Qurghonteppa
|
Qurghonteppa Қурғонтеппа |
|||
| Basic data | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| State : |
 Tajikistan
|
||
| Province : | Chatlon | ||
| Coordinates : | 37 ° 50 ' N , 68 ° 47' E | ||
| Height : | 430 m | ||
| Residents : | 101,600 (2014) | ||
|
|||
Qurghonteppa , Tajik Қурғонтеппа , Russian Курган-Тюбе , Kurgan-Tjube , from Persian گرگان تپه( Kurgan - Tappa , "hill settlement"), is the capital of the Chatlon province in southwest Tajikistan . The third largest city in the country is located in the center of a wide plain in the valley of the Wachsch , which was developed from the 1930s under the Soviet planned economy through the construction of irrigation canals and through forced relocation programs into the largest cotton-growing area in the country and an industrial location. Qurghonteppa is still a center of cotton processing and the largest trading center in the southwest. The medieval fortress town of Lewkand is assumed to be at the present-day location or in its vicinity.
location
Qurghonteppa is located at an altitude of 390 meters on the left side of the Wachsch, the largest river in southwest Tajikistan, which flows from the Nurek Dam in a southwestern direction and after around 90 kilometers as the crow flies it flows into the Pandsch , which forms the border with Afghanistan . The Wachsch makes a wide bend around the city to the north and west. Several parallel mountain ranges divide the lowlands in a north-south direction. The river valleys in between widen to the south. The Wachsch Valley is bounded in the west by the 1633 meter high Aruk-Tau mountain range, beyond this another lower mountain range follows, which slopes down to the Kofarnihon valley along the border with Uzbekistan . The eastern edge of the Wachsch Valley, which is up to 30 kilometers wide, is formed by the Terekli-Tau (Terekli Tagh) mountain range, which extends roughly between the cities of Danghara in the north and Pandschi Pojon on the Pandsch River in the south.
climate
The climate is subtropical with very hot dry summers and mild winters. The average annual precipitation is 273 millimeters and is mostly not sufficient for a field without artificial irrigation. Most of the rain falls between January and April at the beginning of the year. The hottest month is July with an average maximum temperature of 37 ° C, the average minimum temperature is reached in January with –1 ° C. The loess soils on the valley floor are fertile and, with artificial irrigation, are not only suitable for growing cotton, but also for grain and vegetables. Melons, pomegranates, citrus fruits and grapes are also grown.
history
Early time
In southwestern Tajikistan there were in the Bronze Age at the end of the 2nd millennium BC. BC and after the transition to the Iron Age, some settlements on the valley edges up to medium altitudes. The settlements of the early Iron Age, when the population density increased, are assigned to the Yaz-I culture in present-day Turkmenistan . Archaeological explorations in the region began in 1955. The next Bronze Age site was discovered in the area of the Kirov sovkhoz east of Qurghonteppa. The grave finds are attributed to the Andronowo culture .
middle Ages
One kilometer from Kirov and 12 kilometers east of Qurghonteppa are the remains of mud brick from the Buddhist monastery Adschina-Teppa from the 7th / 8th centuries. Preserved century AD.
The city name Qurghonteppa (Kurgan-Tappa) refers to an old fortress city, possibly the city of Lewkand. The geographical allocation of the place names mentioned in the sources is speculative. Lewkand is also associated with the name of the settlement Wachsch and with the largest city in the Middle Ages Chelawerd, the name of which was taken over from the early medieval settlement, later called Kafirkala . The equation of the place name Wachsch with Lewkand (also Lavakand) and again with Sangtude, which is 35 kilometers northeast of Qurghonteppa (Sangtuda are now two dams there on the Wachsch) is discussed in connection with Jalal ad-Din ar-Rumi , the 1207 in one Place called Wachsch and could have spent the first years of life here.
