Kokand Fortress of Pishpek

PREHISTORY OF THE CAPITAL OF KYRGYZSTAN

For those who currently live in this beautiful city, immersed in greenery, it is hard to believe that it began with a few dozen scattered houses around the ruins of the Pishpek Fortress. In some places, these houses were surrounded by small plantings of poplars and willows, and beyond them stretched the bare, barren steppe with scorching sands and stones...

The documentary materials presented in the collection will help understand why this particular place was chosen for the foundation of the central city and how, in a short period of time by historical standards, a small settlement transformed into a large modern city, an industrial, scientific, and cultural center of our republic.

Bishkek is a beloved and native city for many, framed by the snow-white mountains of the Kyrgyz Ala-Too and located on the Great Silk Road. Bishkek is one of the most beautiful and green cities in Eurasia. A city in which we live. Rushing about our business, we do not think that each street, boulevard, and building has its own story.

The published archival documents in the collection will help to learn how the settlement of Pishpek was founded. The history will tell how, year after year, the settlement transformed into the capital of independent Kyrgyzstan. Gradually, Pishpek received the status of a city and later became the administrative center of the Kara-Kyrgyz Autonomous Region. Since May 1925, it has been the administrative center of the Kyrgyz Autonomous Region. A year later, Pishpek was renamed the city of Frunze, and in 1991, after the republic gained independence, the city of Frunze was renamed Bishkek.

During the Great Patriotic War, factories and plants, scientific and educational institutions, orphanages, and thousands of people from areas where hostilities were taking place were evacuated here. From that time on, the city began rapid industrial growth, with the opening of factories and plants.

The collection contains information on how higher and specialized secondary educational institutions, research institutions, libraries, theaters, philharmonics, and cinemas were opened. How our capital was built and improved, how in 1934 the first fifteen-seat buses appeared, and in January 1951 the first trolleybuses took their passengers. Everyone will be interested in how the four districts of our city were formed: Lenin, Pervomaisky, Sverdlovsky, and Oktyabrsky.

Despite the fact that we live in one of the youngest cities in Central Asia, it has a unique history, and each page of the collection is a chronicle not only of Bishkek but of our entire country.

Today, Bishkek is one of the centers of political, economic, and socio-cultural life in Kyrgyzstan, and we are doing everything to make our kind and hospitable city even more beautiful and cozy.

Doc. No. 1
KOKAND FORTRESS PISHPEK¹
“... The Pishpek Fortress² - one of the most powerful outposts of Kokand - was built in the eponymous area by the kushbegi Lyashker³ in 1825 by order of Khan Madali, as noted in Russian and Eastern sources. Crowning the top of a high clay hill on the left bank of the Alamedin River, it dominated the surrounding area, being at the very center of the Kyrgyz pastures, at the crossroads of cattle-driving roads and trade-caravan routes....

Under the protection of the Pishpek Fortress, near its western wall, a significant Kokand settlement gradually emerged in the Chui Valley amidst an apricot grove. It consisted of no fewer than 120, and perhaps several hundred, adobe huts, predominantly inhabited by "arkatsky sarts" - migrants from Tashkent and Bukhara, who owned sheep bought or exchanged from the Kyrgyz. A small number of Uzbek landowners (gardeners) and craftsmen, partly former soldiers, as well as visiting merchants and traders from Tashkent, Margilan, and Namangan also lived here....

After customs inspection at the Pishpek inns (caravanserais), distant caravans heading to the khanate stopped here to rest, and in the shops at the market in the settlement and in the fortress itself, trade was conducted with the garrison, and non-equivalent exchange of Kokand handicrafts for Kyrgyz livestock took place. Pishpek served as a warehouse and trade-transshipment point for the Chui Valley, Susamyr, Pre-Issyk-Kul, and other regions of the Tien Shan. ...

Kokand Pishpek, dominating over the Chui Kyrgyz, was at the same time a constant source of threat for the Kazakhs, who had already accepted Russian citizenship, and for the first Russian settlements in the Zailiysky region.

Comments:

1 Published from the monograph of the well-known historian in the republic V.Y. Galitsky.
2 The term Pishpek (Pshpek) is probably a distorted ancient Turkic word with a forgotten or unclear meaning. Later folk traditions, recorded in the 1870s, associate its etymology with the name of a Kyrgyz hero, supposedly buried in the Pishpek area, or with a kumys stirrer (in Kyrgyz - bishkek), allegedly lost at one of the Kyrgyz winter pastures in this area. The important fact is the reflection in the existing legends that the Kyrgyz people consider this land their own, inhabited by them since ancient times.
3 Khan's military commander.

The Pishpek commanders, fiercely suppressing periodic anti-Kokand uprisings by the Kyrgyz and Cossacks in the Chui Valley, often played an unflattering role as instigators of Kyrgyz-Kazakh feudal infighting and organizers of attacks by Kokand-Kipchak troops on Kazakh tribes, and against the Sarybagysh - on the Issyk-Kul Kyrgyz who accepted Russian citizenship in 1855....”

Galitsky V.Y. History of the City of Pishpek (1878-1917): Monograph. Frunze, 1980. P. 19-26.

City of Bishkek