: 32°11′21″N 48°15′28″E / 32.18922°N 48.257785°E / 32.18922; 48.257785
Susa (Persian: شوش Shush [ʃuʃ]; Greek: Σοῦσα [ˈsuːsa]; Syriac: ܫܘܫ Shush; Old Persian Çūšā-; Biblical Hebrew שׁוּשָׁן Shushān) was an ancient city of the Elamite, Persian and Parthian empires of Iran. It is located in the lower Zagros Mountains about 250 km (160 mi) east of the Tigris River, between the Karkheh and Dez Rivers.
The modern Iranian town of Shush is located at the site of ancient Susa. Shush is the administrative capital of the Shush County of Iran's Khuzestan province. It had a population 64,960 in 2005.
In historic literature, Susa appears in the very earliest Sumerian records, e.g. in Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta it is described as one of the places obedient to Inanna, patron deity of Uruk.
Susa is also mentioned in the Ketuvim of the Hebrew Bible by the name Shushan, mainly in Esther, but also once each in Nehemiah and Daniel. Both Daniel and Nehemiah lived in Susa during the Babylonian captivity of the 6th century BCE. Esther became queen there, and saved the Jews from genocide. A tomb presumed to be that of Daniel is located in the area, known as Shush-Daniel. The tomb is marked by an unusual white stone cone, which is neither regular nor symmetric. Many scholars believe it was at one point a Star of David. Susa is further mentioned in the Book of Jubilees (8:21 & 9:2) as one of the places within the inheritance of Shem and his eldest son Elam; and in 8:1, "Susan" is also named as the son (or daughter, in some translations) of Elam.
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Tabriz
Tabriz (Persian/Azerbaijani:تبریز) ( pronunciation (help·info)) is the fifth largest city and one of the historical capitals of Iran and the capital of East Azerbaijan Province. Situated at an altitude of 1,350 meters at the junction of the Quru River and Aji River, it was the second largest city in Iran until the late 1960s, one of its former capitals, and residence of the crown prince under the Qajar dynasty. The city has proven extremely influential in the country’s recent history. Tabriz is located in a valley to the north of the long ridge of the volcanic cone of Sahand, south of the Eynali mountain. The valley opens out into a plain that slopes gently down to the northern end of Lake Urmia, 60 km to the west. With cold winters and temperate summers the city is considered a summer resort.
The estimated population of the city is around 1,400,000 based on results of the Iranian census bureau. Tabriz is the fourth most populous city in Iran after Tehran, Mashhad, and Esfahan, and is also a major Iranian heavy industrial and manufacturing center. Some of these industries include automobile, machine tools, oil and petrochemical and cement production.
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Tajikistan
Tajikistan (i/tɑːˈdʒiːkɨstɑːn/, /təˈdʒiːkɨstæn/, or /tæˈdʒiːkiːstæn/; Тоҷикистон [ˈtɔjikɪsˈtɔn]), officially the Republic of Tajikistan (Tajik: Ҷумҳурии Тоҷикистон, Cumhuriyi Tocikiston; Persian: جمهوری تاجیکستان Jomhuri-ye Tajikestan; Russian: Республика Таджикистан, Respublika Tadzhikistan), is a mountainous landlocked country in Central Asia. It borders Afghanistan to the south, Uzbekistan to the west, Kyrgyzstan to the north, and China to the east. Gilgit Baltistan as well as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa of Pakistan are separated from Tajikistan by the narrow Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan in the south.
Most of Tajikistan's population belongs to the Persian-speaking Tajik ethnic group, who share language, culture and history with Afghanistan and Iran. Once part of the Samanid Empire, Tajikistan became a constituent republic of the Soviet Union in the 20th century, known as the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic (Tajik SSR). Mountains cover over 90% of this Central Asian republic.
After independence, Tajikistan suffered from a devastating civil war which lasted from 1992 to 1997. Since the end of the war, newly established political stability and foreign aid have allowed the country's economy to grow. Trade in commodities such as cotton, aluminium and uranium has contributed greatly to this steady improvement.
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Tashkent
Tashkent (/ˌtæʃˈkɛnt/; Uzbek: Toshkent, Тошкент; Russian: Ташкент, [tɐʂˈkʲent]; literally "Stone City") is the capital of Uzbekistan and of the Tashkent Province. The officially registered population of the city in 2008 was about 2.2 million. Unofficial sources estimate the actual population may be as much as 4.45 million.
During its long history, Tashkent has had various changes in names and political and religious affiliations.
Tashkent started as an oasis on the Chirchik River, near the foothills of the West Tian Shan Mountains. In ancient times, this area contained Beitian, probably the summer "capital" of the Kangju confederacy.
In pre-Islamic and early Islamic times the town and the province were known as "Chach". The Shahnameh of Ferdowsi also refers to the city as Chach. Later the town came to be known as Chachkand/Chashkand, meaning "Chach City".[citation needed] The principality of Chach, whose main town had a square citadel built around the 5th to 3rd centuries BC, some 8 kilometres (5.0 mi) south of the Syr Darya River. By the 7th century AD, Chach had over 30 towns and a network of over 50 canals, forming a trade center between the Sogdians and Turkic nomads. The Buddhist monk Xuánzàng 玄奘 (602/603? – 664 CE), who travelled from China to India through Central Asia, mentioned the name of the city as Zhěshí 赭時. The Chinese chronicles Suí shū 隋書 (Book of Suí), Běi shǐ 北史 (History of Northern Dynasties) and Táng shū 唐書 (Book of Táng) mention a possession called Shí 石 or Zhěshí 赭時 with a capital of the same name since the fifth century AD [Bichurin, 1950. v. II]. The region came under the sway of Islam in the early parts of the 8th century.
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Termez
Termez (Uzbek: Termiz/Термиз; Russian: Термез; Persian: ترمذ Termez, Tirmiz) is a city in southern Uzbekistan near the border with Afghanistan.
Some link the name of the city to thermos, "hot" in Greek, tracing its name back to Alexander the Great. Others suggest that it came from Sanskrit taramato, meaning "on the river bank". It is the hottest point of Uzbekistan. It has a population of 140,404 (1 January 2005), and is the capital of Surxondaryo Province.
Its most famous native son is Al-Tirmidhi, born in its suburb Bugh and buried 60 kilometers north of Termez, on the outskirts of Sherobod. He is locally known as Iso At Termezi or Termez Ota (Father of Termez City). Hakim-e-Termizi, one of the famous Sufi leaders, is buried in the suburbs of Termez. He is also known as Termez Ota (Father of Termez City). It was once a great center of Buddhism and Islam.
The river Amu Darya divides the two countries of Uzbekistan and Afghanistan and the Afghanistan–Uzbekistan Friendship Bridge crosses the river to Hairatan in Afghanistan. Termez is also served by Termez Airport, with flights to Tashkent.
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Toyloq District
Toyloq District is a district of Samarqand Province in Uzbekistan. The capital lies at Toyloq.
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Tunisia
Tunisia (USi/tuːˈniːʒə/ two-NEE-zhə or UK /tjuːˈnɪziə/ tew-NIZ-iə; Arabic: تونس Tūnis pronounced [ˈtuːnɪs]), officially the Republic of Tunisia (Arabic: الجمهورية التونسية al-Jumhūriyyah at-Tūnisiyyah), is the northernmost country in Africa. It is an Arab Maghreb country and is bordered by Algeria to the west, Libya to the southeast, and the Mediterranean Sea to the north and east. Its area is almost 165,000 square kilometres (64,000 sq mi), with an estimated population of just under 10.7 million. Its name is derived from the capital Tunis located in the northeast.
Tunisia is the smallest country in North Africa. The south of the country is composed of the Sahara desert, with much of the remainder consisting of particularly fertile soil and 1,300 kilometres (810 mi) of coastline.
Tunisia has relations with both the European Union—with whom it has an association agreement—and the Arab world. Tunisia is also a member of the Arab Maghreb Union, the Arab League, and the African Union. Tunisia has established close relations with France in particular, through economic cooperation, industrial modernization, and privatisation programs.
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Turkey
Turkey (Turkish: Türkiye), known officially as the Republic of Turkey ( Türkiye Cumhuriyeti (help·info)), is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia (mostly in the Anatolian peninsula) and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe. Turkey is bordered by eight countries: Bulgaria to the northwest; Greece to the west; Georgia to the northeast; Armenia, Azerbaijan (the exclave of Nakhchivan) and Iran to the east; and Iraq and Syria to the southeast. The Mediterranean Sea and Cyprus are to the south; the Aegean Sea is to the west; and the Black Sea is to the north. The Sea of Marmara, the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles (which together form the Turkish Straits) demarcate the boundary between East Thrace and Anatolia; they also separate Europe and Asia.
Turkey is one of the six independent Turkic states. The vast majority of the population are Muslims. The country's official language is Turkish, whereas Kurdish and Zazaki languages are spoken by Kurds and Zazas, who constitute 18% of the population.
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Turkmenistan
Turkmenistan (i/tɜrkˈmɛnɨstæn/ or i/tɜrkmɛnɨˈstɑːn/; Turkmen: Türkmenistan), formerly also known as Turkmenia (Russian: Туркмения), is one of the Turkic states in Central Asia. Until 1991, it was a constituent republic of the Soviet Union, the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic (Turkmen SSR). Turkmenistan is one of the six independent Turkic states. It is bordered by Afghanistan to the southeast, Iran to the south and southwest, Uzbekistan to the east and northeast, Kazakhstan to the north and northwest and the Caspian Sea to the west.
Turkmenistan's GDP growth rate of 11% in 2010[update] ranks 4th in the world, but these figures are subject to wide margins of error. It possesses the world's fourth largest reserves of natural gas resources. Although it is wealthy in natural resources in certain areas, most of the country is covered by the Karakum (Black Sand) Desert.
The Turkmen government operates as a single-party system. Turkmenistan was ruled by President for Life Saparmurat Niyazov (called "Türkmenbaşy" — "leader of the Turkmens") until his sudden death on 21 December 2006. Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov was elected the new president on 11 February 2007.
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Ukraine
Ukraine (i/juːˈkreɪn/ yew-KRAYN; Ukrainian: Україна, transliterated: Ukrayina, [ukrɑˈjinɑ]; Russian: Украина; Crimean Tatar: Ukraina) is a country in Central and Eastern Europe. Ukraine borders the Russian Federation to the east and northeast, Belarus to the northwest, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary to the west, Romania and Moldova to the southwest, and the Black Sea and Sea of Azov to the south and southeast, respectively. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after the Russian Federation.
According to a popular and well established theory, the medieval state of Kievan Rus was established by the Varangians in the 9th century as the first historically recorded East Slavic state which emerged as a powerful nation in the Middle Ages until it disintegrated in the 12th century. By the middle of the 14th century, Ukrainian territories were under the rule of three external powers—the Golden Horde, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and the Kingdom of Poland. After the Great Northern War (1700–1721) Ukraine was divided between a number of regional powers and, by the 19th century, the largest part of Ukraine was integrated into the Russian Empire with the rest under Austro-Hungarian control. A chaotic period of incessant warfare ensued, with several internationally recognized attempts at independence from 1917 to 1921, following World War I and the Russian Civil War. Ukraine emerged from its own civil war, and on December 30, 1922 Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic became one of the founding republics of the Soviet Union. The Ukrainian SSR's territory was enlarged westward during the civil war shortly before, and after World War II, and further south in 1954 with the Crimea transfer. In 1945, the Ukrainian SSR became one of the founding members of the United Nations.
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United States
The United States of America (commonly abbreviated to the United States, the U.S., the USA, America, and the States) is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its forty-eight contiguous states and Washington, D.C., the capital district, lie between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, bordered by Canada to the north and Mexico to the south. The state of Alaska is in the northwest of the continent, with Canada to the east and Russia to the west, across the Bering Strait. The state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific. The country also possesses several territories in the Pacific and Caribbean.
At 3.79 million square miles (9.83 million km2) and with over 312 million people, the United States is the third or fourth largest country by total area, and the third largest by both land area and population. It is one of the world's most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, the product of large-scale immigration from many countries. The U.S. economy is the world's largest national economy, with an estimated 2011 GDP of $15.1 trillion (22% of nominal global GDP and over 19% of global GDP at purchasing-power parity). Per capita income is the world's sixth-highest.
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Urgut
Urgut (Uzbek: Urgut / Ургут; Russian: Ургут) is a town in the Samarqand Province of Uzbekistan and the capital of Urgut District. It is known for the grove of platans, some of which are more than 1000 years old. Urgut is located in mountainous areas.
Urgutlik (also known as Urguti in Tajik) people are a subgroup of ethnic Uzbeks who track their ancestry to people from a town of Urgut. There are almost 500,000 people who describe themselves as Urgutlik. Urgutlik people frequently use Tajik words in their daily conversation. Majority of the population speak Uzbek; however, there are some Tajik ethnic villages and they speak Tajik.
Urguti people are heavily involved in basic mercantile trading in their respective locations and in farming. In the town craftsmanship is also well-known which has been maintained traditionally throughout the centuries.[citation needed]
Urgut's biggest market with varied and relatively inexpensive merchandise attracts folks even from Samarkand, the capital of the Province
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Urgut District
Urgut District is a district of Samarqand Province in Uzbekistan. The capital lies at Urgut. It is located near the Zarafshan Mountains. There is a Navrouz festival every spring equinox.
The district produces tobacco and wool and silk products. Urgut town has market days every weekend, and is one of the largest market towns in the region. The district is home to carpets, jewels, metalwork and ceramics. The market also has smithies, tin workshops and stalls selling locally produced tea sets, clothes and traditional leather boots.
