-
Climate Migration: Villages Relocating from Risk
In the mountain valleys of Tajikistan, migration is often imagined as a social phenomenon: people moving for work, education, or opportunity. Yet in many villages, movement is increasingly shaped not by choice but by shifting land and water. Climate change alters hydrological patterns, accelerates erosion, and destabilizes slopes, gradually pushing communities to relocate. This is…
-
Hydropower and Rivers: Nurek and Roghun as Geography of Control
The Vakhsh River carves a path through mountains, its waters tumbling fast and brown, carrying silt from high Pamir glaciers. Along this river, concrete walls rise, transforming torrents into reservoirs, valleys into lakes. Nurek and Roghun are more than dams: they are landscapes of control, reshaping hydrology, sediment, and even the atmosphere above. To stand…
-
Earthquake Memories: Oral Histories of Tremors
The earth moves quietly at first, almost imperceptibly. A low vibration, a shudder through walls and ground, then the sudden sway that makes people step into doorways or rush outside. In Tajikistan, earthquakes are part of life in a seismically active landscape where mountain-building and faulting shape not only geology but memory. For many communities,…
-
Droughts in Khatlon: Climate Pressures on Lowlands
The lowlands of Khatlon stretch wide and flat beneath a hard summer sky. Irrigation canals run like veins across fields of cotton and wheat, pulling water from distant rivers to sustain a landscape that depends on every drop. The sun beats down, hot winds rise from the Afghan plain, and the horizon shimmers. In dry…
-
Tigrovaya Balka Reserve: Floodplain Ecology in Peril
Where the Vakhsh River meets the Amu Darya, a floodplain stretches into thickets, wetlands, and forests of willow and poplar. This is Tigrovaya Balka, Tajikistan’s oldest nature reserve and one of Central Asia’s most important floodplain ecosystems. To walk here is to enter a geography defined by water’s ebb and flow, by forests that rise…
-
Urban Morphology in Khujand: Soviet Planning Visible
Khujand sits at a bend of the Syr Darya River, a city shaped by water, trade, and power. From above, its structure is unmistakable: rectilinear avenues radiating from a central core, residential blocks arranged in planned grids, green corridors following canals, and newer neighborhoods spreading toward the southern hills. It is a city where the…
-
Dust Storms from the South: Transboundary Skies
In southern Tajikistan the air sometimes thickens into haze. It comes not from local chimneys or urban traffic but from the south, rising from deserts beyond the border. Dust storms lift across Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, carried by wind into valleys of Khatlon and across the Amu Darya. These storms are transboundary events, reminders that…
-
The Gissar Range: Geology and Farming
The Gissar Range cuts across central Tajikistan like a rugged spine, a long chain of folded mountains that rises between the fertile valleys of the Vakhsh and Zarafshan rivers. It is not the highest range in the country, nor the most remote, but it is one of the most inhabited and historically shaped by human…
-
Lake Sarez: The Sleeping Giant
Lake Sarez begins quietly, with stillness. Its turquoise surface stretches across the narrow Bartang Valley in eastern Tajikistan, framed by steep slopes that rise like walls. The lake is beautiful, almost unnaturally so. But beneath that calm lies a story of sudden catastrophe, geological upheaval, and an uncertain future. Sarez is a lake born in…
-
Mining Landscapes: Gold, Aluminum, and Scars
In the mountains of Tajikistan, stone carries secrets. Beneath ridges and valleys lie veins of gold, seams of coal, and ores that shimmer with aluminum and antimony. Mining here is not new, the land has long offered minerals, but its scale and intensity have deepened since the Soviet period. Mines dig into mountainsides, rivers turn…
Search
Archive
- October 2023
- December 2020
- November 2020
- September 2020
- July 2020
- June 2020
- March 2020
- February 2020
- December 2019
- October 2019
- August 2019
- June 2019
- April 2019
- March 2019
- February 2019
- December 2018
- October 2018
- September 2018
- June 2018
- May 2018
- April 2018
- March 2018
- February 2018
- December 2017
- October 2017
- August 2017
- July 2017
- June 2017
- May 2017
- April 2017
- March 2017
- February 2017
- December 2016
- November 2016
- October 2016
- September 2016
- August 2016
- July 2016
- June 2016
- May 2016
- February 2016
Gallery
