SETTLEMENT AND DWELLING
The presence of two different types of economic activities in the 19th and early 20th centuries—nomadic animal husbandry and settled agricultural-animal husbandry—determined the existence of two types of dwellings among the Kyrgyz: portable and permanent. Semi-nomadic Kyrgyz simultaneously used both types of dwellings. The settling down and transition to agriculture as the main occupation led to the gradual disappearance of portable dwellings from the lives of a significant portion of the population and the improvement of a new type of dwelling—adobe houses.
In the territory of the modern Osh region, this process occurred unevenly. The reason for this was the differing rates of economic development among various groups of Kyrgyz, the presence or absence of close contact with neighboring settled populations, and partly the different times of settlement of the region by the Kyrgyz. In some places, the existence of yurts is remembered only vaguely. In the village of Palal in the Batken region, for example, many elderly people recount that they lived in adobe houses since childhood. In the Alay region, on the contrary, the elderly speak of living in yurts as a recent past, and it was the main type of dwelling here. According to some informants, many yurts were destroyed during the years of the Basmach movement when the Basmachi devastated farms, burned yurts, and stole livestock.
Currently, yurts have not been preserved everywhere in the personal farms of collective farmers and workers of state farms, and those that remain have already been deformed and altered. Therefore, we often restored the appearance of the old yurt based on the memories of the elderly, and hereditary wood craftsmen greatly assisted in this.
Ethnography