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Uzbekistan
Uzbekistani/ʊzˌbɛkɨˈstɑːn/, officially the Republic of Uzbekistan (Uzbek: O‘zbekiston Respublikasi, Ўзбекистон Республикаси) is the only doubly landlocked country in Central Asia and one of only two such countries worldwide. It shares borders with Kazakhstan to the west and to the north, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to the east, and Afghanistan and Turkmenistan to the south. Before 1991, it was part of the Soviet Union.
Uzbekistan is one of the Turkic states in Central Asia.
Once part of the Persian Samanid and later Timurid empires, the region was conquered in the early 16th century by Uzbek nomads, who spoke an Eastern Turkic language. Most of Uzbekistan’s population today belong to the Uzbek ethnic group and speak the Uzbek language, one of the family of Turkic languages.
Uzbekistan was incorporated into the Russian Empire in the 19th century, and in 1924 became a constituent republic of the Soviet Union, known as the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic (Uzbek SSR). It became independent on 31 August 1991 (officially, from the following day).
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Yangiabad
Yangiabad is a city located in the Angren municipality of Tashkent Province, Uzbekistan.
The village has only three sources of drinking water. The village was previously the site of Kolkhoz (collective farms), but currently there are only farmers and workers. The farmers file quarterly reports to the mayor of Fergana Province.
Every year the government sets a new plan for the year, and the plan for each farmer will be different depending on how much land the farmer holds.
Coordinates: 41°07′09″N 70°05′39″E / 41.1191666767°N 70.0941666767°E / 41.1191666767; 70.0941666767
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Yangiyer
Yangiyer (Uzbek: Yangiyer / Янгиер; Russian: Янгиер) is a city (1991 pop. 29.600) in Sirdaryo Province, Eastern Uzbekistan. It was established in 1957 as part of the grand Soviet project to cultivate the naturally saline virgin lands of Golodnaya Steppe, a vast area of about 10,000 square kilometres in Eastern Uzbekistan. The shortage of irrigation water was the main problem hindering the development of agriculture in the area.
The city has several plants including a plant of building materials (комбинат стройматериалов), pipe plant (гончарно-дренажный завод), asphalt plant (асфальтобетонный).
Yangier also has a branch of Tashkent Institute of Agriculture and Irrigation Engineering (Филиал Ташкентского Института Инженеров Ирригации и Механизации Сельского Хозяйства), a college of civil engineering (коммунально-строительный техникум) and a museum dedicated to cultivation of virgin lands of Golodnaya Steppe (Музей "Освоение Голодной Степи")
Coordinates: 40°16′N 68°49′E / 40.267°N 68.817°E / 40.267; 68.817
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Yazd
Yazd (pronounced /jæzd/) (Persian: یزد, also Romanized as Yezd) is the capital of Yazd Province in Iran, and a centre of Zoroastrian culture. The city is located 270 km southeast of Isfahan. At the 2006 census, the population was 423,006, in 114,716 families.
Because of generations of adaptations to its desert surroundings, Yazd is an architecturally unique city. It is also known in Iran for the high quality of its handicrafts, especially silk weaving, and its sweet shops.
Yazd with the area of 131,551 km²[citation needed] is situated at an oasis where the Dasht-e Kavir desert and the Dasht-e Lut desert meet, the city is sometimes called "the bride of the Kavir" because of its location, in a valley between Shir Kuh, the tallest mountain in the region at 4075 m. above sea level, and Kharaneq. The city itself is located at 1203 m. above sea-level, and covers 16,000 km².
According to the administrative division rules, the Yazd province is divided into 10 districts, each includes at least one town and a number of villages. These districts are: Abarkuh, Ardakan, Bafq, Khatam, Maybod, Mehriz, Tabas, Sadough, Taft and Yazd.
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Alexander the Great
Alexander III of Macedon (20/21 July 356 – 10/11 June 323 BC), commonly known as Alexander the Great (Greek: Ἀλέξανδρος ὁ Μέγας, Aléxandros ho Mégas from the Greek αλέξω alexo "to defend, help" + ανήρ aner "man"), was a king of Macedon, a state in northern ancient Greece. Born in Pella in 356 BC, Alexander was tutored by Aristotle until the age of 16. By the age of thirty, he had created one of the largest empires of the ancient world, stretching from the Ionian Sea to the Himalayas. He was undefeated in battle and is considered one of history's most successful commanders.
Alexander succeeded his father, Philip II of Macedon, to the throne in 336 BC after Philip was assassinated. Upon Philip's death, Alexander inherited a strong kingdom and an experienced army. He was awarded the generalship of Greece and used this authority to launch his father's military expansion plans. In 334 BC, he invaded Persian-ruled Asia Minor and began a series of campaigns that lasted ten years. Alexander broke the power of Persia in a series of decisive battles, most notably the battles of Issus and Gaugamela. He subsequently overthrew the Persian King Darius III and conquered the entirety of the Persian Empire. At that point, his empire stretched from the Adriatic Sea to the Indus River.
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Amin Maalouf
Amin Maalouf (Arabic: أمين معلوف), born 25 February 1949 in Beirut, is a Lebanese-born French author. Although his native language is Arabic, he writes in French, and his works have been translated into many languages. He received the Prix Goncourt in 1993 for his novel The Rock of Tanios (English translation of, Le Rocher de Tanios). He has also been awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature in its 2010 edition. He was elected at the Académie française on 23 June 2011, on seat 29.
Maalouf is the second of four children. His parents' families were from the Lebanese mountain village of Ain el Kabou. His parents married in Cairo in 1945, where Odette, his mother, was born of a Maronite Christian father from the village, who had left to work in Egypt, and a mother born in Turkey. Amin's father, Ruchdi, was from the Melkite Greek Catholic community. One of his ancestors was a priest whose son converted to become a Presbyterian parson. The parson's son (Maalouf's grandfather) was a "rationalist, anticlerical, probably a freemason, and refused to baptise his children".[citation needed] While the Protestant branch of the family sent their children to British or American schools, Maalouf's mother was a staunch Catholic who insisted on sending him to Collège Notre Dame de Jamhour- a French Jesuit school. He studied sociology at the Francophone Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut.
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Amoghavajra
Amoghavajra (Sanskrit: अमोघवज्र amoghavajra; Chinese: 不空, pīnyīn: Bùkōng, Japanese: Fukū; Korean: 불공) (705–774) was a prolific translator who became one of the most politically powerful Buddhist monks in Chinese history, acknowledged as one of the eight patriarchs of the doctrine in Shingon lineages.
Born in Samarkand of an Indian father and Sogdian mother, he went to China at age 10 after his father's death. In 719, he was ordained into the saṃgha by Vajrabodhi and became his disciple. After all foreign monks were expelled from China in 741, he and some associates went on a pilgrimage to gather texts, visiting Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia and India. During this voyage, he apparently met Nagabodhi, master of Vajrabodhi, and studied the Tattvasaṃgraha system at length. He returned to China in 746 with some five hundred volumes.
In 750, he left the court to join the military governorship of Geshu Han, for whom he conducted large-scale tantric initiations at field headquarters. In 754, he translated the first portion of the Tattvasaṃgraha (T. 865), the central yoga tantra of Esoteric Buddhism, which became one of his most significant accomplishments. He regarded its teachings as the most effective method for attaining enlightenment yet devised, and incorporated its basic schema in a number of writings. Amoghavajra was captured in general An Lushan's rebellion but in 757 was freed by loyalist forces, whereupon he performed rites to purify the capital and consolidate the security of the Tang state. Two years later, he initiated the emperor Suzong as a cakravartin. In 765, Amoghavajra used his new rendition of the Scripture for Humane Kings in an elaborate ritual to counter the advance of a 200,000-strong army of Tibetans and Uyghurs which was poised to invade Changan. Its leader, Pugu Huaien, dropped dead in camp and his forces dispersed.
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Clive Barker
Clive Barker (born 5 October 1952) is an English author, film director and visual artist best known for his work in both fantasy and horror fiction. Barker came to prominence in the mid-1980s with a series of short stories which established him as a leading young horror writer. He has since written many novels and other works, and his fiction has been adapted into motion pictures, notably the Hellraiser and Candyman series.
Clive Barker was born in Liverpool, England, the son of Joan Rubie (née Revill), a painter and school welfare officer, and Leonard Barker, a personnel director for an industrial relations firm. Educated at Dovedale Primary School and the former Quarry Bank High School now Calderstones Quarry Bank High School, he studied English and Philosophy at Liverpool University. The Damnation Game and Volume 2 of The Books of Blood are dedicated to John Gregson[who?].
In 2003, Barker received The Davidson/Valentini Award at the 15th GLAAD Media Awards, presented "to an openly lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender individual who has made a significant difference in promoting equal rights for any of those communities". While Barker is critical of organized religion, he has identified himself as a Christian and has stated that the Bible influences his work.
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Craig Murray
Craig John Murray (born 17 October 1958) is a British political activist, former ambassador to Uzbekistan and former Rector of the University of Dundee.
While at the embassy in Tashkent, he accused the Karimov administration of human rights abuses, a step which, he argued, was against the wishes of the British government and the reason for his removal. Murray complained to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in November 2002, January or early February 2003, and in June 2004 that intelligence linking the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan to al-Qaeda, suspected of being gained through torture, was unreliable, immoral, and illegal. He described this as "selling our souls for dross".
Murray was subsequently removed from his ambassadorial post on 14 October 2004.
Murray was born in West Runton, Norfolk and grew up in neighbouring Sheringham. He was educated at Sheringham Primary and then at the Paston School in North Walsham, Norfolk, an all-boys grammar school where he had an undistinguished record and by his own account he barely gained admission to study Modern History at the University of Dundee. Whilst at university he attended few lectures, instead reading voraciously to teach himself and graduated in 1982 with an MA (Hons) 1st Class. During this period, he was a member of the Liberal Party.
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Elif Batuman
Elif Batuman (born in 1977) is an American author, academic, and journalist.
Born in New York City to Turkish parents, she grew up in New Jersey. She graduated from Harvard College, and received her doctorate in comparative literature from Stanford University, where she taught. While in graduate school, Batuman studied the Uzbek language in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. Her dissertation, The Windmill and the Giant: Double-Entry Bookkeeping in the Novel, is about the process of social research and solitary construction undertaken by novelists.
In February, 2010, she published her first book, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, based on material previously published in The New Yorker,Harper's Magazine, and n+1, which details her experiences as a graduate student. Her writing has been described as "almost helplessly epigrammatical."
She currently resides in Istanbul, Turkey, where she is the writer-in-residence at Koç University.
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Genghis Khan
Genghis Khan (/ˈɡɛŋɡɪs ˈkɑːn/ or /ˈdʒɛŋɡɪs ˈkɑːn/,Mongol: [tʃiŋɡɪs xaːŋ] ( listen); 1162? – August 1227), born Temujin, was the founder and Great Khan (emperor) of the Mongol Empire, which became the largest contiguous empire in history after his death.
He came to power by uniting many of the nomadic tribes of northeast Asia. After founding the Mongol Empire and being proclaimed "Genghis Khan", he started the Mongol invasions that resulted in the conquest of most of Eurasia. These included raids or invasions of the Kara-Khitan Khanate, Caucasus, Khwarezmid Empire, Western Xia and Jin dynasties. These campaigns were often accompanied by wholesale massacres of the civilian populations – especially in Khwarezmia. By the end of his life, the Mongol Empire occupied a substantial portion of Central Asia and China.
Before Genghis Khan died, he assigned Ögedei Khan as his successor and split his empire into khanates among his sons and grandsons. He died in 1227 after defeating the Western Xia. He was buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in Mongolia at an unknown location. His descendants went on to stretch the Mongol Empire across most of Eurasia by conquering or creating vassal states out of all of modern-day China, Korea, the Caucasus, Central Asian countries, and substantial portions of modern Eastern Europe, Russia and the Middle East. Many of these invasions resulted in the large-scale slaughter of local populations, which have given Genghis Khan and his empire a fearsome reputation in local histories.
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Hugo Pratt
Hugo Eugenio Pratt (June 15, 1927 – August 20, 1995) was an Italian comic book creator who was known for combining strong storytelling with extensive historical research on works such as Corto Maltese. He was inducted into the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 2005.
Born in Rimini in Romagna to Rolando Pratt and Evelina Genero, Hugo Pratt spent most of his childhood in Venice in a very cosmopolitan family environment. His paternal grandfather Joseph was of English origin, while his maternal grandfather was a Marrano Jew and his maternal grandmother was of Turkish origin. He was also related to the actor Boris Karloff, whose birth name was William Henry Pratt. In 1937, Hugo Pratt moved with his mother to Abyssinia (Ethiopia), joining his father who was working there following the conquest of that country by Benito Mussolini's Italy. Pratt's father, a professional Italian soldier, was captured in 1941 by British troops and in late 1942, died from disease as a prisoner of war. The same year, Hugo Pratt and his mother were interned in a prison camp at Dirédaoua where he would buy comics from guards and later was sent back to Italy by the Red Cross. In 1944, he was at risk of being executed as SS troops had mistaken him for a South African spy.
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Ibn Battuta
Abū ‘Abd Allāh Muḥammad ibn ‘Abd Allāh al-Lawātī al-Ţanjī ibn Baṭūṭah (Arabic: أبو عبد الله محمد بن عبد الله اللواتي الطنجي بن بطوطة), or simply Ibn Battuta (ابن بطوطة), also known as Shams ad-Din (February 25, 1304–1368 or 1369), was a Berber Muslim Moroccan explorer, known for his extensive travels, accounts of which were published in the Rihla (lit. "Journey"). Over a period of thirty years, he visited most of the known Islamic world as well as many non-Muslim lands; his journeys including trips to North Africa, the Horn of Africa, West Africa, Southern Europe and Eastern Europe in the West, and to the Middle East, South Asia, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and China in the East, a distance surpassing threefold his near-contemporary Marco Polo. Ibn Battuta is considered one of the greatest travellers of all time. He journeyed more than 75,000 miles (121,000 km), a figure unsurpassed by any individual explorer until the coming of the Steam Age some 450 years later.
