Water Stories
Kyrgyzstan
It took more than 10 years of work to finish the dam,
but by 1973 the project was more or less complete. The
river was blocked, and the Ketmen-Tube Valley began to
flood. More than 20,000 people who had previously lived
in the valley had already been resettled in newly-built villages in the surrounding foothills.
“It wasn’t just our houses and orchards in the flood
zone, but architectural monuments, sacred shrines, the
tombs of our ancestors,” sighs Karybek. “The Soviet authorities promised to rebury the dead elsewhere, but as
far as I remember that was only partially done.”
The bulk of resettlement had taken place in 1968 and
1969, when locals began to be moved into hastily built,
barrack-like houses. “No one was especially outraged.
Lots of people were employed building the hydro plant,”
explains Karybek
A History of Floods
Back then, Isabek Toktogulov was working as an
agronomist at the local directorate for agricultural production. Now a pensioner, he recalls how many of the older
residents opposed the flooding of their ancestral land.
“When I was still a teenager, a Soviet scientific expedition came here and discovered monuments dating from
the bronze age to the 16th century AD,” said Karybek.
Archaeologists and historians working amongst the
mounds and ruins of medieval settlements discovered
traces of long-vanished nomadic peoples. The medieval
Uluk-Korgon fortress, whose walls and towers rose high
over the sharp rocks to provide protection in times of
trouble, once dominated the valley.
According to local legend, Ketmen-Tube got its name
when a local farmer tried to dam the Naryn River so
he could divert the water to irrigate his fields. He didn’t
manage it, and in frustration threw down his ketmen
(a traditional Central Asian hoe), which turned into a
mountain. It is a tale spookily prescient of the fate of the
valley, which since the mid 1970s has been drowned by
an artificial lake.
Bakyt Ibraimov, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
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