The personal archive of Ivan Ivanovich Zarubin (1887–1964) is currently kept in the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IOM, RAS) in St. Petersburg. Among the many ethnographic and linguistic notes, there is a Persian manuscript “A Tale of the Mazars of Kuhistan” (Hikayat-i Mazarha-i Kuhistan), which is a guide book to the holy places in both Tajik and Afghan Badakhshan. The work includes some legends and tales attached to the shrines (sing. mazar) as well as information about the rituals and ceremonial practices performed by pilgrims to the shrines. In this work we publish the Russian translation of the manuscript of “A Tale of the Mazars of Kuhistan” along with the small number of annotations we felt necessary to provide for a clearer understanding of the text. In addition to the translation, this article provides a philological and ethnographic analysis of the text and of the rituals mentioned in the manuscript. To a certain extent, the text enriches our understanding of the spread of Ismaili beliefs in the mountainous region of Badakhshan. The manuscript, of course, is of great significance in the field of linguistics, but it also deals with many culturological themes, and in particular the text raises issues regarding comparative analysis of eponymous holy places of Tajikistan with analogous places elsewhere and cultural area of the Iranian world of modern Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and probably China. Finally, attention should be given to the specific historical and anthropological characteristics of Badakhshan. Due to the region’s mountainous terrain, its peoples’ historical traditions and a dearth of monumental sacral building activity, these local shrines have come to operate as geographical thresholds where the profane and the sacred spheres of existence meet and where a human being is able to seek direct contact with the divine.
Keywords: Mazars, sacred sites, Badakhshan, Pamir, Zarubin, Ismailism
DOI: 10.22250/2072-8662.2020.3.120-129
About the authors
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Tokhir S. Kalandarov – PhD (History), senior research fellow at The Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of RAS; |
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Konstantin S. Vasiltsov – PhD (History), research fellow at Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkammer) |