All that is known about Ibn Battuta's life comes from the autobiographical information included in the account of his travels. Ibn Battuta was born into a Berber family of Islamic legal scholars in Tangier, Morocco, on 25 February 1304, during the reign of the Marinid dynasty. As a young man he would have studied at a Sunni Maliki madh'hab, (Islamic jurisprudence school), the dominant form of education in North Africa at that time. In June 1325, at the age of twenty-one, Ibn Battuta set off from his hometown on a hajj, or pilgrimage, to Mecca, a journey that would take sixteen months. He would not see Morocco again for twenty-four years.
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Islam Karimov
Islom Abdug‘aniyevich Karimov (Cyrillic Uzbek: Ислом Абдуғаниевич Каримов; Russian: Ислам Абдуганиевич Каримов Islam Abduganiyevich Karimov) (born January 30, 1938) is the first President of Uzbekistan, serving since 1990.
Karimov, placed in an orphanage in Samarkand at birth, grew up to study economics and engineering at school. He became an official in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, becoming the party's First Secretary in Uzbekistan in 1989. On March 24, 1990 he became President of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. Karimov's election to the Uzbek Communist Party resulted after his predecessor Rafik Nishanov failed to quell inter-ethnic clashes and instability in the Fergana region. He declared Uzbekistan an independent nation on August 31, 1991 and subsequently won Uzbekistan's first presidential election on December 29, 1991, with 86% of the vote. The election was called unfair[citation needed], with state-run propaganda and a falsified vote count, although the opposing candidate and leader of the Erk (Freedom) Party, Muhammad Salih, had a chance to participate. Karimov permitted the participation of the opposition organizations Birlik ("popular movement") and the Islamic Renaissance Party until his efforts to consolidate power over Shukrullo Mirsaidov, a former Communist Party elite who had originally supported Karimov's rise to the Party presidency. The period of political thaw was brief; Karimov began to complicate the registration process of opposition parties during elections. As Birlik grew in strength as a "popular movement", it was denied the ability to register as a "political party" without the required 60,000 signatures. The Karimov government allowed Birlik one day to gather these signatures, 25,000 of which they rejected. Karimov effectively took authoritarian measures to block any meaningful opposition.
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James Elroy Flecker
James Elroy Flecker (5 November 1884 - 3 January 1915) was an English poet, novelist and playwright. As a poet he was most influenced by the Parnassian poets.
He was born on 5 November 1884 in Lewisham, London, and baptised Herman Elroy Flecker, later choosing to use the first name "James", either because he disliked the name "Herman" or to avoid confusion with his father. "Roy", as he was known to his family, was educated at Dean Close School, Cheltenham, where his father was headmaster, and Uppingham School. He studied at Trinity College, Oxford, and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. While at Oxford he was greatly influenced by the last flowering of the Aesthetic movement there, under John Addington Symonds.
From 1910 Flecker was in the consular service, in the Eastern Mediterranean. On a ship to Athens he met Helle Skiadaressi, and in 1911 he married her.
One of his better-known poems is "To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence". An enduring testimony to his work is the excerpt from the verse drama Hassan ... The Golden Journey to Samarkand inscribed on the clock tower of the barracks of the British Army's 22 Special Air Service regiment in Hereford:
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Jin Yong
Louis Cha Leung Yung, GBM, OBE (born 6 February 1924), better known by his pen name Jin Yong, is a modern Chinese-language novelist. Having co-founded the Hong Kong daily Ming Pao in 1959, he was the paper's first editor-in-chief.
Cha's fiction, which is of the wuxia ("martial arts and chivalry") genre, has a widespread following in Chinese-speaking areas, including mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and the United States. His 15 works written between 1955 and 1972 earned him a reputation as one of the finest wuxia writers ever. He is currently the best-selling Chinese author alive; over 100 million copies of his works have been sold worldwide (not including unknown number of bootleg copies).
Cha's works have been translated into English, French, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, Burmese, Malay and Indonesian. He has many fans abroad as well, owing to the numerous adaptations of his works into films, television series, manhua (comics) and video games.
Asteroid 10930 Jinyong (1998 CR2) is named after him.
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Jonathan Stroud
Jonathan Anthony Stroud (born 27 October 1970, Bedford, England) is an author of fantasy books, mainly for children and young adults.
Born in 1970 in Bedford, England, Stroud began to write stories at a very young age. He grew up in St Albans where he enjoyed reading books, drawing pictures, and writing stories. Between the ages seven and nine he was often ill, so he spent most of his days in the hospital or in his bed at home. To escape boredom, he would occupy himself with books and stories. After he completed his studies of English literature at the University of York, he worked in London as an editor for the Walker Books store. During the 1990s, he started publishing his own works and quickly gained success.[clarification needed]
Among his most prominent works are the best-sellingBartimaeus Trilogy. A special feature of these novels compared to others of their genre is that Stroud examines the stereotypes and ethics of the magician class and the enslaved demons. This is done by telling the story from the perspective of the sarcastic and slightly egomaniacal djinni Bartimaeus. The books in this series are The Amulet of Samarkand, The Golem's Eye, Ptolemy's Gate, and The Ring of Solomon (although The Ring of Solomon was not part of the official trilogy), his first books to be published in the United States.
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Jules Verne
Jules Gabriel Verne (French pronunciation: [ʒyl vɛʁn]; February 8, 1828 – March 24, 1905) was a French author who pioneered the science fiction genre. He is best known for his novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), A Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). Verne wrote about space, air, and underwater travel before air travel and practical submarines were invented, and before practical means of space travel had been devised. He is the second most translated author in the world (after Agatha Christie). Some of his books have also been made into live-action and animated films and television shows. Verne is often referred to as the "Father of Science Fiction", a title sometimes shared with Hugo Gernsback and H. G. Wells.
Jules Verne was born in Nantes, in France, to Pierre Verne, an attorney, and his wife, Sophie Allote de la Fuÿe. Jules spent his early years at home with his parents in the bustling harbor city of Nantes. The family spent summers in a country house just outside the city, in Brains on the banks of the Loire River. Here Jules and his brother Paul would often rent a boat for one franc a day. The sight of the many ships navigating the river sparked Jules's imagination, as he describes in the autobiographical short story "Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse". At the age of nine, Jules and Paul, of whom he was very fond, were sent to boarding school at the Saint Donatien College (Petit séminaire de Saint-Donatien). As a child, he developed a great interest in travel and exploration, a passion he showed as a writer of adventure stories and science fiction. His interest in writing often cost him progress in other subjects.
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Lill Lindfors
Lillemor "Lill" Lindfors (born 12 May 1940 in Helsinki) is a Swedish singer. Born in Helsinki, Finland she has been performing in Scandinavia with minor and major success since the 1960s. She debuted as a revue actress in Uddevalla in 1960 and the following year as a recording artist. In the most recent decades, Lindfors has been known in Scandinavia for her "one-woman shows" in which she mixes music with a lot of comedy. She was one of the first artists who sang samba in Sweden, and she was also one of the first Swedish performers who did stand-up comedy in her shows.
She was married in 1969 to director Peter Wester, with whom she has one child. The couple divorced in 1973. She lives in Stockholm, Sweden.
Lindfors's performance of "Nygammal Vals ("New, yet familiar waltz") with Svante Thuresson took second place in the 1966 Eurovision Song Contest.
She was a presenter at the 1985 Eurovision Song Contest in Gothenburg, Sweden, and was most famous for suffering a wardrobe malfunction live, during the contest, after passing through a part of the elaborate set. She later admitted it was a gag, but that it had not been rehearsed beforehand. According to author John Kennedy O'Connor's book The Eurovision Song Contest - The Official History, the EBU was not pleased with this stunt. It remains one of the most iconic moments in the contest's history. She also performed "Musik skall byggas utav glädje" ("My Joy Is Building Bricks of Music") as the contest's major opener.
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Lucia Micarelli
Lucia Micarelli (born July 9, 1983) is an American violinist and actress best known for her collaborations with Josh Groban and classic rock band Jethro Tull, and her role as Annie Talarico in Treme.
Born in Queens, New York, of Italian - Korean heritage, she began playing the violin at the age of three and played her first concert with an orchestra at six years old. She was classically trained at Juilliard and the Manhattan School of Music.[citation needed]
She was the concertmaster with the Trans-Siberian Orchestra (TSO) on their Christmas Season Tour in 2003.[citation needed] After her tour with TSO, Micarelli joined Josh Groban on his Closer Tour as a guest soloist and concertmaster.[citation needed]
In 2004, Micarelli released her first album Music From A Farther Room, executive produced by Groban. It is a blend of classical pieces and familiar pop songs, including Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody", David Bowie's "Lady Grinning Soul" and David Foster's "To Love You More".[citation needed] In May 2005, Micarelli opened for West End singer Michael Ball.[citation needed] In October and November 2005 and most of 2006, she toured the United States with Jethro Tull.[citation needed] In 2007, Micarelli toured with Josh Groban again to promote his album Awake, and completed her second album, titled Interlude.[citation needed]
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Léon Benett
Léon Benett, (born Hippolyte Léon Benet; 1839 – 1917) was a French painter and illustrator. He was born in Orange, Vaucluse. He changed his name to "Benett" to differentiate his career in the administration of his work as a draftsman.
Benett is the most important illustrator of books written by Jules Verne; during 1873 - 1910 he illustrated twenty five novels from the Voyages Extraordinaires series. He also illustrated other books by Verne. He died in Toulon.
He illustrated works of Victor Hugo, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mayne Reid, André Laurie, Camille Flammarion, and others. Benett's illustrations often depict exotic countries, arising from his real experiences as a government employee in which he visited Algeria, Cochinchina, Martinique, and New Caledonia.
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Marco Polo
Marco Polo (i/ˈmɑrkoʊ ˈpoʊloʊ/; Italian pronunciation: [ˈmarko ˈpɔːlo]; c. 1254 – January 9, 1324) was a Venetian merchant traveler from the Venetian Republic whose travels are recorded in Il Milione, a book which did much to introduce Europeans to Central Asia and China. He learned about trading whilst his father and uncle, Niccolò and Maffeo, travelled through Asia and apparently met Kublai Khan. In 1269, they returned to Venice to meet Marco for the first time. The three of them embarked on an epic journey to Asia, returning after 24 years to find Venice at war with Genoa; Marco was imprisoned, and dictated his stories to a cellmate. He was released in 1299, became a wealthy merchant, married and had three children. He died in 1324, and was buried in San Lorenzo.
Their pioneering journey inspired Christopher Columbus and others. Marco Polo's other legacies include Venice Marco Polo Airport, the Marco Polo sheep, and several books and films. He also had an influence on European cartography, leading to the introduction of the Fra Mauro map.
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Mongols
Mongols (Mongolian: Монголчууд (help·info)), Mongolchuud) are a Central-East Asian ethnic group that lives mainly in the countries of Mongolia, China, and Russia. Owing to wars and migrations, Mongols are also found in some Central Asian states such as Kazakhstan. In China, ethnic Mongols can be found mainly in the central north region of China such as Inner Mongolia (a smaller number of Mongols can also be found in Xinjiang in northwest China). The Buryat branch of the Mongol ethnic group can be found in the autonomous republic of Buryatia, Russia. Ethnic Mongols are bound together by a common language and culture. They speak languages belonging to the Mongolic languages. The contiguous territories inhabited by ethnic Mongols is also known as Greater Mongolia[disambiguation needed 
]. There are approximately 10 million ethnic Mongols in total.
A definition includes the Mongols proper, who can be approximately divided into the eastern Mongols (the Khalkha Mongols, the Inner Mongolians, the Buryats), and the Oirats. In a wider sense, the Mongol people includes all people who speak a Mongolic language, such as the Kalmyks of eastern Europe.
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Neal Asher
Neal Asher (born February 4, 1961 in Billericay, Essex, England) is an English science fiction writer. Both his parents are educators and science fiction fans. Although he began writing Science Fiction and Fantasy in secondary school, Asher did not turn seriously to writing till he was 25. He worked as a machinist and machine programmer from 1979 to 1987 and as a gardener from 1979 to 1987. He published his first short story in 1989. His novel Gridlinked was published in 2001, the first in a series of novels made up of Gridlinked, The Line of Polity, Brass Man, Polity Agent, and Line War.
The majority of Asher's novels and most of his short fiction are all set within one future history, known as the "Polity" universe. The Polity encompasses many classic science fiction tropes including world-ruling artificial intelligences, androids, hive minds and aliens. His novels are characterized by fast paced action and violent encounters. While his work is frequently epic in scope and thus nominally space opera, its graphic and aggressive tone is more akin to cyberpunk. When combined with the way that Asher's main characters are usually acting to preserve social order or improve their society (rather than disrupt a society they are estranged from), these influences could place his work in the subgenre known as postcyberpunk.
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Nizami Aruzi
Ahmad ibn Umar ibn Alī, known as Nizamī-i Arūzī-i Samarqandī (Persian: نظامی عروضی) and also Arudi ("The Prosodist"), was a Persian poet and prose writer who flourished between 1110 and 1161 AD. He is particularly famous for his Chahar Maqala ("Four Discourses"), his only work to fully survive.
Born in Samarqand, Aruzi spent most of his time in Khorasan and Transoxiana. He served as essentially a court-poet to the Ghaznavids for many years, and is considered one of the greatest of the Persian prose writers, though his poetry is considered inferior to his prose. All that is known of his personal life is gleaned from the Chahar Maqala itself. While he was primarily a courtier, he also noted in his book that he was an astronomer and physician as well. He reports in the work that he spent time not only in his native Samarqand, but also in Herat, Tus (where he visited Ferdowsi's tomb and gathered material on the great poet) Balkh, and Nishapur, where he lived for perhaps five years. He also claimed to have studied under the astronomer-poet Omar Khayyám, a native of Nishapour.
