KZBlog

Tag archive for ‘history’

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  Your Eyes are as Deep as the Caspian Sea

  As part of my aforementioned vacation, I went to Aktau in Western Kazakhstan. The main reason for this was to finally get a chance to swim in the Caspian Sea at long last. Interestingly while the Caspian has some romantic and poetic value in the West (I think of Jill Sobule’s Good Person Inside as […]

  8/05/09 • (7)

• Oral History

  A great website Central Asia History, which consists of oral interviews with people from Kyrgyzstan, particularly focusing on older people and the early years of the Soviet Union, World War I, the settlement of nomadic people, World War II/the Great Patriotic War, and life now. It’s extremely interesting to read and I’d love to see […]

  5/19/09 • (Comments Off on Oral History)

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  History of Afghanistan in Manga

  Afganisu-tan is really impressive: 38 comic pages covering the history of Afghanistan and its neighbors as a manga-style comic, created by a Danish artist. Kazakhstan is not featured as a character but America is: Birthday; July 4. She’s the richest girl her neighborhood. She is a superhero fanatic. Her fighting skills are top-class. She has […]

  4/01/08 • (Comments Off on History of Afghanistan in Manga)

• Learning Kazakh: Resources

  As someone who does want to learn Kazakh partially for fun, partially because I do run into situations where it would make life easier, and partially because it would give me great standing with my wife’s family and with colleagues, I have been searching for a decent textbook for a long time. I started with […]

  10/10/07 • (2)

• Kazakh Humour

  As Kazakhstan Neweurasia points out in an article on humor in Kazakhstan, one popular and rather clever area of humor is finding pseudo-Kazakh roots in foreign words. I suppose one reason I love these jokes so much is that it acts as a welcome antidote to bad history that relies on linguistic coincidences. One joke […]

  9/29/07 • (1)

• The Truth about Nomads

  On the occasion of the release of the international trailer of Nomad: I bring you my story of The Nomads. The Book The Nomads was written by Ilyas Yesenberlin (1915 – 1983) in Kazakh. He wrote a lot of historical fiction about the history of Kazakhstan including a trilogy of books, “The Golden Horde,” about […]

  9/30/06 • (2)

• Poppa, Monarchiya

  When in the course of human events, a nation suffers hardships and prospers and one group of people prospers beyond the limits of all predictions, they get odd ideas. Many accuse the Bush administration of trying to use political and material capital to remake the fundamental core of the United States government. Now in Kazakhstan, […]

  9/20/06 • (Comments Off on Poppa, Monarchiya)

• On bad words and legends

  Mankurt is apparently an awful term to call a Kazakh. It literally means someone who has lost their home, their history, traditions, has no memory of where they are from, cannot recite their Seven Fathers. It is a grave insult. Recently, my wife was reading Chingis Aitmatov, the Kyrgyz author of The White Ship and […]

  9/18/06 • (Comments Off on On bad words and legends)

• Send in the clowns

  Borat first came to my attention when a Kazakh friend of mine was asked, very apologetically, if she had heard of him. She hadn’t and the guy sent her an article from the New Yorker from the Kazakh Embassy in Washington. My reaction then was probably typical of most Americans: What’s the big deal? This […]

  11/13/05 • (1)