In the Middle Ages, the lower Wachsch valley belonged temporarily to the province of Chuttal, the center of which was east of the confluence of the Kyzylsu and the Pandsch . The province name Chuttal was replaced by Kulob in the 16th century. To the west of the Wachsch was the Chaganian province (north of Termiz in what is now the Uzbek province of Surxondaryo ). The entire region north of the Amu Darya was called Transoxania in antiquity and mā warāʾan-nahr by the Arabs from the middle of the 7th century . Descriptions of Ajina-Teppa and other Buddhist monasteries in Chuttal have come down to us from Chinese pilgrims of that time.
After the Umayyads , Chuttal was controlled in the 9th and 10th centuries by the short-lived Banijurid dynasty, presumably from Iran, about whose ruler little is known. The capital of Chuttal was Hulbuk in the 10th and 11th centuries ; the city of Kulob is first mentioned around 1220 when it was conquered during the Mongol invasion .
Modern times
Qurghonteppa first appears by name in the sources in the 17th century, when various local princes ruled the province from Bukhara under the suzerainty of the Uzbek dynasties . The influence of central Uzbek rule in Bukhara ended in the first half of the 18th century. After that, the uskekische tribe took over the Yüz from the fortress hisor of control of the lower Vakhsh Valley to the area of Qabodiyon , soon replaced by another, in Kunduz residents south of the Amu Darya Uzbek tribe. Until the second half of the 19th century, the region ruled by regents from Kulob remained relatively independent between the more powerful emirate of Afghanistan in the south, the emirate of Bukhara in the northwest and the Kokand khanate in the Ferghana valley to the north .
In 1868 the Russian Empire defeated the Kokand Khanate and the Emirate of Bukhara. Amir Mozaffar ad-Din, an emir of the Mangite dynasty of Bukhara, was able, with Russian support, to expand his territory to the east in 1870 and to add the areas of Qurghonteppa, Qabodiyon and Kulob to the administrative province of Hissor. During the Emirate of Bukhara, the outer provinces of Qurghonteppa, Kulab, Qarotegin and Darwos (today part of Berg-Badachschan ) were practically autonomous by provincial governors ( Beg ) and exploited by them.
At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, Russian observers described the social conditions in the province of Qurghonteppa, which, in addition to the district of the capital, along the Wachsch to the south, consisted of the urban districts ( amlakdari ) Tschilikul and Sarai (today Pandsch) and around 30 rural districts ( qeschlaq ). Agriculture was based on the cultivation of grain as well as nomadic and semi-nomadic cattle breeding. The population consisted predominantly of Uzbeks, furthermore from Turkmens , "Arabs" (a Persian-speaking ethnic group who consider themselves to be descendants of the Arab immigrants), Tajiks and Hazara from Afghanistan .
Against the conquest of Tajikistan after the October Revolution by the 1917 Red Army began, the local insurgents contributed Basmachi an organized resistance collapsed in the region in August 1922nd The aim of the Basmachi was to re-establish the political structures of the old emirate of Bukhara. For this they lacked the support of the surrounding countries, apart from a few Muslim groups from Afghanistan. The civil war resulted in redistribution and the flight of large parts of the population.
In the Soviet Union
In 1924, Qurghonteppa Province was incorporated into the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of Turkestan , from which the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic was split off in 1929 . From 1926 Qurghonteppa was the capital of the newly formed province ( wiloyat ) of the same name with an area of 12,600 square kilometers. Between the late 1920s and around 1940, the farms were expropriated and converted into state-controlled collective farms or state-owned sovkhozs . In the 1920s, construction of the first industrial plants and infrastructure in the country began; From 1926 to 1928 this included cotton processing plants in Qurghonteppa, Schahritus and other cities. Between 1926 and 1929, the province's population grew by 160,000 new settlers. In the 1930s, cotton began to be grown on a large scale in the lower Wachsch Valley. For this purpose, the wetlands along the rivers were converted into fields and a system of irrigation channels was created. Most of the workers employed in the farms were forcibly relocated from the higher mountain valleys in the north, especially from the Rasht Valley (around Gharm , formerly Qarotegin Province). Russian farmers, traders and administrators also came to the province in large numbers.
