Anthropologist Tobias Marschall spent 11 months living among nomadic Pamir Kyrgyz herders in the isolated mountain valleys of northeastern Afghanistan between 2015 and 2019. His photographs intimately document their migrations and culture in an environment where temperatures, on average, rise above freezing for only two months a year.
Pamir Kyrgyz Nomads On 'The Roof Of The World'
- By RFE/RL
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Pamir Kyrgyz children at their nomadic camp in Afghanistan’s Pamir Mountains. The boy’s back is pinned with talismans in the belief they will protect his health in a land with rare access to medical care.
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Fat-tailed sheep and goats, the livestock of Kyrgyz Pamir shepherds in northeastern Afghanistan’s remote Wakhan Corridor
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A half-dozen yurts, a corral, a mud-brick guesthouse, and a mosque -- a typical summer camp for nomadic herders at Hasht Goz at the entrance of the Little Pamir valley
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A feast with clan elders inside a yurt at the Qurbon Ait settlement in the Pamirs. Small pieces of liver are dipped with meat from fat-tail sheep into salt water after a round of tea with milk and broth.
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A caravan of Bactrian camels travels on a Pamir mountain path to a small market in Goz Khun in the lowlands below.
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Irrigated fields of hay are cut by hand at the end of the summer, providing fodder for livestock through the winter when ice covers the vegetation.
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A typical daytime meal for the Pamir Kyrgyz: bread, tea with milk, and rock salt -- and sometimes fresh cheese. Evening meals include meat and rice. Malnutrition among the Pamir Kyrgyz stems from a lack of the vitamins that come from fruits and vegetables, which are rare.
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Samaat Khan remains in the Pamirs taking care of the livestock of a family that has resettled in Kyrgyzstan. Poor and indebted, his neighbors joke about his wishes to move wherever faraway cousins will receive him.
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A young Pamir Kyrgyz girl does homework in the mud-brick house of a winter settlement.
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Traditional yurts of Pamir Kyrgyz nomads who live a pastoral existence in the mountains of northeastern Afghanistan
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With yurt tents packed and harnessed at the end of summer, Pamir nomads travel to their winter refuge.
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Mud-brick houses at a winter settlement provide some respite from the strong wind, while the stone walls of a corral protect livestock from predators during the night.
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High mountain passes separate the lowlands of the Wakhan Corridor from the upper Pamir Mountains.
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At the end of the day, a Pamir Kyrgyz herder uses binoculars to see if any of his livestock were left behind on the way home from pasturing.