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Odd Nordstoga
Odd Nordstoga (born 1972) is a musician, actor and editor from Vinje in Telemark, Norway. In 2004, he went from relative obscurity to becoming the country's biggest selling recording artist, with the phenomenal success of his first solo album proper, "Luring". The album, a fusion of pop and Norwegian folk music, has sold more than 160,000 copies in Norway to date and earned him several Spellemannsprisen awards. For the album Strålande Jul, released together with Sissel Kyrkjebø, he won an unprecedented 11 Norwegian platinum trophies.
Nordstoga grew up at Plassen in Vinje, Telemark, the homestead of author Aasmund Olavsson Vinje. He hails from a hugely cultural family. His mother, Ellen Bojer Nordstoga is a renowned folk singer. His father, Olav Nordstoga is a folk singer, former politician and the chairman of the Vinje Literary Days. In addition, brother Aasmund Nordstoga has made a name for himself as a singer, dancer, actor and radio and TV presenter. Renowned organist Kåre Nordstoga is his second cousin.
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Omar Khayyám
Omar Khayyám (1048–1131; Persian: عمر خیام) was a Persian polymath: philosopher, mathematician, astronomer and poet. He also wrote treatises on mechanics, geography, mineralogy, music, climatology and Islamic theology.
Born in Nishapur, at a young age he moved to Samarkand and obtained his education there, afterwards he moved to Bukhara and became established as one of the major mathematicians and astronomers of the medieval period. He is the author of one of the most important treatises on algebra written before modern times, the Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra, which includes a geometric method for solving cubic equations by intersecting a hyperbola with a circle. He contributed to a calendar reform.
His significance as a philosopher and teacher, and his few remaining philosophical works, have not received the same attention as his scientific and poetic writings. Al-Zamakhshari referred to him as “the philosopher of the world”. Many sources have testified that he taught for decades the philosophy of Avicenna in Nishapur where Khayyám was born and buried and where his mausoleum today remains a masterpiece of Iranian architecture visited by many people every year.
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Roberto Vecchioni
Roberto Vecchioni (born 25 June 1943) is an Italian singer-songwriter and writer.
Vecchioni was born in Carate Brianza, province of Milan, to a family of Neapolitan origin. In 1968 he graduated in Classical Literature at the Università Cattolica of Milan, where he remained for two years as assistant lecturer of History of Religion. Later he become literature and history teacher in a Milanese High School, an activity he continues to this day.
His career in the Italian music industry began in the late 1960s as songwriter for Italian pop stars including Ornella Vanoni, Gigliola Cinquetti, Mina, Iva Zanicchi. His first solo album was Parabola of 1971. In 1973 he took part in the Sanremo Festival with "L'uomo che si gioca il cielo a dadi", continuing to release works as singer-songwriter in the following years. His 1974 LP, Il re non si diverte, obtained the Best Year's Album Award from the Italian musical critics. In 1976 he published his first commercial success, Elisir, but he gained public recognition only in the following year, with Samarcanda. With this work Vecchioni was acclaimed as one of the most skillful italian singer-songwriters: his inspiration draws mainly from autobiographical themes, intermingled with dreamy, literary and historical (often mythological) ones. His friend Angelo Branduardi played violin on the LP.
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Shapur I
Shapur I or also known as Shapur I the Great was the second Sassanid King of the Second Persian Empire. The dates of his reign are commonly given as 240/42 – 270/72, but it is likely that he also reigned as co-regent (together with his father) prior to his father's death in 242 (more probably than 240).
Shapur was the son of Ardashir I (r. 226–240 [died 242]), the founder of the Sassanid dynasty and whom Shapur succeeded. His mother was Lady Myrōd, who—according to legend—was an Arsacid princess. The Talmud cites a nickname for her, "Ifra Hurmiz", after her bewitching beauty.
Shapur accompanied his father's campaigns against the Parthians, who - at the time - still controlled much of the Iranian plateau through a system of vassal states that the Persian kingdom had itself previously been a part of. Before an assembly of magnates, Ardashir "judged him the gentlest, wisest, bravest and ablest of all his children" and nominated him as his successor. Shapur also appears as heir apparent in Ardashir's investiture inscriptions at Naqsh-e Rajab and Firuzabad. The Cologne Mani-Codex indicates that, by 240, Ardashir and Shapur were already reigning together. In a letter from Gordian III to his senate, dated to 242, the "Persian Kings" are referred to in the plural. Synarchy is also evident in the coins of this period that portray Ardashir facing his youthful son, and which are accompanied by a legend that indicates that Shapur was already referred to as king.
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Shaybanids
The Shaybanids (Persian: سلسله شیبانیان) were a Persianized dynasty of Mongolian origin in central Asia. They were the patrilineal descendants of Shiban, the fifth son of Jochi and grandson of Genghis Khan. Until the mid-14th century, they acknowledged the authority of the descendants of Batu Khan and Orda Khan, such as Uzbeg Khan. The Shaybanid horde was converted to Islam in 1282 and gradually assumed the name of Uzbeks.
As the lineages of Batu and Orda died out in the course of the great civil wars of the 14th century, the Shaybanids under Abu'l-Khayr Khan declared themselves the only legitimate successors to Jochi and put forward claims to the whole of his enormous ulus, which included parts of Siberia and Kazakhstan. Their rivals were the Timurids, who claimed descent from Jochi's thirteenth son by a concubine. Several decades of strife left the Timurids in control of the Great Horde and its successor states in Europe, namely, the Khanates of Kazan, Astrakhan, and Crimea.
Under Abu'l-Khayr Khan (who led the Shaybanids from 1428 to 1468), the dynasty began consolidating disparate Uzbek tribes, first in the area around Tyumen and the Tura River and then down into the Syr Darya region. His grandson Muhammad Shaybani (ruled 1500-10), who gave his name to the Shaybanid dynasty, wrested Samarkand, Herat (for a time) and Bukhara from Babur's control and established the short-lived Shaybanid Empire. After his death at the hands of Shah Ismail I, he was followed successively by an uncle, a cousin, and a brother, whose Shaybanid descendants would rule the Khanate of Bukhara from 1505 until 1598 and the Khanate of Khwarezm (Khiva) from 1511 until 1695.
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Sogdiana
Sogdiana or Sogdia ([pronunciation?]; Old Persian: Suguda-; Ancient Greek: Σογδιανή, Sogdianē; Persian: سغد Soġd; Tajik: Суғд, سغد Suġd; Uzbek: Sơģd; Chinese: 粟特 Sùtè) was the ancient civilization of an Iranian people and a province of the Achaemenid Empire, eighteenth in the list on the Behistun Inscription of Darius the Great (i. 16). Sogdiana is "listed" as the second of the "good lands and countries" that Ahura Mazda created. This region is listed second after Airyana Vaeja, Land of the Aryans, in the Zoroastrian book of Vendidad or "Videvdat", indicating the importance of this region from ancient times. Sogdiana, at different times, included territories around Samarkand, Bukhara, Khujand and Shahrisabz in modern Uzbekistan. The inhabitants of Sogdiana were the Sogdians, an Eastern Iranian people who are among the ancestors of modern-day Tajik, Pashun and Yaghnobi peoples.
The Sogdian states, although never politically united, were centered around the main city of Samarkand. Sogdiana lay north of Bactria, east of Khwarezm, and southeast of Kangju between the Oxus (Amu Darya) and the Jaxartes (Syr Darya), embracing the fertile valley of the Zeravshan (ancient Polytimetus). Sogdian territory corresponds to the modern provinces of Samarkand and Bokhara in modern Uzbekistan as well as the Sughd province of modern Tajikistan.
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Timur
Timur (Turkish: Demir "iron", Persian: تمور Timūr, Chagatai: Temür "iron"; 8 April 1336 – 18 February 1405), historically known as Tamerlane (from Persian: تيمور لنگ, Timūr-i Lang, Aksak Timur "Timur the Lame" in Turkish), was a Turkic, who conquered West, South and Central Asia, and the founder of the Timurid dynasty. He was the grandfather of Ulugh Beg, who ruled Central Asia from 1411 to 1449, and the great-great-grandfather of Babur, founder of the Mughal Empire, which ruled South Asia for centuries.
Timur envisioned the restoration of the Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan. Unlike his predecessors Timur was also a devout Muslim and referred to himself as the Sword of Islam. His armies were inclusively multi-ethnic and multicultural. During his lifetime Timur would emerge as the most powerful ruler in the Muslim world after defeating the formidable Mamluks of Egypt and Syria, the emerging Ottoman Empire and the declining Sultanate of Delhi; Timur had also decisively defeated the Knights Hospitaler at Smyrna and since then referred to himself as a Ghazi. By the end of his reign Timur had also gained complete suzerainty over all the remnants of the Chagatai Khanate, Ilkhanate, Golden Horde and even the Yuan Khanate.
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Turkic peoples
The Turkic peoples are a collection of ethnic groups that live in northern, central and western Asia, northwestern China and parts of eastern Europe. They speak languages belonging to the Turkic language family. They share, to varying degrees, certain cultural traits and historical backgrounds. The term Turkic represents a broad ethno-linguistic group of people including existing societies such as the Turkish, Azerbaijani, Chuvashes, Kazakhs, Tatars, Kyrgyzs, Turkmens, Uyghurs, Uzbeks, Bashkirs, Qashqai, Gagauzs, Yakuts, Crimean Karaites, Krymchaks, Karakalpaks, Karachays, Nogais and as well as past civilizations such as the Göktürks, Kumans, Kipchaks, Avars, Bulgars, Turgeshes, Khazars, Seljuk Turks, Ottoman Turks, Mamluks, Timurids and possibly Huns and the Xiongnu.
The distribution of people of Turkic cultural background ranges from Siberia, across Central Asia, to Eastern Europe. As of 2011[update] the largest groups of Turkic people live throughout Central Asia—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Azerbaijan, in addition to Turkey and Iran. Additionally, Turkic people are found within Crimea, East Turkistan region of western China, northern Iraq, Pakistan, Israel, Russia, Afghanistan, and the Balkans: Moldova, Bulgaria, Romania, and former Yugoslavia. A small number of Turkic people also live in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. Small numbers inhabit eastern Poland and the south-eastern part of Finland. There are also considerable populations of Turkic people (originating mostly from Turkey) in Germany, United States, and Australia, largely because of migrations during the 20th century.
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Ulugh Beg
Ulugh Beg (Uzbek: Muhammad Tarag'ay Ulug'beg, Муҳаммад Тарағай Улуғбек; Persian: میرزا محمد طارق بن شاہرخ الغبیگ – Mīrzā Muhammad Tāraghay bin Shāhrukh Uluġ Beg) (March 22, 1394 in Sultaniyeh (Persia) – October 27, 1449 (Samarkand)) was a Timurid ruler as well as an astronomer, mathematician and sultan. His commonly-known name is not truly a personal name, but rather a moniker, which can be loosely translated as "Great Ruler" or "Patriarch Ruler" and was the Turkic equivalent of Timur's Perso-Arabic title Amīr-e Kabīr. His real name was Mīrzā Mohammad Tāraghay bin Shāhrokh. Ulugh Beg was also notable for his work in astronomy-related mathematics, such as trigonometry and spherical geometry. Being an genius astronomer he built the great Ulugh Beg Observatory in Samarkand between 1424 and 1429. It was considered by scholars to have been one of the finest observatories in the Islamic world at the time and the largest in Central Asia. He also build the Ulugh Beg Madrasah (1417–1420) in Samarkand and Bukhara, transforming the cities into cultural center of learning in Central Asia. He was also a mathematics genius of the 15th century — albeit his mental aptitude was perseverance rather than any unusual endowment of intellect. He ruled Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, southern Kazakhstan for almost half an century from 1411 to 1449 and occupied the Herat province in Afghanistan for an short time in 1448.
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Uzbek language
Uzbek (O‘zbek tili or O‘zbekcha in Latin script, Ўзбек тили or Ўзбекча in Cyrillic script; اوزبیک تیلی or اوزبیکچه in Arabic script) is a Turkic language and the official language of Uzbekistan. It has about 40 million native speakers, and it is spoken by the Uzbeks in Uzbekistan and elsewhere in Central Asia. Uzbek belongs to the southeastern Turkic or Uyghur family of Turkic languages, and consequently its lexicon and grammar are most closely linked to the Uyghur language, while other influences rose from Persian, Arabic and Russian.
One of the most distinguishing aspects of Uzbek from other Turkic languages is its rounding of the vowel /a/ to /ɒ/ or /ɔ/, a feature influenced by Persian.
Turkic speakers have probably settled in the Amu-Darya, Syr-Darya and Zeravshan river basins since at least AD 600–700, gradually ousting or assimilating the speakers of Eastern Iranian languages who previously inhabited Soghdiana, Bactria and Chorasmia. The first Turkic dynasty in the region was that of the Karakhanids in the 9th–12th centuries AD, who were a confederation of Karluks (Qarluq), Chigil, Yaghma and other tribes.
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Wole Soyinka
Akinwande Oluwole "Wole" Soyinka (born 13 July 1934) is a Nigerian writer, notable especially as a playwright and poet; he was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first African in Africa and the diaspora to be so honoured.
Soyinka was born into a Yoruba family in Abeokuta. After study in Nigeria and the UK, he worked with the Royal Court Theatre in London. He went on to write plays that were produced in both countries, in theatres and on radio. He took an active role in Nigeria's political history and its struggle for independence from Great Britain. In 1965, he seized the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Service studio and broadcast a demand for the cancellation of the Western Nigeria Regional Elections. In 1967 during the Nigerian Civil War, he was arrested by the federal government of General Yakubu Gowon and put in solitary confinement for two years.
