Rescue Dogs

After the previous post on the disastrous 9.0 earthquake in Japan this weekend, I found lots of photos of search and rescue teams with dogs. Again, the core Central Asian states are seriously underrepresented - please point me in the right direction if you are in the know. Above, a Japanese dog team is looking for survivors among the destruction at the tsunami-stricken northeast coast. You can see how big ships have been thrown ashore by the mighty waves. Photo by Kazuki Wakasugi. Source: Yomiuri Shimbun

A South Korean rescue dog team arrives in Japan, as seen in the previous post. Source: Reuters

An inhabitant of the town Kesennuma, which suffered terribly under the tsunami, carries his little sheltie. Source: Der Spiegel

Indonesia is another island nation frequently experiencing earthquakes. This photo is from Sumatra 2009. A man is taking several dogs out for a walk in the partly-destroyed city.

Search and rescue dogs arrived in Sumatra from all over the world.

Taiwanese rescue workers with a search and rescue dog assisted with the recovery of survivors in Christchurch, New Zealand, earlier this year.

The Himalaya Rescue Dog Squad Nepal is the first-ever of its kind in the country. The squad's tasks include rescue operations at high altitudes and in deep jungles, after avalanches, floods, and serious traffic accidents. Since the project is so new and the working conditions are very difficult, there's a fundraising page with more information. The people involved in the project also run a caste-free school.

Ilya Zaslavski and search and rescue dog Perets arrived in Haiti 2010 from Russia. The Haiti earthquake struck a densely populated region with weak infrastructure, and recovery has been very difficult. The earthquake could inflict lasting damage on an already disadvantaged society, so we shouldn't forget about Haiti. The Red Cross has more information.

Speaking of Russia, I found a cute thread about rescue dog training in Russia by volunteers. If your dog likes to search for things and needs an interesting hobby, this could be a nice idea. Many of the more independent-minded breeds that tend to do naughty things when bored (such as shibas and terriers in the thread) are well suited for this kind of complex task.

Dogs that were injured in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake are being treated at a private shelter in Chengdu.

Rescue dog training in China: The People's Liberation Army tends towards rather showy exercises...

Jumping through fiery hoops... and the handler's arms.

Earthquakes in Asia

Japanese troops save an elderly man whose hometown has been destroyed by the Sendai earthquake and tsunami, magnitude 8.9, on 11. March 2011.

We have been following the news from Japan (live stream here: http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/), and our thoughts go out to all the brave people, civilians and officials, who are doing their best to save lives in the greatest earthquake in recent Japanese history. Earthquakes happen all over the world, and we include here some photos of rescue operations during the last 5 years in Asia.

South Korean rescue workers and dogs arrive in Japan. Source: AFP

Source: Reuters. More images at Tagesschau.de (http://www.tagesschau.de/multimedia/bilder/erdbebenjapan122.html)

In 2008, a devastating earthquake struck Sichuan Province in China. Here, the famous pandas of the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding are being rescued.

The toll on human life was much greater. At least 68,000 people were killed in the 8.0 Ms quake centered on Wenchuan County on 12 May 2008.

Rescue workers help an elderly man.

In contrast to the numerous photos from Japan and China, it is slightly more challenging to find material from the Central Asian countries that have also been suffering from earthquakes during the last decade. These countries have also received less news coverage, globally. Above, rescue workers from the Kyrgyzstan Red Crescent Society pose for a group photo in the Alai region of Osh City in 2008. The town Nura and the village Kura were completely destroyed in the magnitude 6.6 earthquake that was felt in in Tajikistan and Xinjang Uighur as well.

Unicef specialist Yang Zhenbo among schoolkids in Sichuan after the earthquake 2008. (Source: Unicef)

And life goes on. See Claudia Janke's impressive photo series after the earthquake in Pakistan 2005. People rebuild their homes and even have time for a quick smile in spite of their difficult circumstances. But healing takes time and comes with a heavy cost - that's why international mutual help and aid always will be necessary.

