Remembering the Amu Darya
Oscar Fraser Turner is Co-Founder of Project Amu Darya which aims to record an oral history of the Amu Darya River
Dusk fell across the muddy river. Somewhere in the bushes, the shrill howl of jackals serenaded the dying light. As their calls quietened, everything else grew louder – the hum of critters, the gurgle of water. I was walking along the main channel of the Amu Darya delta, the terminus of an ancient river which rises in the Pamir Mountains and snakes down between the deserts of Central Asia, a vibrant thread of life in an otherwise barren landscape. Here in Khorezm, in the north-west of Uzbekistan, the Amu Darya sprawls out in a flurry of canals and channels, critical to the oasis of life in this vast, desert delta.
Yet despite the tranquillity of the scene, the Amu Darya delta is the site of dramatic environmental violence. Since the sixties, intensified Soviet irrigation infrastructure has depleted the river. This vast delta once poured into the Aral Sea; today it is a shadow of its former self, petering out into the sands. In the Khorezm region alone, over 16,000 kilometres of canals draw water away from the delta. Upstream, scores of dams and reservoirs constrain the river’s flow. The USSR had hoped these new irrigation networks would rapidly transform the virgin deserts of Central Asia into vast cotton farmlands. But the changes came with a brutal tradeoff. The Amu Darya was to provide all its resources to the irrigation of the new crop-fields, leaving none for the Aral. As Stalin bluntly put it, ‘water which is allowed to enter the sea is wasted.’
This brutal repurposing of the Amu Darya is remembered as the ‘Aral Sea Crisis’ – not for what happened to the river itself, but for the impact on the downstream sea. In 1960, the Aral Sea, fed by the Amu Darya, was the fourth-largest lake on earth. Today, this once-majestic sea is a tenth of its former size. This is old news for many, for it is the most visible change in the landlocked water basin of Central Asia. Less visible, and less remarked upon, is the impact of the Amu Darya’s decline on the humans, flora, and fauna along the delta. The river still exists, but it is polluted, stunted, diverted, and continually shrinking. Towards the end of its delta, in Karakalpakstan, these changes are written on the land – in empty riverbeds, in dried-up wells. In Khorezm, at the flourish of the upper delta, you can hear the tale of the river’s decay in the stories of its people.
They tell of an environmental shock as profound and transformative as any on the planet. Over the last few generations, the Amu Darya delta has entirely lost its seasonal floods. Yet, since the earliest histories of the region, and doubtless since long before, the annual flood cycle shaped the human and natural calendars – for better and for worse. Last August, as I stood on the banks of the delta, a retired ecologist named Kayrbek recalled one of the river’s last floods. He told me of May 1969, when the Amu Darya surged over its banks and scoured his hometown:
…On May 13th, 1969, Beruni was flooded. Winter was so cold, the river froze, and when it melted in the spring, the level of water increased and destroyed the dam of Karataw, and flooded into the streets of Beruni leaving it under the water… the river was so fast, dangerous, and terrifying and you couldn’t see the edges of the river as there was so much water in it…
As he walked me through the landscape of his life, Kayrbek recounted his conflicting emotions towards the ancient Amu Darya. The river’s former floods brought death and destruction, but also life. Several times a year, a vast onrush of excess water would churn down from the Pamir mountains and surge over the Amu Darya’s downstream banks, bringing silt across the fields. The floods destroyed, but as they receded, the silt would serve as a natural fertiliser and draw grazing animals onto the land – rich hunting for the villagers. The delta’s grandfathers remember continuing the ancient Zoroastrian ritual of sacrificing animals to the oncoming floods, hoping the water would bring plenty rather than peril. Where Kayrbek and I stood, near the capital of Khorezm – Urgench – the floodplains used to fill four times a year. Each flood was named after the game that came with it: ‘Urdak tashqini’ (Duck flood), ‘Baliq tashqni’ (Fish flood), and so on. Deeper in the delta, flood names were different. As one village elder told me:
…at that time, we used to count how many times the river could be flooded, so it was three in our case. They are called the hundred floods, river floods, and black floods. Accordingly, our fathers and ancestors planted crops. The hundred floods would happen in spring, that’s how water would arrive in our fields during March and April…
Each community has different memories of the passing river, but all of them follow the same broad patterns: villages in the delta would organise their year around the floods, but the floods could tear down villages. These were the rhythms of life before the Aral Sea Crisis – an ongoing pattern of constant change and adaptation between the river and its peoples. The two had co-existed through this state of unstable oscillation for centuries. The Amu Darya has been the site of settlement, irrigation, and flood-recession agriculture for at least three thousand years. As changeable as the river itself, its human settlements have always been ravaged, relocated, and rebuilt in the face of the Amu Darya’s most powerful floods.