Soyinka has strongly criticized many Nigerian military dictators, as well as other political tyrannies, including the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. Much of his writing has been concerned with "the oppressive boot and the irrelevance of the colour of the foot that wears it".[citation needed] During the regime of General Sani Abacha (1993–1998), Soyinka escaped from Nigeria via the "Nadeco Route" on motorcycle. Living abroad, mainly in the United States, he was a professor first at Cornell University and then at Emory University in Atlanta, where in 1996 he was appointed Robert W. Woodruff Professor of the Arts. Abacha proclaimed a death sentence against him "in absentia". With civilian rule restored to Nigeria in 1999, Soyinka returned to his nation. He has also taught at Oxford, Harvard and Yale.
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The silk road city of Samarkand
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:53
- Updated: 26 Dec 2012
2002 Visit of / Visite de / Besuch von / Visita de / Chiamata di de Samarkande (ouzbekistan) / Samarkand (uzbekistan) Semerkand / Самарқанд / Samarkand / の訪問 / زياره سمرقند / 访问萨马尔罕 / Samarkand / 의 방문 Samarkand (Greek: Marakanda) is one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world, prospering from its location on the (Silk Road) trade route between China and Europe. At times Samarkand has been the greatest city of Central Asia, and for much of its history it has been under Persian rule. Founded circa 700 BCE it was already the capital of the Sogdian satrapy under the Achaemenid dynasty of Persia when Alexander the Great conquered it in 329 BCE (see Afrasiab, Sogdiana). Under Sassanid Empire of Persia, Samarkand flourished and became one of the most important cities of the Persian empire. Under Abbasid rule, the secret of papermaking was obtained from two Chinese prisoners from the Battle of Talas in 751, which led to the first paper mill in the Islamic world to be founded in Samarkand. The invention then spread to the rest of the Islamic world, and from there to Europe (either through Spain or through crusaders). From the 6th to 13th centuries it grew larger and more populous than modern Samarkand and was controlled by the Western Turks, Arabs (who converted the area to Islam), Persian Samanids, Karakhan Turks, Seljuk Turks, Karakitay, and Khorezmshah before being sacked by the Mongols in 1220. A small part of the population survived, but Samarkand suffered at ...
http://wn.com/The_silk_road_city_of_Samarkand
2002 Visit of / Visite de / Besuch von / Visita de / Chiamata di de Samarkande (ouzbekistan) / Samarkand (uzbekistan) Semerkand / Самарқанд / Samarkand / の訪問 / زياره سمرقند / 访问萨马尔罕 / Samarkand / 의 방문 Samarkand (Greek: Marakanda) is one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world, prospering from its location on the (Silk Road) trade route between China and Europe. At times Samarkand has been the greatest city of Central Asia, and for much of its history it has been under Persian rule. Founded circa 700 BCE it was already the capital of the Sogdian satrapy under the Achaemenid dynasty of Persia when Alexander the Great conquered it in 329 BCE (see Afrasiab, Sogdiana). Under Sassanid Empire of Persia, Samarkand flourished and became one of the most important cities of the Persian empire. Under Abbasid rule, the secret of papermaking was obtained from two Chinese prisoners from the Battle of Talas in 751, which led to the first paper mill in the Islamic world to be founded in Samarkand. The invention then spread to the rest of the Islamic world, and from there to Europe (either through Spain or through crusaders). From the 6th to 13th centuries it grew larger and more populous than modern Samarkand and was controlled by the Western Turks, Arabs (who converted the area to Islam), Persian Samanids, Karakhan Turks, Seljuk Turks, Karakitay, and Khorezmshah before being sacked by the Mongols in 1220. A small part of the population survived, but Samarkand suffered at ...
Samarkand 2012
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:44
- Updated: 28 Dec 2012
Update of the city. visit my blog samarkandancient.blogspot.com
http://wn.com/Samarkand_2012
Update of the city. visit my blog samarkandancient.blogspot.com
- published: 16 Apr 2012
- views: 26697
- author: morhash0
Magdalena Released From Shame -Samarkand Tajik Dialect
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 78:59
- Updated: 05 Dec 2012
The Story of Isa's life and teachings narrated by Marium Magdalena who lived and witnessed Isa while he was walking the Earth.
http://wn.com/Magdalena_Released_From_Shame_-Samarkand_Tajik_Dialect
The Story of Isa's life and teachings narrated by Marium Magdalena who lived and witnessed Isa while he was walking the Earth.
- published: 06 Feb 2012
- views: 2760
- author: TajikWomen
Amuk - Samarkand
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:33
- Updated: 12 Dec 2012
original artis bloodshed! best lgu nieh.. download lagendarockmp3.blogspot.com komen o msg snie www.myspace.com
http://wn.com/Amuk_Samarkand
original artis bloodshed! best lgu nieh.. download lagendarockmp3.blogspot.com komen o msg snie www.myspace.com
- published: 19 Apr 2009
- views: 24325
- author: rockersmalaya07
BBC - In the footsteps of Alexander (Samarkand) 18
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:21
- Updated: 23 Dec 2012
In thefootsteps of Alexander the Great In this award winning adventure Micheal Wood embarks on a 2000 mile journey in the foot steps of Alexander's triumphal march from Greece to India. Travelling with Lebanese traders, Iranian pilgrims and Afghan guerillas, by jeep, train, boat, camel and on foot, he interweaves the momentous events of the past with present day reality and brings us new insights into a man whose myth and acheivements still resonate down the centuries. "We saw things I can scarcely believe. We took shelter for the night with an Afghan warlord who had delivered pizzas in the United States, and were hauled off to jail more than once. It was one of the great experiences of my life" - Michael Wood lexander then set off in pursuit of Darius again, first into Media, and then Parthia.[94] The Persian king was no longer in control of his destiny, having been taken prisoner by Bessus, his Bactrian satrap and kinsman.[95] As Alexander approached, Bessus had his men fatally stab the Great King and then declared himself Darius' successor as Artaxerxes V, before retreating into Central Asia to launch a guerrilla campaign against Alexander.[96] Darius' remains were buried by Alexander next to his Achaemenid predecessors in a full regal funeral.[97] Alexander claimed that, while dying, Darius had named him as his successor to the Achaemenid throne.[98] The Achaemenid Empire is normally considered to have fallen with the death of Darius.[99] Silver coin of Alexander ...
http://wn.com/BBC_In_the_footsteps_of_Alexander_Samarkand_18
In thefootsteps of Alexander the Great In this award winning adventure Micheal Wood embarks on a 2000 mile journey in the foot steps of Alexander's triumphal march from Greece to India. Travelling with Lebanese traders, Iranian pilgrims and Afghan guerillas, by jeep, train, boat, camel and on foot, he interweaves the momentous events of the past with present day reality and brings us new insights into a man whose myth and acheivements still resonate down the centuries. "We saw things I can scarcely believe. We took shelter for the night with an Afghan warlord who had delivered pizzas in the United States, and were hauled off to jail more than once. It was one of the great experiences of my life" - Michael Wood lexander then set off in pursuit of Darius again, first into Media, and then Parthia.[94] The Persian king was no longer in control of his destiny, having been taken prisoner by Bessus, his Bactrian satrap and kinsman.[95] As Alexander approached, Bessus had his men fatally stab the Great King and then declared himself Darius' successor as Artaxerxes V, before retreating into Central Asia to launch a guerrilla campaign against Alexander.[96] Darius' remains were buried by Alexander next to his Achaemenid predecessors in a full regal funeral.[97] Alexander claimed that, while dying, Darius had named him as his successor to the Achaemenid throne.[98] The Achaemenid Empire is normally considered to have fallen with the death of Darius.[99] Silver coin of Alexander ...
- published: 02 Aug 2007
- views: 53829
- author: alexandros1821
samarkand 2011 uzbekistan
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:54
- Updated: 06 Aug 2012
samarkand
http://wn.com/samarkand_2011_uzbekistan
Samarkand - City of Amir Temur
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:01
- Updated: 25 Dec 2012
Samarkand video shows historical monuments of the city and other tourist attractions. See more info on Samarkand at www.advantour.com
http://wn.com/Samarkand_City_of_Amir_Temur
Samarkand video shows historical monuments of the city and other tourist attractions. See more info on Samarkand at www.advantour.com
- published: 05 Jun 2011
- views: 18956
- author: advantourcom
Samarkand
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:04
- Updated: 28 Dec 2012
samarkandancient.blogspot.com
http://wn.com/Samarkand
Samarkand - Bloodshed
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:58
- Updated: 27 Dec 2012
rock purba kala
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Lola - Tashkent Samarkand
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:02
- Updated: 11 Dec 2012
Uzbek music video with nice scenery of Uzbekistan.
http://wn.com/Lola_Tashkent_Samarkand
Uzbek music video with nice scenery of Uzbekistan.
- published: 04 Jul 2006
- views: 141305
- author: Rubaru
Bachoyi Samarkand
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:53
- Updated: 05 Oct 2012
uzbek boy samarkaqnd behzod jurayev
http://wn.com/Bachoyi_Samarkand
Samarkand 2011
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:52
- Updated: 28 Dec 2012
New city of Samarkand, Uzbekistan 2011 Visit my blog samarkandancient.blogspot.com
http://wn.com/Samarkand_2011
New city of Samarkand, Uzbekistan 2011 Visit my blog samarkandancient.blogspot.com
- published: 03 Feb 2011
- views: 41709
- author: morhash0
The Samarkand Run ~ Al Gromer Khan
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 6:45
- Updated: 21 Dec 2012
Song: The Samarkand Run. Artist: Al Gromer Khan. Album: Space Hotel. iTunes: itunes.apple.com Myspace: www.ilike.com . Top albums on Amazon by Al Gromer Khan and sample music: www.amazon.com Al Gromer Khan is a German-born sitar player and composer whose music spans the multiple genres of ambient, New Age, world and electronica. Al Gromer Khan's ultimate musical awakening came during a trip to India in 1968, at a recital by sitarist Ustad Vilayat Khan. Gromer Khan professes to have been so moved by the performance that he instantly decided to devote his life to the study of the sitar. He remained in India, where he was to find a powerful teacher in Vilayat Khan's brother, Ustad Imrat Khan. Gromer Khan remained in India for the next three years, speed-learning his instrument at the feet of his guru. He returned to Bavaria in 1971, already an accomplished sitarist. Gromer Khan spent the next 10 years studying with Imrat Khan in Europe and India. In 1975, his teacher performed the Ghanda Ceremony, thus initiating Al Gromer into the Khan-I-Gharana lineage of sitarists. He was the first outsider to be accepted into this particular Gharana, which like most Hindustani musical traditions, passes knowledge down the generations from father to son. After his initiation, Al Gromer added "Khan" to his name. Read more here: en.wikipedia.org DISCLAIMER! - I DO NOT OWN THE MUSIC IN THIS VIDEO! THE RIGHTS TO OWNERSHIP OF THE MUSIC IN THIS VIDEO GOES TO ITS RIGHTFUL OWNER!
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Song: The Samarkand Run. Artist: Al Gromer Khan. Album: Space Hotel. iTunes: itunes.apple.com Myspace: www.ilike.com . Top albums on Amazon by Al Gromer Khan and sample music: www.amazon.com Al Gromer Khan is a German-born sitar player and composer whose music spans the multiple genres of ambient, New Age, world and electronica. Al Gromer Khan's ultimate musical awakening came during a trip to India in 1968, at a recital by sitarist Ustad Vilayat Khan. Gromer Khan professes to have been so moved by the performance that he instantly decided to devote his life to the study of the sitar. He remained in India, where he was to find a powerful teacher in Vilayat Khan's brother, Ustad Imrat Khan. Gromer Khan remained in India for the next three years, speed-learning his instrument at the feet of his guru. He returned to Bavaria in 1971, already an accomplished sitarist. Gromer Khan spent the next 10 years studying with Imrat Khan in Europe and India. In 1975, his teacher performed the Ghanda Ceremony, thus initiating Al Gromer into the Khan-I-Gharana lineage of sitarists. He was the first outsider to be accepted into this particular Gharana, which like most Hindustani musical traditions, passes knowledge down the generations from father to son. After his initiation, Al Gromer added "Khan" to his name. Read more here: en.wikipedia.org DISCLAIMER! - I DO NOT OWN THE MUSIC IN THIS VIDEO! THE RIGHTS TO OWNERSHIP OF THE MUSIC IN THIS VIDEO GOES TO ITS RIGHTFUL OWNER!
- published: 25 Feb 2011
- views: 8365
- author: Aetopus
bond - Road to samarkand
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:27
- Updated: 26 Dec 2012
New track from Bond's new Album "Play"
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New track from Bond's new Album "Play"
- published: 25 Jul 2011
- views: 34453
- author: Alberto De Los Rios
Samarkand tuy XURSHED IRODA
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:46
- Updated: 17 Jul 2012
http://wn.com/Samarkand_tuy_XURSHED_IRODA
Uzbekistan: Bazaar in Samarkand
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:16
- Updated: 27 Dec 2012
Travel in Uzbekistan in 2007
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Märkte und Menschen: Markt in Samarkand
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 6:34
- Updated: 23 Sep 2012
Der Markt in Samarkand
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BLOODSHED - Samarkand
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:59
- Updated: 26 Dec 2012
www.rockapak.org
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Samarkand Avrom Tolmasov classik song 8/1987
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:00
- Updated: 17 Nov 2012
http://wn.com/Samarkand_Avrom_Tolmasov_classik_song_8_1987
Samarkand o Bukhara-Afzalshah Shodiev www.Tajikam.com
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:39
- Updated: 09 Dec 2012
www.Tajikam.com Afghanistan mabaad, Khorasan zendabaad. death to fraudulent name of afghanistan and long live khorasan. The name Afghanistan was fabricated and imposed by the British on Khurasan / Khorasan Zameen. Greater Khorasan consisted of Tajikistan, Samarqand Bukhara, Balkh, Takhar,...
http://wn.com/Samarkand_o_Bukhara-Afzalshah_Shodiev_wwwTajikamcom
www.Tajikam.com Afghanistan mabaad, Khorasan zendabaad. death to fraudulent name of afghanistan and long live khorasan. The name Afghanistan was fabricated and imposed by the British on Khurasan / Khorasan Zameen. Greater Khorasan consisted of Tajikistan, Samarqand Bukhara, Balkh, Takhar,...