As a result of an administrative reform in 1939, Qurghonteppa lost its status as a province, only to temporarily become the capital of the oblast of the same name (Russian for a larger administrative district) from 1944 to 1947 . After that, Kulob was the provincial capital until this function was returned to Qurghonteppa between 1977 and 1992. The ( nohija ) Pandsch district (now Qumsangir district) on the Afghan border, added in 1979, increased the number of districts in the province to eleven. Since 1992 the oblasts of Qurghonteppa and Kulob have been united in the independent Tajikistan to the province of Chatlon with the capital Qurghonteppa after the restructuring. The area of this most densely populated province in the country is 24,600 square kilometers.
During the Soviet period, Qurghonteppa became the center of cotton processing in the southwest. Almost half of the annual production came from the region, at the end of the 1980s this was almost half a million tons. In 1986 there were 50 kolkhozes and 70 sovkhozes, which mainly produced cotton on the plains and grain, fruit and animal fodder on the edges of the valley. In addition, cattle were raised on the large farms, especially the Karakul sheep, which is valued for its wool . The high point of industrialization, which took place parallel to agricultural development, was the 1960s and 1970s. Qurghonteppa got a petroleum processing plant and a tin factory in the 1960s. Until independence, the three major population groups - the (long-established) Kulobis, Gharmis (from the mountains) and Uzbeks - were in competition with each other for positions of political and economic power.
In independent Tajikistan
After independence in 1991, a nationwide civil war began in May 1992 , which lasted until 1997 and led, especially in the province of Qurghonteppa, to great destruction of the settlements and infrastructure as well as devastating consequences for agriculture. Between May and December 1992 alone, 50,000 people died in fighting in the provinces of Dushanbe, Qurghonteppa and Kulob and 650,000 Tajiks had fled by the end of the year. In the power struggle between confidants of today's President Emomalij Rahmon , mainly militias ( Sitodi Melli , "Popular Front"), and the United Tajik Opposition (UTO) in Qurghonteppa province, the long-standing ethnic tensions between Uzbeks and others mixed up immigrated population groups (Gharmis, also kuhistoni , "from the mountains") and the local Kulobis (or long -established mahalli , from mahalla ). An armed mob penetrating from Kulob forced many Gharmis to flee to Afghanistan.
The rebel leader Mahmud Khudoiberdyev, who was born in Qurghonteppa in 1964, succeeded in shifting the distribution of power in favor of Rahmon's Kulobi faction at the end of 1992 by taking over a tank and steering it to Kalininobod near the city. For this he was rewarded in 1993 with the post of commander of the First Brigade in Qurghonteppa after Rahmon took over the government. In the following years, however, he opposed the government and three times demanded the replacement of certain government officials and the removal of the Qurghonteppa area from the Khatlon province. In August 1997, the Presidential Guard captured Qurghonteppa and Khudoiberdyev reportedly fled across the Afghan border.
The civil war ended in 1997 with a peace agreement that promised the opposition Islamic forces a 30 percent stake in the government.
population
At the beginning of the 20th century, about 4,000 people lived in Qurghonteppa. According to official censuses, the population was 23,560 in 1959, 36,620 in 1970 and 42,075 in 1979. In 1989 the number had risen to 58,505, in 2000 it was 60,508 and in 2010 it was 75,450. For 2014 101,600 inhabitants are estimated. After Dushanbe and Khujand and before Kulob, Qurghonteppa is one of the few large urban settlement areas in valley plains in which the majority of the population of Tajikistan lives.
Cityscape
The axis of the city is Aini Street ( ulitsa Aini ), which cuts through the center of the city from Sarband in the east towards Kolkhozobod in the southwest. From the central main intersection, a road leads in a north-westerly direction to Qizilqala for connection to the A384. National traffic can bypass the entire city on a ring road. The fourth of the main roads forming an approximate axis cross branches off from the southern ring road in a south-easterly direction to Wachsch . A few meters north of the central intersection, a tower can be seen on the roof of a circular building built in 1983, which stands on a small hill and in which there is a museum. Industrially manufactured objects from the Soviet era are exhibited. Opposite an equestrian statue commemorates the 9th century Samanid ruler Ismoil Somonij, who is revered as the founder of the Tajik nation.
