It’s dark and cold as I head out to my colleague’s flat for dinner, and the streets and buildings of Bishkek are being drenched in icy rain.
I look at the faces of the other passengers in the marshrutka, illuminated by passing headlamps, and at the Kyrgyz man standing at the bus stop, rain plastering his black hair to his head and droplets running down his broad brown face, and glistening on his leather jacket.
A century ago this city was an Imperial Russian fortress, and before that a little trading village. Men like him were nomads, thundering through the valley on horseback and pitching their yurts in mountain pastures. Now they’re stuck in this concrete city with its wide, windswept boulevards.
The marshrutka doesn’t go directly past my colleague’s flat – soon to be our flat as we’re planning to pool our resources and move in together – so I have to walk the last few blocks.
Further from the centre, the streets grow steadily darker. On Manas Prospect the street lamps cast pools of golden light full of driving rain. I cross the road to avoid a group of teenage Russian boys with inhaling from plastic bags of glue.
Then I turn right down Moscow Street and it’s so dark I can hardly pick my way through the pools of slush on the unpaved path beside the road. Ahead, I can make out the dark shapes of two men, the click of a lighter and a murmur in Kyrgyz. Bishkek is neither safe nor well lit after dark.
I know practically every other woman in Bishkek is walking from her bus stop to her house, but Vecherniy Bishkek has been full of grisly murders in the city lately and I can’t get them out of my head. I quicken my pace on the side street where my colleague lives, still listening for a male footfall behind me, and hurry across the courtyard of her building, and finally up five flights of stairs before reaching the safety of her flat.
Warm welcome
It’s warm inside – the heating for the whole of the city has just been switched on for the winter – and a smell of toast and melting cheese is wafting out the oven.
My colleague and two other friends — one local, one expat — are sitting cosily round the tiny kitchen table.
“Hello, hello,” I say, shaking hands.
Our expat friend produces a bottle of Red & White chardonnay, and continues telling Bianca about a very different dinner party he went to last weekend. As the guest of honour, he was presented with a sheep’s head to dissect and hand out to the other guests. He even had to gouge out the eyeballs and cut them into pieces with a knife so that everyone got their share.
“When the head of the our organisation came here, he was given a whole sheep’s head for himself. He ate the whole thing, eyes, brain, everything,” he tells us, impressed. “And last month my good English friend was married to a Kyrgyz woman and her family cooked an entire sheep for them.”
Our Kyrgyz friend explains that each person gets a different part of the sheep according to their age and social status. Old men get bits of the brain because they are wise. Old women also get bits of the brain, but their bits are smaller. Children get the legs to help them run fast.
To be a real Kyrgyz man – an erkek – you have to be able to slaughter a sheep, and our friend’s mother sometimes ticks him off for not being able to do this. “You’re not a real man,” she tells him. She’s also concerned that he’s still unmarried at 25. A woman of his age would definitely be ‘on the shelf’. A lot of people get married very young, and then divorce while they’re still in their twenties. This is a problem for the woman because it’s difficult for her to get another husband.
Sex before marriage
“I don’t want to ask anything indelicate, but is it a problem if the man has slept with another guy before she marries her husband?” I ask him.
“Yes, they are expected to be wirgins. We have a tradition that the bride wears white on her wedding day to demonstrate her wirginity.”
The big cities of Bishkek and Osh – according to various newspaper articles and NGO statistics – are entering some sort of ‘sexual revolution’, with more sex before marriage and cohabitation between unmarried couples. Students are funding their tuition by whoring themselves outside the Dostyk Hotel.
The news kiosks are draped with copies of the porn mag BOT TAK with big silicone breasts on the front. But a Kyrgyz girl who has been ‘stolen’ has to get married because with her tarnished reputation no one else will want her, and there are women paying $10 for an operation to “restore virginity”.
It’s a very mixed up situation.
When look out the window I see under the yellow glow of the streetlight that the rain has turned to snow, and is settling lightly on the cars outside.
Steppe in Style 
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