- published: 27 Feb 2008
- views: 10505
- author: Khurramdinan
AVRAM TOLMASOV - SAMARKAND
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:51
- Updated: 25 Dec 2012
WWW.AVRAHAMTOLMASOV.COM
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Vagif Mustafazadeh & Hajibaba Huseinov - "Samarkand ornamentation"
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 8:09
- Updated: 25 Nov 2012
Vagif Mustafazadeh & Hajibaba Huseinov - "Samarkand ornamentation"
http://wn.com/Vagif_Mustafazadeh_Hajibaba_Huseinov_Samarkand_ornamentation
Vagif Mustafazadeh & Hajibaba Huseinov - "Samarkand ornamentation"
- published: 27 Oct 2009
- views: 9444
- author: fgibson100
photo: US Navy / HMC Josh Ives
27 Dec 2012
Imperial adventures are nothing new in the Middle East. Neither is their glorification, as Peter O’Toole’s pained Lawrence of Arabia eternally reminds us. But for a decade or so now, things have been heating up, as if to coincide with climate change and fears of declining petroleum reserves ... The Belly for Belligerence? ... The question loomed over beltway intelligentsia like an ephemeral Gordian knot ... We’re All Hawks Now ... While George W ... ....(size: 9.3Kb)
photo: WN / Janice Sabnal
27 Dec 2012
Washington. Six people, including two young children, were left dead in weather-related accidents, as winter snowstorms complicated travel for many Americans in the Midwest and Northeast on Wednesday. Snow totals in parts of Indiana ranged from 6 to 12 inches, CNN reported. About 350 snowploughs were clearing roads throughout the city. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo told residents they should avoid nonessential travel ... IANS ... ....(size: 2.2Kb)
photo: AP / Ben Curtis
28 Dec 2012
The president of Central African Republic (CAR) has urgently called on France and other foreign powers to help his government fend off rebels who are quickly seizing territory and approaching the capital. Speaking to crowds in Bangui, a city of some 600,000, Francois Bozize on Thursday pleaded with foreign powers to do what they could. He pointed in particular to France, Central African Republic's former colonial ruler ... 516 Share ... News ... ....(size: 19.5Kb)
photo: AP / K.M.Chaudary
27 Dec 2012
Large crowds of Pakistan People's Party (PPP) supporters are gathering to mark the fifth anniversary of the murder of ex-Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Ms Bhutto died in a gun and bomb attack during her 2007 election campaign. Hundreds of thousands of people have set up camp near the Bhutto family's ancestral home in Sindh province ... He cannot contest an election until his 25th birthday. Show of strength ... ....(size: 2.4Kb)
photo: AP / Khalil Hamra, File
26 Dec 2012
Cairo • The official approval of Egypt’s disputed, Islamist-backed constitution Tuesday held out little hope of stabilizing the country after two years of turmoil and Islamist President Mohammed Morsi may now face a more immediate crisis with the economy falling deeper into distress ... Join the Discussion. The battle over the constitution left Egypt deeply polarized at a time when the government is increasingly cash-strapped ... The U.S ... " ... ....(size: 5.7Kb)
Deccan Herald
28 Dec 2012
Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia may well be regarded as the patron Saint of Delhi. His ever-lasting message to all who look on Delhi with evil eyes “Hunooz Dilli Door Ast - Delhi is still a long way away”, can never be forgotten. A recent publication highlights his message ... I give a few extracts from her biography ... Muinuddin was fifty years old when he came to South Asia from the Persian lands of Samarkand and Bukhara in 1192 ... ....(size: 4.9Kb)
noodls
26 Dec 2012
(Source. Government of Republic of Uzbekistan). 26.12.2012 ... Deputy Chairman of the Uzbekenergo board R ... Seven investment projects amounting to 239.13 million US dollars are being carried out with the assistance of the Fund for Reconstruction and Development of Uzbekistan ... In September 2012 220 kV high-voltage line among Choponota - Sogdiana - Beaubourg substations were put into operation in Jambay district of Samarkand region....(size: 4.3Kb)
photo: WN / Imran Nissar
24 Dec 2012
Tweet. Srinagar, Dec.24 (ANI). Christmas has proved to be a boon for papier mache artisans in Kashmir, as they are doing brisk business ... As the festival knocks the door, the artisans are giving final touches to various decorative items ... The art originated in Persia and was brought to Kashmir in the 15th century by a Kashmiri prince who spent some years in a prison in Samarkand in Central Asia, and was favoured by the Mughal rulers ... (ANI)....(size: 3.6Kb)
The Daily Telegraph
19 Dec 2012
PREVIOUS. 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20. MORE... 40. Samarkand, Uzbekistan. Found on the Silk Road, halfway between China and Europe, Samarkand has long been considered a melting pot of the world's cultures ... Cheaper alternative?. Istanbul is another city which straddles two cultures, and it is cheaper and easier to visit. Picture. ALAMY. . Comments on this gallery. telegraphuk ... blog comments powered by Disqus ... ....(size: 9.7Kb)
Joystiq
19 Dec 2012
Mechwarrior Online's final update of 2012 is Conquest Mode, allowing players to capture locations in the Inner Sphere ... See the pics and video right in here ... Show full PR text ... Born on New Samarkand and part of a noble family, they attended the Sun Zhang MechWarrior Academy together; upon graduation, each was given a Dragon – to Martin, a DRG-1C belonging to his grandmother, and to Donald, a DRG-1N that belonged to their father ... ....(size: 6.1Kb)
The Examiner
17 Dec 2012
965 of the Common Era, Kiev. Also see Part 2 of this story. And if you'd like to read more of a story like this one as a novel, check out my published paperback fiction book or also in the Kindle edition, Adventures in my Beloved Medieval Alania and Beyond. "Deliver these Torah Scrolls by Hanukkah," the rabbi from Constantinople eagerly committed ... I promise." ... # ... Is this not the face of a pilgrim from Samarkand or a Pharaoh of the Nile?" ... ....(size: 28.2Kb)
The Gleaner
12 Dec 2012
Paul Clarke, Gleaner Writer. WESTERN BUREAU.. Former Jamaica tennis star, Dustin Brown, returns to the island after a five-year absence to play in an exhibition match at the Royal DeCameron Tennis Club in Montego Bay on Sunday ... An exciting matchup ... Brown has won several tournaments in Europe, including Romerberg, Germany, in July 2007; Trier, Germany - June 2008; Vaduz, Liechtenstein - March 2009; Samarkand, Uzbekistan - August 2009 ... ....(size: 2.3Kb)
The Observer
09 Dec 2012
Apple strudel. Photograph. Romas Foord for Observer Food Monthly ... To me they trigger childhood memories of Cairo. The Book of Jewish Food. An Odyssey from Samarkand and Vilna to the Present Day by Claudia Roden Buy it from the Guardian bookshop Search the Guardian bookshop Tell us what you think. Star-rate and review this book ... Then family members got together for the cooking ... At Rosh Hashanah, it is to bring all that one hopes for ... Share ... ....(size: 11.8Kb)
BBC News
04 Dec 2012
Yet in many ways this Tartar warlord, born near Samarkand in 1336 in what is now Uzbekistan, outshone both the Macedonian king and the Mongol warlord ... By the time he faced the Ottoman Sultan Bayazid I on the battlefield in 1402, his soldiers came from the length and breadth of his empire, from Armenia to Afghanistan, Samarkand to Siberia ... The Gur Emir Mausoleum in Samarkand holds Tamerlane's tomb....(size: 7.3Kb)
noodls
01 Dec 2012
... agencies, such measures are being taken also in Samarkand region like in all regions of the country ... Practical tactical trainings have been conducted at the Samarkand City Medical Association, Samarkand International Airport and other institutions In order to improve the professional training of fire safety employees....(size: 2.0Kb)
noodls
29 Nov 2012
29.11.2012 ... Faculty of International Tourism of the Tashkent State University of Economics, Samarkand Institute of Economics and Service, Management Development Institute of Singapore in Tashkent and College of Tourism in Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva train specialists in areas such as tourism marketing and management, service, international tourism, hotel and restaurant business ... distributed by ... (noodl. 16774839) ....(size: 3.8Kb)
"Gymnastics for All" Open Championship of Uzbekistan was Held (Government of Republic of Uzbekistan)
noodls28 Nov 2012
28.11.2012. The open championship of Uzbekistan in "Gymnastics for All" took place at Sports Palace "Universal" ... According to the results of two day competitions, the teams of Tashkent city, the Republic of Karakalpakstan and Tashkent, Samarkand, Navoi, Kashkadarya, Jizzakh regions became winners in various nominations ... distributed by ... It was distributed, unedited and unaltered, by noodls on 2012-11-28 08.50.15 CET....(size: 3.5Kb)
noodls
27 Nov 2012
The representatives of the Law Faculty of the Samarkand State University have also made speech about the features of the constitutions of the various countries of the world and their experience, as well as the foundations of our national laws....(size: 1.9Kb)
Coordinates: 39°39′15″N 66°57′35″E / 39.65417°N 66.95972°E / 39.65417; 66.95972
| سمرقند Samarkand Samarqand / Самарқанд |
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|---|---|---|---|
 |
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 سمرقند Samarkand
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| Coordinates: 39°39′15″N 66°57′35″E / 39.65417°N 66.95972°E / 39.65417; 66.95972 | |||
| Country |  Uzbekistan |
||
| Province | Samarqand Province | ||
| Elevation | 702 m (2,303 ft) | ||
| Population (2008) | |||
| • City | 596,300 | ||
| • Urban | 643,970 | ||
| • Metro | 708,000 | ||
Samarkand (Tajik: Самарқанд; Persian: سمرقند; Uzbek: Samarqand; from Sogdian: "Stone Fort" or "Rock Town") is the second-largest city in Uzbekistan and the capital of Samarqand Province. The city is most noted for its central position on the Silk Road between China and the West, and for being an Islamic centre for scholarly study. In the 14th century it became the capital of the empire of Timur (Tamerlane) and is the site of his mausoleum (the Gur-e Amir). The Bibi-Khanym Mosque remains one of the city's most notable landmarks. The Registan was the ancient center of the city.
In 2001, UNESCO added the city to its World Heritage List as Samarkand – Crossroads of Cultures.
Contents |
Etymology[link]
The city was known by an abbreviated name of Marakanda when Alexander the Great took it in 332BC. There are various theories of how Marakanda evolved into Samarkanda/Samarkan. One derives the name from the Old Persian asmara, "stone", "rock", and Sogdian kand, "fort", "town".[1] Others less convincingly derive the name from the old Turkic "Semiz-Kent" meaning "Rich City".[citation needed]. Since the name Marakanda was already in existence 2300 years ago and long before anyone had heard of Turks in that region of Transoxiana, this version is likely a folk etymology.
Population[link]
The population of Samarkand grew from 134,346 in 1939[2] to 384,000 in 2005. Around 10 percent of Samarkand population is Tajik and speak Persian.[citation needed]
History[link]
Along with Bukhara,[3] Samarkand is one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world, prospering from its location on the trade route between China and the Mediterranean (Silk Road). At times Samarkand has been one of the greatest cities of Central Asia.
Early history[link]
Founded circa 700 BC by the Sogdians, Samarkand has been one of the main centres of Persian civilization from its early days. It was already the capital of the Sogdian satrapy under the Achaemenid dynasty of Persia when Alexander the Great conquered it in 329 BC. The Greeks referred to Samarkand as Maracanda.[4]
| Samarkand – Crossroads of Culture * | |
|---|---|
 Bibi-Khanym Mausoleum |
|
| Country | Uzbekistan |
| Type | Cultural |
| Criteria | i, ii, iv |
| Reference | 603 |
| Region ** | Asia-Pacific |
| Inscription history | |
| Inscription | 2001 (25th Session) |
| * Name as inscribed on World Heritage List ** Region as classified by UNESCO |
|
Although a Persian-speaking region, it was not united politically with Iran most of the times between the disintegration of the Seleucid Empire and the Arab conquest (except at the time of early Sassanids, such as Shapur I).[5] In the 6th century it was within the domain of the Turkic kingdom of the Göktürks.[6]
At the start of the 8th century Samarkand came under Arab control. Under Abbasid rule, the legend goes,[7] the secret of papermaking was obtained from two Chinese prisoners from the Battle of Talas in 751, which led to the first paper mill in the Islamic world being founded in Samarkand. The invention then spread to the rest of the Islamic world, and from there to Europe.
From the 6th to the 13th century it grew larger and more populous than modern Samarkand[citation needed] and was controlled by the Western Turks, Arabs (who converted the area to Islam), Persian Samanids, Kara-Khanid Turks, Seljuk Turks, Kara-Khitan, and Khorezmshah before the Mongols arrived in 1220.
Although Genghis Khan "did not disturb the inhabitants [of the city] in any way," according to Juvaini he killed all who took refuge in the citadel and the mosque. He also pillaged the city completely and conscripted 30,000 young men along with 30,000 craftsmen. Samarkand suffered at least one other Mongol sack by Khan Baraq to get treasure he needed to pay an army. The town took many decades to recover from these disasters.