From this intersection, Vahdat Avenue, lined with avenue trees, leads southeast to Bobojon Ghafurow Street in the business center. Ghafurow (1908-1977) was a historian who published on the history of the Tajiks and was General Secretary of the Communist Party of Tajikistan from 1946 to 1956 . At the confluence of Bobojon Ghafurow Street with Karla Marksa Street is the large market hall for fruit, vegetables and everyday items, a hotel from the socialist era and several restaurants. On the corner of Bobojon Ghafurow Street and Vahdat Avenue, the city's small Orthodox Christian community is building one of the few churches in Tajikistan, almost all of which are otherwise in Dushanbe or Khujand . The shell was completed at the end of 2014.
There are several tree-lined parks and avenues in the city center. In the Soviet era industrial companies were established in the area of the Ringstrasse, which today have largely disintegrated. An irrigation canal runs through the city from northeast to southwest. The residential area between the canal and the northern ring road is more spacious and consists mainly of uniform apartment blocks.
Several banks and hotels point to the importance of the city as a trading center. The state university on Aini Street east of the center is named after the 11th century Persian poet Nāsir-i Chusrau . The city football club is called Wachsch Qurghonteppa .
traffic
From the state capital Dushanbe , the A384 trunk road leads south via Obikiik in around 90 kilometers to Qurghonteppa. A longer connection from Dushanbe is the A385, which continues south-east to Kulob via Norak and Danghara . From Danghara a road branches off to the west in the direction of Wachsch and reaches Qurghonteppa around 70 kilometers after the junction. The A384 leads south from Qurghonteppa past Kolkhozobod (32 kilometers) through Qubodijon and Schahritus to the only Uzbek border crossing in the south near Termiz .
In 1932 a narrow-gauge railway line from the river port Pandschi Pojon to Qurghonteppa and from there to Kulob in 1956 was completed. This was the last completed narrow-gauge railway line in Tajikistan. It was used to transport cotton and salt from the vicinity of Kurbon Shahid . Before this time, there were no asphalt roads in the southwest and after Dushanbe, and goods were transported with pack animals on paths. Otherwise, shipping between Termiz and Pandschi Pojon was the only means of transport, and shipping on the lower reaches of the Wachsch was only possible to a very limited extent. In 1932 the first driveway between Qurghonteppa and Dushanbe was opened. A narrow-gauge railway line between the two cities that started around this time and roughly followed the course of the road could only be completed in 1941 because of the complex route through the mountains. Passenger train traffic was slow on the narrow-gauge lines in the southwest and largely stopped in the 1960s. From the connection in Termiz, a 264-kilometer broad-gauge railway line was built between 1966 and 1980 to the west of the narrow-gauge line, which led north via Schahritus, Qubodijon and Qurghonteppa to the city of Jowon. In 1999 the line from Qurghonteppa was extended by 132 kilometers eastwards to Kulob. It replaced the old narrow-gauge railway. Since the end of August 2016, the city has been directly connected to Dushanbe by a 41-kilometer, newly built mountain route between Wahdat and Jovon . This eliminates the detour via Uzbek territory.
The Qurghonteppa train station is located around seven kilometers east in the town of Bustonqala. Rail does not play a role in domestic passenger transport. On two days of the week, trains run under normal circumstances from Qurghonteppa via Termiz to Moscow , which mainly transport Tajik workers to Russia.
From Qurghonteppa Airport , about seven kilometers east of the city center on the banks of the Wachsch, there are flights to Moscow and Yekaterinburg , which, like the train connections, are mainly used by Tajik migrant workers.
