Settlements and Permanent Housing
The 19th century was a turning point in the life of the Kyrgyz. It marked the beginning of their settlement on land.
One of the most important factors that led to the gradual transition to settled life among the southern Kyrgyz was the historical event of Southern Kyrgyzstan's annexation to Russia. This decisively changed the lifestyle of the Kyrgyz: conflicts and wars between Kyrgyz tribes and neighboring peoples ceased, economic life began to stabilize, and the Kyrgyz were freed from the services and duties they had to perform in the Kokand Khanate.
The transition of the southern Kyrgyz to agriculture was accelerated by the development of cotton cultivation in Turkestan, which was particularly notable in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A source from that time reported: "The rapidly developing life in the Fergana region, with its intensive cotton culture, is causing nomads to gradually settle on the land."
The decline of animal husbandry, observed in Turkestan and southern Kyrgyzstan since the last quarter of the 19th century, also served as a significant impetus for settlement. From this time, the most intense settling of the southern Kyrgyz and the construction of adobe houses began.
Materials from statistical surveys (1915) indicate that in the southeast (Alai, Alai-Ku), the transition to settled life was somewhat delayed compared to other regions. Here, the population "still maintains a mixed economy, with a significant predominance of livestock breeding, and therefore settlement has taken very weak roots here." In the southwest (in the Laylak and Noygut-Kypchak volosts), where natural conditions favored the development of animal husbandry, the "issue of transitioning the population of the two mentioned volosts to a settled lifestyle was not considered sufficiently ripe" even at the beginning of the 20th century.
Nevertheless, the process of settling continued. Official sources note that in the 1890s, 200,000 people, or 65% of the Kyrgyz in the Fergana region, were settled and engaged in agriculture.
V. Nalivkin noted at the end of the 19th century that "in Fergana, nomads in the strict sense of the word no longer exist." According to him, "the impossibility of satisfying even the most basic needs of life through livestock breeding forced almost all Kyrgyz to cultivate land." This phenomenon was later noted by G. V. Pokrovsky and N. I. Stogov.
The settlement of the Kyrgyz and their transition to agricultural farming is convincingly illustrated by the fact of the "decrease in the number of yurts traveling to summer pastures in the Alai Valley," where "up to tens of thousands of yurts" migrated annually.
Our ethnographic materials allow us to speak of the unevenness of the transition to a settled lifestyle. In areas such as Batken, Frunze, Naukat, Aravan, and Osh, the southwestern part of Alai saw significant spread of adobe houses by the end of the last century. At the same time, in the Soviet and northeastern parts of the Alai region, permanent-type housing began to be built much later, with the majority of houses dating back to the 1920s and 1930s.
Many settlements were built in undeveloped areas. The elders have memories of the difficulties associated with construction: considerable efforts were spent clearing areas covered with juniper and walnut forests, thickets of reeds, various shrubs, as well as fighting wild animals—wolves and boars. In the settlement of Sogond in the Alai region, the Kyrgyz had to clear dense reed thickets. When houses were built in the Kar-Tokoy area of the Batken region, it was necessary to cut down dense thickets of shrubs, which the locals call changal.
Amrakul Rakhmatullaev's father was among the first Kyrgyz to settle in the area where the village of Kara-Bulak in the Batken region is now located. He told his son that there was a juniper forest where the current village is located, which was cut down by Kyrgyz from the modern territory of Uzbekistan, belonging to the Kypchak group. Sultan Narkulov's father (born in 1890), who worked for Mold Abaz (in the village of Palal in the Batken region), was turning over stones with a pickaxe to expand the area of arable land.
The Migrations of the Kyrgyz from Winter Camps to Spring and Summer Pastures