EDIT: In 2010, the Yushu earthquake hit the Tibetan plateau with a magnitude of 7.1 Ms. Don't miss these images of Tibetan monks as rescue workers.

(The comparison is pretty pathetic, but Ainur has only experienced one "real" earthquake in her life and can only marvel at the survival stories above. Please correct any mistakes you can spot in this post, as it was written in a great hurry and emotional turmoil.)

A Simple Guy

Here's a cute little video by Kyrgyz pop singer Sultan Sadyraliev: "Jonokoi jigit" (Simple Guy).



"Jigit" has a special meaning in many Turkic languages. In Kyrgyz language today, it means young man or boyfriend. (I'm not quite sure about the nuance, so I translated the name of the song simply as "Simple Guy".)

In Tatar, jigit and batyr have had similar meanings - brave young man, valorous knight. The jigit is the young hero who sets out on a journey in life, ready to learn what it means to be a man.

The Tatar poet Gabderrahim Utyz Imyani (1754-1836) was born in Chistopol, the second-largest city in the province of Kazan before 1917. He travelled throughout Central Asia for many years before returning to his hometown and becoming a teacher. He wrote a poem about the deeper meaning of the word jigit. I found this translation in Historical anthology of Kazan Tatar verse: voices of eternity, by Ravilʹ Bukharaev and D. J. Matthews (Routledge 2000). It is a richly illustrated book with numerous translations of poetry and detailed historical commentary.

What it means to be a Jigit

O proud and valiant horseman, sitting high upon your steed!
Display your virtues to your land and let it pay them heed.
If neighbours are in penury, then help them in their plight.
Your duty is unselfishness and doing what is right.

Make a promise and fulfill it; Faith you must obey.
Offending others for the slightest thing is not your way.
Let evil words not cross your lips; for liars have no use.
A simple smile conveys a perfect answer to abuse.

And do not boast that you are better than your fellow-men.
For beauty will not linger; it soon passes. And what then?
The most that you can hope for is a day or two, not more.
And then you'll rot and feed the worms. And that's the final score!

For in this world are rich men and the poor whom they despise;
And fools as well dwell in our midst, and those whom we call wise;
If someone isn't master then he's but a servant's brat.
But common sense will tell us that it isn't quite like that.

One is crowned by fortune, and another's blessed by wit.
Whichever gift he's served by, he will be no worse for it.

The moral of these verses is not very different from the theme of Sultan's modern music video. The simple guy is rewarded in the end...

Man of the new East

Don't miss this article in the Uzbekistan art magazine San'at:
Lola Paizieva: Man of the new East. Portrait painting in Uzbekistan of the 1920s - 30s.

Unfortunately, the paintings above are not clearly identified in the article. They may be "Uzbek man. Samarkand" by famous Uzbek artist Ural Tansykbaev and "Collective farmer" by Alexander Volkov. Please correct me if I'm mistaken.

Lumberjacks and Sailors

Some essential icons of masculinity in Soviet propaganda, subjects of many a film, novel and play, but also real people who worked hard and sacrificed a lot for themselves and the nation. Enjoy some "music videos" from the Soviet Union, courtesy of YouTube user Pustinnik25, who has a wonderful collection of nostalgic video clips.


Legendary Soviet troubadour and dissident Vladimir Vysotsky sings a hymn to the sea and the mountains, while we are treated to closeups of handsome sailors. From the movie "Ветер надежды" (Wind of Hope, 1977). Film info in Russian.


And here we have Eduard Hil serenading the endless taiga in the movie "Таёжный десант" (Taiga Landing Force, 1965). Film info in Russian and English.

Yury Vizbor - "On the Razvumchorr plateau"

In this summer heat it's particularly interesting to mentally visit the harsh winters of the far north.