Environment, social affairs, politics
Most of the chemical water pollution, which affects the large rivers and the entire drinking water supply, comes from industrial production, which includes the TALCO aluminum factory in Tursunsoda , which is still active today, and the Wachsch nitrogen fertilizer factory 25 kilometers north of Qurghanteppa. In 1989 this factory, which was later destroyed in the civil war, poisoned the water supply in several villages in the southwest and in Qurghonteppa. According to a study, around 90 percent of water consumption was used for irrigation in 1994, which leads to the salinisation of the soil. To this day, many soils are contaminated with untreated wastewater and salts containing chlorine and nitrogen. The cultivation of cotton in monoculture is mainly responsible for the salinisation of the soil. In most cases, irrigation takes place through a system of surface canals ( arik ) to the top of the fields, from where the water is distributed over the furrows.
During the unrest that began in 1992, Tajikistan initially developed on a small scale as a transit country for smuggling opium from Afghanistan. Initially, drugs were smuggled through the difficult-to-access mountainous region of Berg-Badachschan. In the mid-1990s, the smuggling routes shifted to the more densely populated and easier-to-cross areas in the west, combined with a significant increase in numbers and encouraged by the corruption that was widespread among police, customs, the military and members of the government. The cities of Kulob and Qurghonteppa became transhipment points for Afghan opium and, from 1995, also for heroin . Tajikistan has played an essential role as a transit country in the global drug trade since the late 1990s. For example, smuggled goods were discovered at the Pandschi Pojon border crossing south of Qurghonteppa and in a freight train that was transporting cotton from Qurghonteppa to Moscow. Mahmadsaid Ubaidulloev, the mayor of Dushanbe since 2001, speaker of parliament and one of the richest and most influential men in the country, was indirectly and directly referred to as a drug baron by his political opponent, President Rahmon, in 2004 by the Russian media. At the same time he essentially controls the country's cotton trade.
Around 7,000 Russian soldiers, mainly from the 201st Motorized Rifle Division from the Russian military district Volga-Urals, are stationed at three locations in Tajikistan. In addition to the headquarters near Dushanbe, there are the Kulob and Qurghonteppa garrisons, where the 191st Infantry Regiment is stationed.
sons and daughters of the town
- Rawilja Agletdinowa (1960–1999), Soviet middle-distance runner
- Imomudin Sattorow (* 1964), Ambassador of Tajikistan in Germany
- Sergei Mandreko (* 1971), Tajik-Russian-Austrian soccer coach and former soccer player
literature
- Habib Borjian: Kurgan Tepe . In: Ehsan Yarshater (Ed.): Encyclopædia Iranica , as of: July 27, 2005 (English, including references)
- Kulob . In: Kamoludin Abdullaev, Shahram Akbarzadeh: Historical Dictionary of Tajikistan. Scarecrow Press, Lanham (Maryland), 2010, pp. 291f
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Vakhsh Valley . In: Kamoludin Abdullaev, Shahram Akbarzadeh: Historical Dictionary of Tajikistan , p. 376
- ↑ Kurgan-Tyube, Tajikistan. weatherbase.com
- ^ Natalia M. Vinogradova, Giovanna Lombardo: Farming Sites of the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages in Southern Tajikistan. In: East and West, Vol. 52, No. 1/4, December 2002, pp. 71–125, here p. 116
- ↑ LT P'jankova: Young Bronze Age burial sites in Vachs Valley, South Tadžikistan . (Materials for General and Comparative Archeology, Volume 36) CH Beck, Munich, 1986, p. 8
