Tajikistan

Heir to Sogdiana and the Samanid golden age, reborn as a Persian-speaking republic in the mountains.

Tajikistan is the Persian-speaking heart of Central Asia, heir to the ancient civilisations of Sogdiana and Bactria whose merchants carried goods and faiths along the Silk Road. Tajiks trace their golden age to the Samanid Empire of the 9th and 10th centuries, centred on Bukhara, which nurtured the rebirth of Persian literature in the verse of Rudaki and made Ismail Samani a national symbol. After centuries of Turkic, Mongol and Bukharan rule, the region was absorbed by the Russian Empire and reorganised by the Soviet Union, which created the Tajik republic in the 1920s while leaving the historic cities of Bukhara and Samarkand in Uzbekistan. Independence on 9 September 1991 was followed by a devastating civil war (1992–1997) ended by a UN-brokered peace, and the country has since been governed by Emomali Rahmon over a mountainous, remittance-dependent economy.