Kyrgyzstan

From the Yenisei steppe and the epic of Manas to a turbulent mountain democracy.

Kyrgyzstan's story begins with the Yenisei Kyrgyz of the Siberian steppe, whose khaganate destroyed the Uyghur capital in 840, and with the great oral epic of Manas that carried the people's memory across centuries. Along the Silk Road through the Tian Shan rose Karakhanid Balasagun, the sacred mountain of Sulaiman-Too above Osh, and the caravan halts of Lake Issyk-Kul, while Mongol conquest and later pressures drew the Kyrgyz tribes into the Tian Shan that became their homeland. Absorbed by the Khanate of Kokand and then by the Russian Empire, the Kyrgyz rose in the catastrophic 1916 revolt before being organized as the Kara-Kyrgyz Autonomous Oblast and the Kirghiz SSR of the Soviet Union. Kyrgyzstan declared independence on 31 August 1991, and since then has lived a turbulent, competitive politics — the 2005 Tulip Revolution, the 2010 uprising and the ethnic violence in the south, and a return to a presidential republic in 2021.