- ^ Franklin Lewis: Rumi: Past and Present, East and West. The Life Teachings and Poetry of Jalâl al-Din Rumi . One World Publications, Oxford 2000, pp. 47-49
- ↑ Clifford Edmund Bosworth: Lot valley. In: Encyclopædia Iranica
- ↑ See: Vladimir N. Nastich: A Survey of the Abbasid Copper Coinage of Transoxania , pp. 1-80
- ↑ A. Tabyshalieva: Social Structures in Central Asia. In: Chahryar Adle (Ed.): History of civilizations of Central Asia. Volume 5. Towards the contemporary period: from the mid-nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century . UNESCO, Paris 2005, p. 82
- ↑ Kirill Nourzhanov, Christian Bleuer: Tajikistan. A Political and Social History. (Asian Studies Series Monograph 5) Australian National University, ANU E Press, Canberra 2013, p. 103
- ↑ M. Dinorshoev: Tajikistan. In: Chahryar Adle (Ed.): History of civilizations of Central Asia . Volume 5. Towards the contemporary period: from the mid-nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century. UNESCO, Paris 2005, p. 292
- ↑ Kirill Nourzhanov, Christian Bleuer: Tajikistan. A Political and Social History. (Asian Studies Series Monograph 5) Australian National University, ANU E Press, Canberra 2013, pp. 104, 167
- ↑ Rahmon, Emomali (1952-) . In: Kamoludin Abdullaev, Shahram Akbarzadeh: Historical Dictionary of Tajikistan , p. 296
- ↑ Khudoiberdyev, Mahmud (1964–). In: Kamoludin Abdullaev, Shahram Akbarzadeh: Historical Dictionary of Tajikistan , pp. 203f
- ↑ Всесоюзная перепись населения 1959 г. demoscope.ru
- ↑ Всесоюзная перепись населения 1970 г. demoscope.ru
- ↑ Всесоюзная перепись населения 1979 г. demoscope.ru
- ^ The provinces of Tajikistan as well as all cities and urban settlements of more than 10,000 inhabitants. City population
- ↑ Religions. In: Kamoludin Abdullaev, Shahram Akbarzadeh: Historical Dictionary of Tajikistan, 2010, p. 302
- ^ MV Hambly: Road vs. Rail. A Note on Transport Development in Tadzhikistan. In: Soviet Studies, Vol. 19, No. January 3, 1968, pp. 421-425, here pp. 421-423
- ^ Railways . In: Abdullaev, Akbarzadeh: Historical Dictionary of Tajikistan, p. 297
- ↑ Inauguration connects Tajik rail networks. Railway Gazette, August 30, 2016, accessed August 31, 2016 .
- ^ Russian railway workers suspend the sale of tickets to Kulob. avesta.tj, November 18, 2011
- ↑ Reza Ghasmi: Tajikistan. A World Bank Country Study. The World Bank, Washington 1994, p. 182
- ^ Sharon Eicher: Environmental Resources and Constraints in the Former Soviet Republics. Chapter 20: Tajikistan. The National Council for Soviet and East European Research. Washington, September 1994, p. 6
- ↑ Kristina Toderich u. a .: A Farm in Kumsangir of Tajikistan: A Perspective of Water / land Use along Pyandzh River. (Kier Discussion Paper Series) Kyoto Institute of Economic Research, Kyoto University, Kyoto, May 2006, p. 23
- ^ Johan Engvall: The State under Siege: The Drug Trade and Organized Crime in Tajikistan . In: Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 58, No. September 6, 2006, pp. 827-854, here p. 846
- ↑ Letizia Paoli, Irina Rabkov, Victoria A. Greenfield, Peter Reuter: Tajikistan: The Rise of a Narco-State. In: Journal of Drug Issues, 2007, pp. 951-980, here pp. 960, 972
- ↑ Bernd Kuzmits: Borders of orders in Central Asia. Transactions and Attitudes between Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. (World Regions in Transition, Volume 15) Nomos, Baden-Baden 2013, p. 285
- ^ Johan Engvall: The State under Siege: The Drug Trade and Organized Crime in Tajikistan. In: Europe-Asia Studies , Vol. 58, No. 6, September 2006, p. 848
- ^ Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst . Volume 13, No. 15, August 17, 2011, p. 21
- ↑ Russian Military Base in Tajikistan. In: Kamoludin Abdullaev, Shahram Akbarzadeh: Historical Dictionary of Tajikistan, 2010, p. 308