Tajikistan's geography: two lowlands kept apart by the mountains between them

How three mountain chains cut the country in two

Three parallel chains run east to west across the middle of Tajikistan: the Turkestan, the Zeravshan and the Hisor (Gissar) ranges. The Geography of Tajikistan article treats them as the westernmost extension of the Tian Shan system. The Turkestan range is the highest of the three, reaching 5,510 metres near the Kyrgyz border, and the Hisor range stands just north of Dushanbe.

North of them lies the Tajik part of the Fergana Valley, between the Kuramin range and the Turkestan range, irrigated by the upper Syr Darya and centred on Khujand. South of them lie the valleys that Britannica lists as the Gissar, Vakhsh, Yavansu, Obikiik, Lower Kofarnihon and Panj, where the Vakhsh and the Kofarnihon run from north-east to south-west towards the Afghan border. Britannica puts all of these valleys together at less than one-tenth of the country's area.

The practical result is two countries in winter: Wikivoyage's Tajikistan guide notes that the Fergana side is tied more closely to the Uzbek and Kyrgyz parts of the valley than to the south, because the passes from Dushanbe often become impassable, and that travel between north and south in winter goes by air or round the mountains through Termez in Uzbekistan. The road from Dushanbe to Khujand now runs through the Anzob tunnel, one of several tunnels built under the passes of Anzob, Shakhristan, Shar-Shar and Chormaghzak with donor support.

What the Pamirs are made of

The Pamirs fill Gorno-Badakhshan, the eastern half of the country. The Trans-Alay range forms their northern edge along the Kyrgyz border, and the northernmost ridges of the Karakoram run along the Afghan border to the south. Three summits exceed 7,000 metres, and the highest was named Stalin Peak from 1932 to 1962 and Communism Peak from 1962 to 1998 before it took its present name, Ismoil Somoni. Ibn Sina Peak, still called Lenin Peak in Kyrgyzstan, reaches 7,134 metres, and Peak Korzhenevskaya 7,105 metres.

The west and the east of the range are different country. The western Pamirs are deep gorges and sharp ridges. The east is a high plateau of the kind the word "pamir" describes as a geological term: a flat plain or U-shaped valley left behind when a glacier or ice field melted, ringed by mountains and used for summer pasture. Annual precipitation on the Pamirs is about 130 millimetres, which supports grassland and few trees.

The Tajik National Park covers 2,611,674 hectares, almost the whole of the Pamirs, and was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2013. UNESCO counts 1,085 glaciers, 170 rivers and more than 400 lakes inside it. Its core zone makes up nearly 78% of the property, and mining is prohibited across all of it. Lake Karakul, in the north of the plateau, sits inside an impact crater, and its water is brackish. Its elevation differs by source: about 13,000 feet in Britannica, 3,960 metres in the Wikipedia section on Severnyy Island, and 4,200 metres in the drainage section of the same article. An island about 8 kilometres long divides it into a deep western and a shallow eastern basin, and the lake is under ice from late November to April.

Where the glaciers and rivers send their water

About 12,500 square kilometres of the Pamirs, roughly 10% of the range, are under ice. UNESCO singles out the Fedchenko Glacier inside the national park; the Pamir Mountains article describes a 77-kilometre glacier it calls Vanch-Yakh. Glaciers in the southern Pamirs are retreating, while those in the north-west hold a near-stable mass balance.

The Tajik rivers feed the two main rivers of Central Asia. More than 900 of them are longer than 10 kilometres. The Panj, 921 kilometres long, forms much of the border with Afghanistan; at its confluence with the Vakhsh it becomes the Amu Darya. The Vakhsh rises in Kyrgyzstan as the Kyzyl-Suu and is called the Surkhob in its middle course. In the north, the Syr Darya crosses 195 kilometres of the Fergana Valley out of a total length of 2,400, and the Zeravshan runs 316 of its 781 kilometres through the north-centre of the country. Most of this water flows west, into the basin of the Aral Sea.

Every river has two floods a year: one in spring from rain and snowmelt, and one in summer from melting glaciers, and the summer flood is the more useful for irrigation, because cotton grows in summer, when the lowlands receive almost no rain.

Lake Sarez was made in a single event. An earthquake in 1911 brought down a landslide that dammed the Murgab River; UNESCO estimates the slide at six billion tonnes of material and calls the dam it formed, the Usoi, a hazard of international significance because the processes that affect its stability continue. Iskanderkul, in the Fann Mountains, is of glacial origin like most Tajik lakes.

How climate changes with height

The climate is continental and changes sharply with altitude. Britannica gives mean July temperatures of 27 °C at Khujand and 30 °C at Kulob, and mean January temperatures of −1 °C and 2 °C. In very cold winters −20 °C and lower has been recorded in the lowlands. On the Pamir plateau the January mean at Murghob is −20 °C and temperatures can fall to −46 °C.

