Mountain republic whose capital began as a village of about 1,000
Tajikistan, a landlocked Central Asian republic, borders Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and China. Dushanbe, the capital, holds over 1.2 million people. Independence came on 9 September 1991 as the Soviet Union dissolved, followed by civil war from May 1992 to June 1997.
Mountains cover more than 90 percent of Tajikistan, home to over 11 million people, and only Afghanistan's narrow Wakhan Corridor separates it from Pakistan. Settlement goes back at least to the fourth millennium BC; the proto-urban site of Sarazm is on the UNESCO World Heritage list. By about 500 BC the land lay inside the Achaemenid Empire, and after Alexander it passed to the Greco-Bactrians. Khujand and Panjakent in the north belonged to Sogdiana, whose Silk Road trade with Han China boomed after Zhang Qian's travels.
Under the Kushans, from the first to fourth centuries AD, Buddhism, Nestorian Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism all had followers, and Arabs brought Islam in the eighth century. The Samanid Empire, united under Ismail Samani in 892, made Samarkand and Bukhara beacons of Persian culture and backed poets such as Rudaki; the first full Persian translation of the Qur'an helped conversions spread. From 999 the Kara-Khanids shifted the region toward Turkic dominance, and Mongols later sacked its cities.
Russia absorbed the area between 1864 and 1885 and began swapping grain fields for cotton. Basmachi guerrillas fought the Bolsheviks for four years after 1917. Created in 1924 as an autonomous republic inside Uzbekistan, Tajikistan was denied Bukhara and Samarkand, and its capital was placed in Dushanbe, then a mountain town of about 1,000 residents. It became a full Soviet republic in 1929, and its Persian dialect, renamed Tajiki, was cut off by Latin and then Cyrillic scripts.
The name Tajik traces back to a Middle Persian term for an Arab tribe that reached Transoxiana in the seventh century. Today Islam is followed by 97.5 percent of residents, Russian serves between ethnic groups, and remittances, aluminium and cotton carry the economy under Emomali Rahmon, in power since 1994.
Source: Tajikistan