The Travels of Marco Polo, where Polo records his journey along the Silk Road, describes Samarkand as a "a very large and splendid city..." Here also is related the story of a Christian church in Samarkand, which miraculously remained standing after a portion of its central supporting column was removed.
14th century[link]
In 1365, a revolt against Mongol control occurred in Samarkand.[8]
In 1370, Timur the Lame decided to make Samarkand the capital of his empire, which extended from India to Turkey. During the next 35 years he built a new city and populated it with artisans and craftsmen from all of the places he had conquered. Timur gained a reputation as a patron of the arts and Samarkand grew to become the centre of the region of Transoxiana. During this time the city had a population of about 150,000.[9]
15th century[link]
Between 1424 and 1429, the great astronomer Ulugh Beg built the Samarkand Observatory. The sextant was 11 metres long and once rose to the top of the surrounding three-storey structure, although it was kept underground to protect it from earthquakes. Calibrated along its length, it was the world’s largest 90-degree quadrant at the time.[10] However, the observatory was destroyed by religious fanatics in 1449.[10]
Modern history[link]
See also: Russian Turkestan
 |
This article is outdated. Please update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information. Please see the talk page for more information. (November 2011) |
In 1500 the Uzbek nomadic warriors took control of Samarkand.[9] The Shaybanids emerged as the Uzbek leaders at or about this time.
In the second quarter of 16th century, the Shaybanids moved their capital to Bukhara and Samarkand went into decline. After an assault by the Persian king, Nadir Shah, the city was abandoned in the 18th century, about 1720 or a few years later.[11]
From 1599 to 1756, Samarkand was ruled by the Ashtarkhanid dynasty of Bukhara.
From 1756 to 1868, Samarkand was ruled by the Manghyt emirs of Bukhara.[2]
The city came under Russian rule after the citadel had been taken by a force under Colonel Konstantin Petrovich von Kaufman in 1868. Shortly thereafter the small Russian garrison of 500 men were themselves besieged. The assault, which was led by Abdul Malik Tura, the rebellious elder son of the Bukharan Emir, and Bek of Shahrisabz, was beaten off with heavy losses. Alexander Abramov, became the first Governor of the Military Okrug which the Russians established along the course of the Zeravshan River, with Samarkand as the administrative centre. The Russian section of the city was built after this point, largely to the west of the old city.
In 1886 the city became the capital of the newly formed Samarkand Oblast of Russian Turkestan and grew in importance still further when the Trans-Caspian railway reached the city in 1888. It became the capital of the Uzbek SSR in 1925 before being replaced by Tashkent in 1930.
Main sights[link]
- The Registan, one of the most relevant examples of Islamic architecture. It consists of three separate buildings:
- Madrasa of Ulugh Beg (1417–1420)
- Sher-Dor Madrasah (Lions Gate) (1619–1635/36).
- Tilya-Kori Madrasah (1647–1659/60).
- Bibi-Khanym Mosque (replica)
- Gur-e Amir Mausoleum (1404)
- Observatory of Ulugh Beg (1428–1429)
- Shah-i-Zinda necropolis
- Historical site of Afrasiyab (13th–7th centuries BC)
Climate[link]
Samarkand features a semi-arid climate (Köppen climate classification BSk) with hot, dry summers and relatively wet, cool winters. July and August are the hottest months of the year with temperatures reaching, and exceeding, 40 °C (104 °F). Most of the sparse precipitation is received from December through April.[12]
| Climate data for Samarkand | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Month | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | Year |
| Average high °C (°F) | 6.1 (43.0) |
7.9 (46.2) |
13.5 (56.3) |
20.8 (69.4) |
26.4 (79.5) |
32.0 (89.6) |
33.8 (92.8) |
32.2 (90.0) |
27.9 (82.2) |
21.0 (69.8) |
14.9 (58.8) |
9.2 (48.6) |
20.5 (68.9) |
| Daily mean °C (°F) | 0.6 (33.1) |
2.2 (36.0) |
7.8 (46.0) |
14.5 (58.1) |
19.5 (67.1) |
24.5 (76.1) |
26.2 (79.2) |
24.2 (75.6) |
19.3 (66.7) |
12.7 (54.9) |
7.5 (45.5) |
3.3 (37.9) |
13.5 (56.3) |
| Average low °C (°F) | −3.3 (26.1) |
−1.4 (29.5) |
3.2 (37.8) |
8.9 (48.0) |
12.7 (54.9) |
16.4 (61.5) |
17.8 (64.0) |
15.9 (60.6) |
11.2 (52.2) |
6.0 (42.8) |
2.0 (35.6) |
−0.9 (30.4) |
7.4 (45.3) |
| Precipitation mm (inches) | 44 (1.73) |
39 (1.54) |
71 (2.8) |
63 (2.48) |
33 (1.3) |
4 (0.16) |
4 (0.16) |
0 (0) |
4 (0.16) |
24 (0.94) |
28 (1.1) |
41 (1.61) |
355 (13.98) |
| Source: Hong Kong Observatory[13] | |||||||||||||
Notable people[link]
- Amoghavajra, 8th century Buddhist monk, translator of Vajrayana scripture, figure in the Tang court, remembered as one of the three founders of Chinese esoteric Buddhism.
- Abu Mansur Maturidi, Sunni theologist of the 10th century
- Omar Khayyám, poet and mathmatician of the 11th century
- Nizami Aruzi Samarqandi, poet and writer of the 12th century
- Suzani Samarqandi, poet of the 12th century
- Najib ad-Din-e-Samarqandi, scholar of the 13th century
- Jamshīd al-Kāshī, astronomer and mathmatician of the 15th century
- Shams al-Dīn al-Samarqandī, scholar
- Nawab Khwaja Abid Siddiqi and Nawab Qaziuddin Siddiqi, grandfather and father of Mir Qamaruddin Siddiqi Asaf Jah I whose dynasty ruled Hyderabad Deccan for seven generations from 1724 to 1951
- Islam Karimov, 1st President of Uzbekistan.
Also said to be the place of death of Muhammad b. Isma'il al-Bukhari, one of the six prominent collectors of hadith of Sunni Islam. See Sahih Bukhari
Popular culture[link]
Fiction[link]
- Chapters 37 and 38 of Jin Yong's Wuxia novel The Legend of the Condor Heroes briefly portray the Mongolian siege of Samarkand in March 1220.
- Samarkand is the title of a 1988 novel by Amin Maalouf, about Omar Khayyám's life.
- The Amulet of Samarkand is the first book in the Bartimaeus Trilogy written by Jonathan Stroud.
- The Road to Samarcand is one of Patrick O'Brian's early novels (1954) about an American teenage boy, the son of recently deceased missionary parents, who travels from China with a small party on the Silk Road en route to the West.
- In Corto Maltese graphical novels by Hugo Pratt one episode is titled "The Golden House of Samarkand"
- The fictional city of Zanarkand in the Final Fantasy series, used Samarkand as inspiration.[14]
- Samarkand is the name of a continent in the Fable fictional universe, though it is more based on Africa and the Orient than Central Asia.
- For part of the history espoused in Clive Barker's novel Galilee, the city of Samarkand is held as a shining light of humanity, and one of the characters longs to go there.[15]
- 'Trębacz z Samarkandy' (The Trumpeter of Samarkand) a short story by Ksawery Pruszyński set during the Second World War, inspired by a Polish legend.
- In The Venetian Betrayal, Samarkand was the world's most powerful city and the "cradle of civilization".
- The objective of the fourth mission in the Ghengis Khan campaign of the video game Age of Empires 2 is to destroy the city of Samarkand.
- Lord of Samarcand is a work of historical fiction by Robert E. Howard.
- An ice-world in Gridlinked, part of Neal Asher's Polity Universe.
- The location of the rose of the DeVirga World Map on the 39 clues.
Poetry, drama and film[link]
- Samarkand can appear as an archetype of romantic exoticism, notably in the work by James Elroy Flecker: The Golden Journey to Samarkand (1913).
- In Islamic literature and discussions, Samarkand has taken on a semi-mythological status and is often cited as an ideal of Islamic philosophy and society, a place of justice, fairness, and righteous moderation.
- Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, explores the metaphysical significance of the marketplace in a volume of poetry entitled Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known, 2002.
- Samarkand has a large featuring in the originally Russian film Day Watch, originally written by Sergei Lukyanenko as part of a Trilogy. Samarkand is the place where the fictional battle for the "Chalk of fate" takes place.
- The American musical Once Upon a Mattress features a character known as the Nightingale of Samarkand. The bird supposedly sings people to sleep.
Non-fiction[link]
- Ibn Battuta, the Muslim 14th century traveler, spent time in Samarkand in the 1330s
- Murder in Samarkand by Craig Murray is a book about the UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan's experiences in this role, until he resigned over human rights abuses in the country in October 2004.
- In her 2010 memoir The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them[16] Elif Batuman writes three chapters about her experiences studying the Uzbek language as a graduate exchange student in Samarkand.
Music[link]
- In 1972, Swedish composer Thorstein Bergman wrote "Om du någonsin kommer fram till Samarkand" ("If you ever reach Samarkand") made notable by Swedish singer Lill Lindfors in 1978.
- In 1977, the Italian singer and composer Roberto Vecchioni issued an LP titled Samarcanda.
- In 2004, violinist Lucia Micarelli released the album Music from a Farther Room, which includes the song "Samarkand".
- In 2008, the Norwegian singer and musician Odd Nordstoga released the album Pilegrim, which includes the song "I byen Samarkand" ("In the city of Samarkhand").
- In 2011, the Australian/British string quartet BOND released the album Play featuring the recording "Road to Samarkand".
- The Uzbek group Yalla made a song in Russian called "The Blue Domes of Samarkand".
In 2012, the Swedish singer Thåström released the album "Beväpna dig met vingar" which includes a song called "Samarkanda".
Sister cities[link]
Boonton, USA
Nishapur, Iran- Bukhara, Uzbekistan
Balkh, Afghanistan
Merv, Turkmenistan
Cuzco, Peru
Lahore, Pakistan
Lviv, Ukraine
Kairouan, Tunisia
Eskişehir, Turkey- Istanbul, Turkey
- İzmir, Turkey
Khujand, Tajikistan
Banda Aceh, Indonesia
See also[link]
- Samarkand Airport
- Semerkand a monthly religious magazine published in Turkey, named after this city because Samarkand has long been a major centre for Islamic scholars.
References[link]
- ^ Room, Adrian (2006). Placenames of the World: Origins and Meanings of the Names for 6,600 Countries, Cities, Territories, Natural Features and Historic Sites (2nd edition ed.). London: McFarland. pp. 330. ISBN 0-7864-2248-3. "Samarkand City, southeastern Uzbekistan. The city derives its name from that of the former Greek city here of Marakanda, captured by Alexander the Great in 329 B.C.. Its own name derives from the Old Persian asmara, "stone", "rock", and Sogdian kand, "fort", "town"."
- ^ a b Columbia-Lippincott Gazeteer. p. 1657
- ^ Vladimir Babak, Demian Vaisman, Aryeh Wasserman, Political organization in Central Asia and Azerbaijan: sources and documents, p.374
- ^ Columbia-Lippincott Gazeteer (New York: Comubia University Press, 1972 reprint) p. 1657
- ^ Guitty Azarpay (1980), Sogdian painting: the pictorial epic in Oriental art, Berkeley : University of California Press, page 16.
- ^ Encyclopædia Britannica (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) Vol. 16, p. 204
- ^ Quraishi, Silim "A survey of the development of papermaking in Islamic Countries", Bookbinder, 1989 (3): 29–36.
- ^ Encyclopædia Britannica, 15th Ed., p. 204
- ^ a b Columbia-Lippincott Gazeteer, p. 1657
- ^ a b "Samarqand". Raw W Travels. http://www.rayw20.co.uk/SAMARQAND.htm. Retrieved November 1, 2009.
- ^ Britannica. 15th Ed., p. 204
- ^ Samarkand.info. "Weather in Samarkand". Samarkand, Uzbekistan. http://www.samarkand.info/html/weather.html. Retrieved 2009-06-11.
- ^ "Climatological Normals of Samarkand". http://www.hko.gov.hk/wxinfo/climat/world/eng/asia/westasia/samarkand_e.htm. Retrieved 2010-08-03.
- ^ (2001) in Studio BentStuff: Final Fantasy X Ultimania Ω (in Japanese). DigiCube/Square Enix, 476. ISBN 4-88787-021-3.
- ^ Clive Barker, Galilee ISBN 0-00-617805-7rm
- ^ Batuman, Elif. "The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People who Read Them" Farrar, Straus and Giroux Paperbacks, February 2010. ISBN 978-0-374-53218-5.
Bibliography[link]
- Alexander Morrison, Russian Rule in Samarkand 1868-1910: A Comparison with British India (Oxford, OUP, 2008) (Oxford Historical Monographs).
External links[link]
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Samarkand |
- Samarkand – Silk Road Seattle Project, University of Washington
- The history of Samarkand, according to Columbia University's Encyclopædia Iranica
| Preceded by Tabriz |
Capital of Iran 1353–1375 |
Succeeded by Tabriz |
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Al Gromer Khan is a German-born sitar player and composer whose music spans the multiple genres of ambient, New Age, world and electronica.
Contents |
Early influences[link]
Né Alois Gromer, Al Gromer Khan was born on April 8, 1946 at farm Hohentann (municipality Altusried/Allgäu) in alpine foothills of Bavaria between Lake Constance and Munich. He spent his early years in England, Morocco and India, where his father worked in the Foreign Office. Gromer Khan claims that he was drawn to the "mysteries of sound" from the first, be it the sound of the bells worn by the Bavarian cows grazing in the alpine meadows near his birthplace, Indian stringed instruments, the drums of North Africa or the "singing" telephone wires on the wind in the freezing Bavarian winters. Gromer Khan claims to have rejected the academic or diplomatic careers his parents expected him to take up.