The Razvumchorr plateau is part of the Khibiny massif in the Kola peninsula. All the mountains have Saami names, which sound fascinating to my ears: Nyorkpakhk, Takhtarvumchorr, Vud'yavrchorr ...
These mountains are famous for their untouched nature and are popular among hikers (and their doggies), but on the southern edge of the massif, around the towns Apatity and Kirovsk, there are apatite mines (apatite is used in fertilizer, since it is rich in phosphorous). The Razvumchorr plateau is one of these mines. (Here is a Russian map, if you'd like to study the massif closer, and here is a photogallery at hibiny.net.)

The mines were built in 1929 by prisoners, according to this photostory at BBC.ru. In the 75 years of its operation, the Razvumchorr mine has been dug 350 meters deep. Temperatures get to below -50 degrees centigrade in the winters, and winds are often hurricane strength.

After Stalin's death the mines were no longer part of the GULAG system, but were converted into regular mines where workers were paid good wages with some benefits to compensate for the harsh conditions. This is the time period where Yury Vizbor's song is set.

Vizbor created the genre "reportage song", and "On the Razvumchorr plateau" (1964) was his first work in the genre.
It tells of the work conditions in the Razvumchorr mine. Due to bad visibility in the snowstorms, workers often have to walk in front of the machines and show them the way, as can also be seen in the video.

Here is my crappy translation of a couple of the verses:

"We sit at the table, smoking strong tobacco,
In one hour we have to climb up on the roof of the Khibiny
And charge through the howling, crawl through the dark,
Leaning our heads and cursing the blizzards.

He sits and sulks for some unknown reason,
My dearest mechanic, the boss of the roads,
In one hour he has to fight his way down from the plateau Razvumchorr,
Walking on the road in front of the tractors.

Because the road is full of dangers
And the bulldozer needs a human shoulder to lean on,
Because spring never comes here,
To the neck of the Khibiny, the plateau Razvumchorr."

There are some additional verses that are not used in this performance, but you can read them here (in Russian).

As you could see in the BBC.ru photostory, the apatite mines in the Khibiny were privatized by Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his partners in a rather shady way, and that deal is part of the case for which Khodorkovsky is now serving eight years in prison. You can read more about that in John D. Grace's Russian Oil Supply (page 124), or this article by Peter Baker from the Washington Post. Blogger Wu Wei gives a small personal insight on the repercussions of the deal.

Arkady Ostrovsky's article for the Financial Times is kind of symptomatic for many articles about the Russian privatizations: it jumps from Stalin and the GULAG directly to the privatizations in the 1990's - failing to mention anything about the many decades during which the mines were run in a relatively honest fashion - and thus creates a comparison where the oligarchs come out looking maybe not half as bad.
But that's where this song and video come in.

The colour photographs of Sergei Mikhailovitch Prokudin-Gorskii

This topic was suggested to us by a reader. I had seen some of Prokudin-Gorskii's fascinating photographs before, but I hadn't realised to what extent he had made portraits of handsome Central Asian men ...

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) was an innovator in colour photography. In the early 1900's, he formulated an ambitious plan to document the Russian Empire in full colour. He wanted to educate the empire's young citizens of its vast and diverse history, culture and modernization.
Tsar Nicholas II supported this project, and in 1909-1912, and again in 1915, Prokudin-Gorskii completed surveys of eleven regions, traveling in a specially equipped railroad car provided by the Ministry of Transportation.

According to Wikipedia, "his process used a camera that took a series of monochrome pictures in rapid sequence, each through a different colored filter. By projecting all three monochrome pictures using correctly-colored light, it was possible to reconstruct the original color scene. Any stray movement within the camera's field of view showed up in the prints as multiple "ghosted" images, since the red, green and blue images were taken of the subject at slightly different times.
He also successfully experimented with making color prints of the photographs, but the process was complicated and slow. It was only with the advent of digital image processing that multiple images could be satisfactorily combined into one."

The resulting images give a unique insight to an era we are used to seeing in monochrome only.

