زمین سبز و کاسه های سبز

So this was supposed to be about my day-long excursion to Kulob, the capital of Tajikistan’s southern Khatlon province, a historically significant city, and the place of origin for my host family.

I’m going to be talking about grass and cow stomachs. I swear, the two are related, just bear with me.

Kulob is roughly a three-and-a-half hour drive from the capital, and given that Khatlon is Tajikistan’s agricultural heart and it’s springtime for the country, the road south is absolutely beautiful. Literally, everything is a bright and verdant green, the sun is shining, and it’s amazing. And one of the stops on the way to Kulob is Nurak (or Nurek), home to a massive hydroelectric complex that was so beautiful, apparently Soviet-era Tajikistan felt like writing poems about it (I’m seriously not making that up, go find them, they exist). And, at Nurak at around 8:00 AM yesterday morning, I came face-to-face with what will be the subject of most of this update.

As I’d had to get up and be ready by 6:30 this morning, I’d only managed to scarf down some Russian hot dogs (of worthy mention, dear Russians, if you’re going to use artificial skins for your sausage, please do what we do in the West and make the damn thing edible, because “peeling” my morning breakfast is both horrifying and time-consuming) and chai before having to be on my way. So when our guide/administrator suggested stopping for food, I eagerly agreed. After all, given that the typical “Tajik breakfast” seemed to be either fried eggs, or some variant of milk and rice, what was the worst that could happen?

Let’s meet shurbo-e alafi and shurbo-e shekam.

The former is a soup (shurbo=soup) that is made of…you guessed it, alafi. But what is alafi? You may notice it looks similar to a word in English, alfalfa. Because that’s what it is. It’s grass. Shurbo-e alafi is “grass soup”. And for the latter, what is shekam? Stomach, in this case, cow stomach; being the base of a soup with little more than some lentils to absorb the taste of…well, more alafi, as well as some other tastes…and now I should fess up. Both of these soups were actually delicious. Hell, I ordered the shurbo-e shekam when I realized that adding meat would be the only way to make the shurbo-e alafi any better. The soups came with a salad (called shakarob in Tajiki) of tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, hot peppers, and greens that you could compare to salsa, the ever present and always delicious naan, and a sauce I’m told is called satsavi. For any Iranians reading, it’s like a notably sour fesenjoon sauce; for any Georgians/fans of Georgian food, you know what I’m talking about; for everyone else, get on one of the two aforementioned boats. But seriously, aside from the cow stomach making the soup taste very…gastric (?), I loved every minute of my breakfast.

But now here was the weirder part. We get to this museum-castle reconstruction thing at a place called Hulbuk, and, after seeing the ruins of an old fort in the shadow of a mountain of salt, we were called over to a shack by an old bearded gentleman. Since this is hardly a random occurrence in Tajikistan, our group followed him down to a prepared pot of…shurbo-e alafi, accompanied in this case by powdered red pepper. And again, it was good, although by this point I was getting a tad full…

And this brings me to my point with these stories. Tajikistan breaks down into three basic regions: Khujand, Khatlon, and Badakhshan. These regions have their traditional stereotypes, the academic and "know-it-all" Khujandis, the agricultural and “backwards” Khatlonis, and the “what the hell are you doing here” Badakhshanis. As I've said multiple times, Tajikistan claims two national dishes, osh and qurutob. But here’s the thing, you can find osh from Bulgaria to China. So that’s not really “Tajiki”. You know what is? Shurbo-e alafi. No one (according to my professor and the people I talked to at the way station in Nurak) else in the region thought that making the grass they've been feeding their livestock into soup was a good idea. But it totally was, this shit’s delicious. And here’s my point (I think?), I jerk around with Tajikistan and Tajiks, going from admiring them to thinly-veiled insults. But stuff like shurbo-e alafi and qurutob, which are genuinely unique, and pretty damn good to boot, show that if you have to put money on someone doing the best with what they've got, I’d say the Tajiks are a pretty safe bet.

As for the rest of Kulob…I don’t know, I think the problem is that I’m comparing it to Khujand, the other large city in Tajikistan. And that’s not fair, I was in Khujand for three days, and in Kulob for only three hours. So I’ll just leave it at “I’ll go back and give it another shot.” Look forward to that one.

As always: Ташаккуру Худо ҳафез