History
In 1825, by a Silk Road settlement on a tributary of the Chuy River, the Uzbek khan of Kokand built a little clay fort, one of several along caravan routes through the Tian Shan mountains. In 1862 the Russians captured and wrecked it, and set up a garrison of their own. The town of Pishpek was founded 16 years later, swelled by Russian peasants lured by land grants and the Chuy Valley’s fertile black earth.
In 1926 the town, rebaptised Frunze, became capital of the new Kyrgyz ASSR. The name never sat well; Mikhail Frunze (who was born here) was the Russian Civil War commander who helped keep tsarist Central Asia in Bolshevik hands and hounded the basmachi rebellion into the mountains.
In 1991 the city became Bishkek, the Kyrgyz form of its old Kazakh name. A pishpek or bishkek is a churn for kumys. Numerous legends (some quaint, some rude) explain how it came to be named for a wooden plunger. Others conclude disappointingly that this was simply the closest familiar sound to its old Sogdian name, Peshagakh, meaning ‘place below the mountains’. With the 4800m, permanently snowcapped rampart of the Kyrgyz Alatau range looming over it, the Sogdian name still fits.
Bishkek
Things to do
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