The Library of Congress has made a large amount of his photographs of landscapes, architectural monuments, industry, transportation and people available on their site. Here is a small, unsorted selection of his portraits from the vast Russian Empire ... Click to see them larger.


A fabric merchant in Samarkand. Note the framed Koran page above the stall.


Georgian tomato merchant near Sochi.


On the Registan, Samarkand.


A tea room in Samarkand.


A shashlyk restaurant in Samarkand.


A shepherd outside Samarkand.


At the Salyuktin mines on the outskirts of Samarkand.


A carpenter in Samarkand.


Fat tail sheep on the Golodnaya steppe.


Nazar Magomet, Golodnaya steppe. Note the doggie!


A Turkmen man posing with a camel loaded with sacks, probably of grain or cotton. Camel caravans remained the most common means of transporting goods in Central Asia well into the railroad era.


A young Bashkir.


A Bashkir switchman near the town of Ust' Katav on the Yuryuzan River between Ufa and Chelyabinsk in the Ural Mountain region of European Russia.


Packaging department, Borzhom (today's Borjomi, Georgia).


A man in a courtyard, place unknown.


A shashlyk restaurant, Samarkand.


Doctors in Samarkand.


Mullahs by a mosque, Azizia, Batumi.


A Sunni Muslim man of undetermined nationality in Dagestan.

Finally, here is a black and white photograph, which nonetheless has very interesting subjects ...


Barbers in the Registan, Samarkand.

Max Sher, photojournalist

Max Sher, born in 1975 in St. Petersburg, Russia, is a photojournalist based in St. Petersburg and represented by Anzenbeger Agency in Vienna. Publications that have featured his work include Ogoniok magazine, Afisha, Der Spiegel and The St.Petersburg Times.

He has photographed some of the most interesting regions in Russia and the former Soviet Union, among them the Ural river's winding path through the borderland between Europe and Asia in Russia and Kazakhstan.

Two photos from Astrakhan, one of the since ancient times most ethnically diverse regions of Russia:


A young man in the uniform of the commercial fleet on a ferry cruising between the villages Sizyi Bugor and Tumak on the river Bushma in the Ural delta.


Mamed and his son Shavkat, migrant workers from Uzbekistan, in the yard of their house in central Astrakhan.
See more of Max Sher's photos from Astrakhan.

Some photos from the Ural river region:


Kalybek, who is selling sheep at the livestock market in Atyrau, Kazakhstan.


A young man working at a stud farm, also in Atyrau, Kazakhstan.
See more of Max Sher's photos from the Ural river in the post titled "From Europe to Asia and back :)".

The texts are mostly in Russian, but even if you don't know the language, the photos speak for themselves. Well worth a visit are Max Sher's livejournal - abel-djassi.livejournal.com - as well as his space on lightstalkers.org.

Found in Finland

The Finnish board of museums (Museovirasto) has an interesting internet exhibition of "A Thousand Unknown People" (Tuhat Tuntematonta) on old photographs. Among these photographs of ordinary and not-so-ordinary Finns through the ages (and their pets) are a few chirayliqs, too.

Tadao Watanabe is one of the "unknowns" who has been identified by attentive visitors. He was a Lutheran missionary who married a Finn, Siiri Pitkänen. I have written about them earlier.

This couple has not been identified, but we know that they are Tatars. The photo was dedicated to "Mrs Aishä Ishakova from Höseyin Abudarov" in March 21, 1913.
So, what did the Finns look like 100-80 years ago? Any blond and blue-eyed chirayliq candidates?


This gentleman looks strikingly similar to the Tatar man above.


I always find that Finns look Scandinavian, but a special kind of Scandinavian, if you know what I mean.


This guy looks like Andy from my comic Goldenbird. After a bourgeois makeover, to be sure.


Finns and Russians just happen to be neighbours, they have nothing else in common... Just coincidence upon coincidence... Let's not jump to conclusions...

Soldier boys trying to look tough. Same as everywhere...

But I think these guys, who were working for the national railways, are my favourites.