The 1960s found a twenty-something Al Gromer in London where he took part in a number of creative experiments which were to have a lasting influence on him. According to Gromer Khan, the Prince Tiane na Champassak of Laos introduced him to tantric art and pop star Marc Bolan invited him to join in the all-night jam sessions he hosted. He explored psycho-acoustic phenomena with film director Mike Figgis, and saxophonist Ronnie Scott of Ronnie Scott's Jazzclub, who introduced Al to Ben Webster, Max Roach and Miles Davis, while Cat Stevens (now known as Yusuf Islam), gave him a taste for English poetry.
Development as a sitarist[link]
There is no doubt that Gromer Khan's creative encounters during the 1960s deeply informed his musical taste and style; however, Gromer’s ultimate musical awakening came during a trip to India in 1968, at a recital by sitarist Ustad Vilayat Khan. Gromer Khan professes to have been so moved by the performance that he instantly decided to devote his life to the study of the sitar. He remained in India, where he was to find a powerful teacher in Vilayat Khan's brother, Ustad Imrat Khan. Gromer Khan remained in India for the next three years, speed-learning his instrument at the feet of his guru. He returned to Bavaria in 1971, already an accomplished sitarist.
Gromer Khan spent the next 10 years studying with Imrat Khan in Europe and India. In 1975, his teacher performed the Ghanda Ceremony, thus initiating Al Gromer into the Khan-I-Gharana lineage of sitarists. He was the first outsider to be accepted into this particular Gharana, which like most Hindustani musical traditions, passes knowledge down the generations from father to son. After his initiation, Al Gromer added "Khan" to his name.
Creative works[link]
Concurrently, Khan engaged in a number of experimental projects, pioneering the proto-electronic music genre called Space music, together with Popol Vuh, Deuter and Amon Düül.
Since 1974, Khan has released nearly 40 albums. He currently resides in Munich, Germany. In 2009 the novel Jimi of Silence was released.
Discography[link]
- KULA JAZZ ‘Tantric Miniatures’, 2012 Zustand
- Foret Diplomatique, 2011 Zustand
- Future Song, 2010 Zustand, Aquamarin 2011 AGK with Thomas Kagermann
- Sitar Secrets 2009 New Earth Records
- Lanoiah, 2008 Zustand
- Negus, 2008 RASA Music
- Indian Music II, 2008 RASA Music, NER 2009
- Another Kind Of Silence, 2007 RASA Music
- Radio Yoga 2007 RASA Music
- Turya 2006 RASA Music
- The Alchemy of Happiness 2005 RASA Music AGK with Klaus Wiese
- Chai & Roses 2004 RASA Music Al Gromer Khan
- Savoy Tea Time 2004 RASA Music with Sébastien Illiano, Raed Khoshaba, Kai Taschner
- Tantra Electronica 2004 New Earth Records with Emin Corrado
- Indian Music 2002 RASA Music
- Future Lounge 2002 New Earth Records
- Lexus 2001 Intuition Wergo
- Sufi 2000 New Earth Records
- Almond Blossom Day 1999 Aquamarin
- Kamasutra Experience 1999 New Earth Records
- Tantra Drums 1998 New Earth Records
- Marco Polo/ Tan Dun 1997 SONY/ Opera Al Gromer Khan/Soloist
- Space Hotel 1997 New Earth Records
- Black Marble and Sweet Fire 1996 Hearts of Space with Kai Taschner
- Monsoon Point 1995 New Earth Records with Amelia Cuni
- Konya 1994 Bluestar Music
- Attar - Musik als Parfüm 1994 Wergo
- Beautiful Marva 1993 Aquarius
- Utopia 1992 Aquamarin
- The God Perfume II 1992 Aquamarin
- Tabris 1991 Musicolor/ Araba
- Mahogany Nights 1990 Hearts of Space
- Kama Sutra II 1989 Musicolor/ Araba
- Music from an Eastern Rosegarden 1989 Aquamarin
- The God Perfume 1987 Aquamarin
- Chai and Roses 1987 Aquamarin
- Kama Sutra 1986 Eversongs with Jörg Evers
- The Neuschwanstein Tapes 1986 Aquamarin with Kai Taschner
- In High Places 1985 Aquamarin with Klaus Wiese
- Hymns of Secret Glory 1984 Aquamarin with Klaus Wiese
- Divan I Khas 1984 Isis with Mario Strack
- Zuban 1981 Major Music/Isis with Mario Strack
- Uranus Venus 1980 Warner Bros. with Mario Strack, Ute Lenz, Jörg Evers
- Yoga Popol Vuh 1976 High Tide 1993 with Florian Fricke
- Hesse Between Music 1974 Wergo CD with P.M. Hamel, J.E. Berendt
Audio Books[link]
- Jazzweihnacht Rasa Music 2007
- Der Lehrer, sein Schüler und der weiße Mogul, Rasa Music 2006
- Der Tigerbericht 1990 Sheema Medien Dietrich Wild/Al Gromer Khan Neuauflage 2004
Books[link]
- Jimi of Silence, Zustand Verlag 2009
- Der weiße Mogul, Zustand Verlag 2009
- „Jazz Christmas“, Zustand Verlag, 2011 e-book
Soundtracks on[link]
- Coer de Vere Herz aus Glas 1977 Werner Herzog Popol Vuh/Al Gromer Khan
- Nosferatu 1979 Werner Herzog Popol Vuh/Al Gromer Khan
- Un Divan A New York 1996 Chantal Akerman
- Sublime 2006 Tony Krantz
- Highway World 2008 Martin Hans Schmitt (Al Gromer Khan Soundtrack zum Film)
Collaboration with Popol Vuh[link]
- Das Hohelied Salomos 1975
- Letzte Tage, letzte Nächte 1976
- Brüder des Schattens, Söhne des Lichts 1978
- Die Nacht der Seele 1979
Exhibitions[link]
- Kunstpavillon München ‚The Malakosha Ambience’ 1991
- Gasteig München ‚Friedensprozess’ 2001
- khan art Galerie ‚Tantric Miniatures’ 2011 München
- khan art ambient ‚Tantric Miniatures’ 2012 Berlin
External links[link]
- Artist's website: Includes music, paintings and essays by Al Gromer Khan [1]
- Current Record Label: With audio samples of his new CDs like Radio Yoga, Another Kind of Silence and Indian Music II [2]
- Record Label: Audio Links to Space Hotel, Monsoon Point, Kamasutra Experience, Tantra Drums [3]
- Nonverbal documentary film: "Highway World - living, changing, growing" [4]
References[link]
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Gromer Khan, Al |
| Alternative names | |
| Short description | |
| Date of birth | |
| Place of birth | |
| Date of death | |
| Place of death | |
http://wn.com/Al_Gromer_Khan
Related pages:
http://pl.wn.com/Al Gromer Khan
This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gromer_Khan
This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
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This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (December 2011) |
| Vagif Mustafazadeh Vaqif Mustafazadə |
|
|---|---|
| Born | (1940-03-16)March 16, 1940 |
| Origin |  Baku, Azerbaijan |
| Died | December 16, 1979(1979-12-16) (aged 39) |
| Genres | Jazz |
| Occupations | Composer, Jazz pianist |
| Years active | 13 years |
| Website | www.vagif.musigi-dunya.az |
Vagif Mustafazadeh (born March, 1940), also known as Vagif Mustafa Zadeh, was an Azerbaijani jazz pianist and composer, acclaimed for fusing jazz and traditional Azerbaijani folk music known as mugham. According to many world famous jazz musicians,[citation needed] Mustafazadeh is one of the pioneers and "the architect of jazz in Azerbaijan".
Contents |
Early life[link]
Mustafazadeh was born in Old City, the historical core of the Baku, on March 16, 1940. His name was chosen by the renowned poet, Samed Vurgun, on the request of his mother, who was a piano teacher in local music school and played very influential and immeasurable role in his success.
In 1963, he graduated from Baku State Musical School named after Asaf Zeynally and a year later accepted to Azerbaijan State Conservatoire. He first achieved fame at the Music School where he studied by giving concerts there, later on performing at the parties and evenings held at the universities and clubs, shortly after he became one of the most influential musical performers in Azerbaijan. While performing at the clubs, he mainly played classical jazz, as well as blues and dance music.
Soviet prohibition[link]
Musical prohibitions during the 1940’s and 1950’s meant that the playing of jazz was banned in USSR countries, including Azerbaijan. Since there was no opportunity to get jazz records from anywhere those times, Mustafazade listened to jazz pieces, learning from movies where he heard jazz music and BBC radio and sang Meykhana, rhythmic poetry, which had also been banned. After listening on the radio, he and his friend Vagif Samadoglu attempted to recreate the music on the piano.
Popularity and recognition[link]
From the 1960’s, prohibitions put on jazz music were gradually lifted and thus the late 1960s and 70’s became a time when Baku was a real center of locally inspired jazz. By this time, Mustafazade was making his way to his audience and his popularity grew. His name was often mentioned among other jazz musicians and he participated in festivals held in his native land, as well as in and outside the Soviet countries. Since making a strong impression in his early years at college, his music progressed and popularity grew; he appeared in many festivals.
In 1966, Willis Conover, conductor of the "Jazz Time" radio program, even went as far as to say, "Vagif Mustafazadeh is an extraordinary pianist. It is impossible to identify his equal. He is the most lyrical pianist I have ever known."
In 1965, he quit the conservatoire and went to Tbilisi to lead the "Orero" musical ensemble. Later he created the "Qafqaz" jazz trio at Georgian State Philarmony. In 1970 the "Leyli" women's quartet and in 1971 "Sevil" vocal-instrumental ensemble were assembled by him. Until 1977 he guided the groups. Between 1977-1979 until his death he led the "Mugham" instrumental ensemble which was also organized by him. He won first prize at the 8th International Competition of Jazz Composers for his composition "Waiting for Aziza" in Monaco in 1978, but died the next year.Vagif attended "Tallinn-66" All-Soviet Union Jazz Festival and "Caz-69" Azerbaijani jazz festivals and was awarded as laureate there. Mustafazadeh was also elected as laureate at Donetsk All-Soviet Union Jazz Festival held in 1977. He was elected as the best pianist in "Tbilisi-78". He won the first prize at the 8th International Competition of Jazz Composers for his composition "Waiting for Aziza" in Monaco in 1978 and awarded with white grand piano. Vagif Mustafazadeh is assigned Honored Artist of Azerbaijan SSR and after his death Azerbaijani State Prize.
Jazz mugham[link]
Mustafazadeh is the founder of Azerbaijani jazz mugham movement that emerged in the late 60’s and 70’s in Baku, as a result of the mixture of these two styles. He began searching for new ways to structure his improvisations by exploring modal music. More innovative approaches were taken by him and its influence stretched into later developments of this style.
Death[link]
Mustafazadeh died of heart-attack shortly after a concert in Tashkent and also shortly before the birthdays of his wife (December 17) and daughter (December 19).
Personal life[link]
Mustafazadeh was married twice, from who he had a daughter from that other marriage named Lala, a talented classical pianist. She won the Grand Prize in Epinal Piano Competition, France, in 1991. He then married to Eliza and father of Aziza Mustafa Zadeh, famous jazz musician.
Legacy[link]
His works and performance were praised by internationally known leading world musicians, such as Willis Connover and B.B. King. Once when King shared the same stage with Mustafazade, he heard him playing the blues piano and said nobody could play the blues like him and afterwards said to Vagif that “people call me the king of the blues, but if I could play the piano like you do, I would call myself God.”
More than three decades since Mustafazade's passing, a larger number of his recordings from all periods of his career are more widely available in stores than at any time during his lifetime. His works are broadcast and listened to every day and are honored in TV and radios.
References[link]
External links[link]
- [1]
- musiqi.az (in Azeri)
- Come closer to Vagif Mustafazadeh, Vagif's page on jazz.az
- Vagif Mustafazadeh: Mugham Jazz, Musical Roots in Baku's Old City. Azerbaijan International
- The Emergence of Jazz in Azerbaijan, Vagif Mustafazadeh: Fusing Jazz with Mugam. Azerbaijan International
- Aziza Mustafa Zadeh website
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Mustafazadeh, Vagif |
| Alternative names | |
| Short description | |
| Date of birth | March 16, 1940 |
| Place of birth | |
| Date of death | December 16, 1979 |
| Place of death | |
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This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagif_Mustafazadeh
This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
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Coordinates: 39°39′15″N 66°57′35″E / 39.65417°N 66.95972°E / 39.65417; 66.95972
Samarkand (Tajik: Самарқанд; Persian: سمرقند; Uzbek: Samarqand; from Sogdian: "Stone Fort" or "Rock Town") is the second-largest city in Uzbekistan and the capital of Samarqand Province. The city is most noted for its central position on the Silk Road between China and the West, and for being an Islamic centre for scholarly study. In the 14th century it became the capital of the empire of Timur (Tamerlane) and is the site of his mausoleum (the Gur-e Amir). The Bibi-Khanym Mosque remains one of the city's most notable landmarks. The Registan was the ancient center of the city.
In 2001, UNESCO added the city to its World Heritage List as Samarkand – Crossroads of Cultures.
The city was known by an abbreviated name of Marakanda when Alexander the Great took it in 332BC. There are various theories of how Marakanda evolved into Samarkanda/Samarkan. One derives the name from the Old Persian asmara, "stone", "rock", and Sogdian kand, "fort", "town". Others less convincingly derive the name from the old Turkic "Semiz-Kent" meaning "Rich City".[citation needed]. Since the name Marakanda was already in existence 2300 years ago and long before anyone had heard of Turks in that region of Transoxiana, this version is likely a folk etymology.