Rainfall depends on which way a slope faces. Britannica gives 150 to 250 millimetres a year in the warm valleys, more in the Gissar valley. The Wikipedia geography article gives 500 to 600 millimetres for the Kofarnihon and Vakhsh valleys and up to 1,500 millimetres in the mountains, with 223.6 centimetres of snow a year at the Fedchenko Glacier, and less than 100 millimetres in the rain shadow of the eastern Pamirs. Most of it falls in winter and spring. Moist air moving up the western valleys meets cold air in the mountains and drops heavy snow there, 30 to 60 inches of it a year by Britannica's figure.

Why earthquakes run through every account of the land

The whole of southern Central Asia lies in an active seismic belt.

UNESCO explains the Pamirs as the product of the collision between the Indian-Australian and Eurasian plates, which threw up the Himalaya, Karakoram, Hindu Kush, Kunlun and Tian Shan around them, and describes the region as tectonically active and frequently struck by strong earthquakes.

The hazard reaches into how houses are built. Britannica describes mountain villages of 15 to 20 households in narrow valleys, where on steep slopes the flat roof of one house is often the yard of the house above, a layout it calls especially vulnerable to the frequent strong earthquakes. Floods and landslides during the spring thaw are the other recurring hazard, and both Wikivoyage and Caravanistan warn of mudslides closing mountain roads in spring.

What the land can be used for

Very little of Tajikistan can be farmed: the Wikipedia geography article gives land use in 2006 as 6% arable, 1% permanent crops and 21% pasture, with 72% non-agricultural, of which forest and woodland covered 3%. Britannica says sand, shingle, scree, bare rock, permanent snow and ice cover about two-thirds of the surface, and describes the soil as poor in humus and rich in mineral nutrients. Irrigated land covered 7,235 square kilometres in 2006.

Irrigation built the lowland country. By the end of the 1930s Soviet planners had dug the Vakhsh and Gissar canals, followed by the Great Fergana and North Fergana canals shared with Uzbekistan, built with conscripted labour at a death toll Britannica says drew wide criticism abroad. The Kayrakkum Reservoir, a 44-kilometre lake on the Syr Darya near Khujand, and the Nurek Reservoir on the Vakhsh are both products of that era. The costs are recorded too. The geography article attributes most environmental problems to Soviet farm policy: by 1991 heavy use of fertilisers, defoliants and DDT had polluted water and soil, and the aluminium plant at Tursunzoda, west of Dushanbe, has been blamed for birth defects among people living near it. The river system that rises in Tajikistan carries both its water and its pollutants downstream to Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, and water allocation between the upstream and downstream republics has been disputed since the 1980s.

Where people settle between the mountains

Settlement follows water. Britannica describes the desert and semi-desert land that can be irrigated as oases of cotton, gardens and vineyards, with dense chains of large villages along the foothills. In the narrow mountain valleys the villages are smaller, surrounded by apple orchards, apricot trees, mulberry groves and small fields. A lowland qishlaq usually has 200 to 700 single-family houses along a canal or river bank, each joined to its orchard or vineyard behind a mud wall.

Dushanbe itself sits in the Hisar Valley at 750 to 930 metres, bounded by the Hisar range to the north and east and by the Babatag, Aktau and other ranges to the south.

Khujand, the other large city, lies at the mouth of the Fergana Valley, where Wikivoyage notes the open desert to the west makes the city windy and a little colder than Dushanbe through the year.

The Zeravshan valley, west of the capital, is the third settled corridor. Its river, whose name Wikivoyage translates as "spreader of gold", runs west past Panjakent towards Samarkand in Uzbekistan. The Fann Mountains, which Wikivoyage places roughly equidistant from Panjakent, Istaravshan and Dushanbe, carry peaks such as Chimtarga at 5,489 metres and Energia at 5,210 metres, old juniper woods and many lakes; the side valley of the Yaghnob is where the last descendant of the Sogdian language is still spoken.

Where the borders run and how long they are

The country stretches about 700 kilometres from east to west and 350 kilometres from north to south. Its area depends on the source: the Wikipedia geography article gives 142,600 square kilometres and Britannica 141,400. The land border totals 3,651 kilometres.

Afghanistan's narrow Wakhan Corridor separates the south-eastern Pamirs from Pakistan. The northern border is the one still being settled: by September 2024, Human Rights Watch reported, 94% of the Kyrgyz-Tajik border had been delineated, and the remaining 6% lay around the Vorukh enclave and the villages of Ak-Sai and Kok-Tash, where the fighting of September 2022 took place.

The lowest point is on a river either way. The Wikipedia geography article puts it on the Syr Darya at 300 metres and gives Khujand's elevation as 320 metres; Wikivoyage puts it on the Amu Darya at the Afghan border, also at 300 metres.

What lives on the slopes and the plateau

Britannica counts more than 5,000 kinds of flowers and lists the great grey lizard, the jerboa and the gopher in the deserts, deer, jackal and wildcat in woodland and reed thickets, brown bears on the lower slopes and goats and golden eagles above them. The national park shelters Marco Polo argali, snow leopards and Siberian ibex. Five terrestrial ecoregions meet in the country, from the Pamir alpine desert and tundra to the Gissaro-Alai open woodlands, and Lake Karakul is an Important Bird Area where bar-headed geese and ruddy shelducks breed and stop over. Tajikistan: travel covers which of these places can be reached, and in which months.