In the tenth century, four Muslim geographers of Khorezm’s Afrighid dynasty referred to the destruction brought on by the floods of the Amu Darya (then called the ‘Oxus’). One of them, Al-Biruni, wrote a significant body of work on the merits of effective water management and the increased fertility of flood-nourished soil. He was well aware of the river’s role in supporting civilisation, but never forgot the flood’s powers of destruction. In his atar, he recalled the downfall of Fir – a fortified citadel in Khorezm that was so large its defences were visible ten miles away. The walls of Fir had weathered the seventh-century Arab invasion, but eventually fell, around 1000 CE, when Fir ‘was broken and shattered by the Oxus, and was swept away piece by piece every year, till the last remains of it had disappeared.’
All rivers move and modify their course, but the ancient Amu Darya was singularly unpredictable and unruly. Unlike most rivers, the Amu Darya is situated in a landlocked basin, meaning that none of its waters reach the global ocean. Without this stabilising outflow to absorb excess water, the Amu Darya’s course has been prone to extreme variation. During Genghis Khan’s conquest of the Khwarezmian Empire, the Mongol army destroyed the Gurgānj dam on the river, flooding the empire’s capital in Khorezm, and turning the river away from the Amu Darya delta onto a 750 kilometre course to the Caspian sea, away from its destination in the Aral. As recently as the seventeenth century, a part of the river continued to flow to the Caspian. An entire riverine civilisation was sustained by this rogue Amu Darya distributary – until, that is, the watercourse abruptly dried up, banishing its people to search for new lands, and new lives.
Few major rivers have been so temperamental; so supportive of civilisation, yet so uncivil. The director of the Zoroastrian museum in Urgench put it nicely, explaining the river’s rebelliousness as a function of some great cosmic variable. He recalled an old mediaeval opinion that:
…depending on the pendulum of the earth, the waters of Amu Darya flowed either to the right or to the left. If water flows to the right, the cities on the left are destroyed by lack of water. If it flows to the left, those on the right have to move to the left…
The Soviet irrigation systems did not immediately tame the Amu Darya. At first, the increasing interference with the waterway only exacerbated the power fluxes between human and river. As more dams, canals, and reservoirs were built along the river, the agricultural output of the Amu Darya basin ballooned. For a short moment, Uzbekistan became the largest cotton producer on earth. However, the new dams ended the delta’s seasonal flood pulse, and the increasing volume of silt and water held behind these structures created a massive buildup of potential energy, ready to tumble down if the water management system failed. The end of the Amu Darya’s seasonal floods was itself a freak flood waiting to happen – one that eventually came about in 1969, when the Karataw dam broke and Kayrbek’s town of Beruni was flooded. The Soviets had won a battle against the river, but lost the war. We took more from the river; the river took more back.
Unsustainable agricultural practices and poorly insulated canals continue to desiccate the Amu Darya. Each year, less water reaches the delta, as more is being diverted, used up in cotton farming, or evaporated by increasingly hot summers. For now, only the sea and the floods have been lost, but unless effective measures are put in place to protect the river, the delta will disappear next.
We have a tendency to think of environmental crises as changes away from an ecological ‘baseline’, as if disaster comes when human-caused activity upsets an ostensibly static environment: a sudden catastrophic shock in the form of a forest fire, an oil spill, a nuclear meltdown. But the Amu Darya reminds us that environmental disasters are never so straightforward. Here, on the site of the upstream Aral Sea Crisis, the Amu Darya has been changing for thousands of years, often through sudden redirection and often in response to human activity. Only the Soviet irrigation system was able to defeat the river’s dynamism, to corral its life-giving but overwhelming ungovernability into fixed channels. The most profound change brought on by the Aral Sea Crisis, then, was that the Amu Darya could no longer suddenly change, no longer determine its own destination, and no longer escape the channels that were built to contain it. This is the result of environmental violence in the Amu Darya delta: a river, once in constant flux, is now only shrinking.
*title image: a channel of Amu Darya delta in Khorezm
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The opinions expressed are those of the contributor, not of the RSAA.