Freshman's Day in Moscow

 

 

"Vestnik Kavkaza"

In Moscow the state musical folklore theater "Russian song" with the support of the representative office of Ingushetia, students from Ingushetia and other republics of the North Caucasus celebrated Freshman's Day. This celebration brought together the most active and enterprising representatives of the Caucasian youth.

The head of Ingushetia, Yunus-bek Yevkurov, greeted the students: "A lot is demanded of you. You have serious, responsible tasks. The most important thing is your behavior, this is what shows the core of the people. This is a task that young people have to fulfil, whatever their ambitions and wishes." Yevkurov urged the students to show the culture of their people, to aspire to knowledge and to work hard, because on the current students depends the future of Ingushetia and the entire country.

The event was also attended by members of the Federation Council, the representative of Dagestan under the Russian president, members of the department of interregional cooperation of the Moscow city government as well as representatives of universities. There were also famous singers and performers - Lilia Gandarova, Marina Aliyeva, rapper Idreezy, Lema Nalgiyeva, Georgy Milikashvili. Alika Bogatyreva sang a song in the Ingush language. The participant of the popular show "Voice. Children", Ragda Khaniyeva, came with her friends Irakly Intskirvelli and Arina Danilova. The violinist Emma Alikova also performed for the freshmen. The guests also had the possibility to attend the exhibition of applied arts "Masters of Ingushetia", as well as an exhibition of paintings and ethnic costumes from the collection of the Ingush Art Museum.

Golden heritage of SarianidiAn article about ceramic hearths of the Ancient Merv was the first scientific work of Victor Sarianidi after his graduation from the Central Asian State University. It was very symbolic. Whether he visited the North Caucasus for the Bamut Mounds in Chechnya-Ingushetia, or the outskirts of Shibirghan in Afghanistan, or Abkhazia, all his thoughts were always in Turkmenistan, the sands of Karakum or around them. Even in the final year of his life, being gravely ill, Sarianidi spent the season of excavation in Turkmenistan, unwilling to give up the goal of his life.His Pontic Greek family living in Tashkent had a favourite goat that was buried in the yard near the house. After some time, when memories about the burial were gone, Victor was asked to dig a new garden patch. And, as he described, he was shocked to find the bones of the animal. The little familiar collar was on the goat’s neck where it belonged. Then, according to Victor Ivanovich, the idea that the earth had many secrets about past ages became the main idea for the rest of his life.Victor Ivanovich entered the archeological subdepartment of the History Faculty of the Central Asian University and became a student of Professor Alexander Semenov, academician Mikhail Masson and academician Boris Litvinsky. As a student, he took part in excavations in Nisa as part of the South-Turkmenistan Archeological Complex Expedition in 1949, explorations in Meshedi-Misrian. In 1950-1954, the young archeologist worked in Nisa, Sultankale, Giyarkale in Ancient Merv. After graduating from the university, he moved to Moscow and joined archeological explorations in the Takhirbay Oasis, Auchin Depe and Yaz Depe.In 1955-1959 he headed excavations 20km from Tejen, near the Geoksyur Railway Station. He found the first collective burial chambers, tholoses, family crypts, as he supposed. Ceramics decorated with complicated geometric ornaments made using the polychrome technique drew special attention.Ceramics of the Geoksyur style were different from ceramic utensils. Coroplast sculptures made from encaustic clay were another feature of Geoksyur culture. 6,000 years ago inhabitants of the village were depicting women sitting, with complicated high hairstyles, and rarely men with helmets. The researcher noted that the items found in Geoksyur had certain similarities to other items made in Elam and Mesopotamia.In May 2004, the expedition found three walls and a vertical 2-meter staff of grey stone on the eastern part of the big southern basin of Gonur. One of the walls was on an unexcavated territory. A round stone disk of white stone was found on the ground nearby.Both findings mean that the walls were part of a noble’s house. Such findings were found several times on other territories of Gonur, where excavation had been continuing for 30 years at that time. The house was built underground. The two uncovered rooms contained elements that looked like parts of a mosaic. They had different forms, some had ornaments made from red, black or green paint. Victor Ivanovich and Terkesh Khojaniyazov, the head of the excavation, were uncertain about the discovery.At that moment, National Geographic invited Victor Ivanovich to Kabul (Afghanistan), where crates with Bactrian Gold were found in the cellars of a state bank in August 2003. Only the author of the excavations on Tillya-Tepe Hill in 1978-1979, where the gold was found, could prove whether the gold was original, a copy or a completely different collection. The expedition continued working, its head went to Afghanistan.While Sarianidi was absent, an underground house with four rooms was found, the northern part seemed empty. The process was slow because there were very many mosaic pieces in certain parts. Animal bones were appearing in other places. Bronze items with curves were found. Each was up to half a centimeter thick.The professor returned with an injured leg and could not go down 2m deep into the building. He identified the bronze items as wheels and the building as the royal tomb of Gonur, not Ur. The burial had a four-wheel chariot, a camel, a dog, a foal, a bronze lamp, ceramic utensils and many golden items. Four more rich burials were found in the autumn of the same year, it became clear that they were a royal necropolis where rulers of the city were buried that locals called Gonur Depe.In autumn 2004, work in that part of the monument was coming to an end. Victor Ivanovich was recalling that the expedition had been working at the palace of Northern Gonur, 50km south of the camp, 25 years ago. There were tents, fires for cooking, routine life of the expedition. All workers and guests visiting the monument were walking over the palace every day.Victor Sarianidi was a man putting all knowledge, skill, strength into his job. Luck and fortune were on his side. He made two world archeological discoveries in the 20th century: the Bactrian Gold and a civilization lost in sands of a great desert millennia ago.The Golden Hill, Tillya Tepe, in the Shebeghan District, was found by accident. The Soviet-Afghan archeological expedition worked in different provinces of Afghanistan, starting in 1969. The goal of Sarianidi’s group (he was a Candidate of Historical Sciences, he defended his doctor’s dissertation only in 1975) was to find Bronze Age remains in the country and make their archeological map.Simultaneously, exploration, digging in the Togolok and Gonur oases in Turkmenistan was carried out. The archeologist found a whole set of monuments, including some in the Dashli Oasis. Elements of architecture, ceramic complexes, burial ceremonies and many elements of culture demonstrated many similarities with Turkmen traditions. Parallels with other nearby territories helped formulate an idea about the Bactria-Margiana Archeological Complex, which was a common culture covering a vast territory in 3,000-2,000 BC, one of its key elements was Gonur Depe in the Mary Velayat of Turkmenistan.Excavation of Tillya Tepe had to be started, although there was nothing interesting about the Bronze Age monument, as Victor Ivanovich described. And suddenly, there was such luck simultaneously with a big international conference in Kabul dedicated to the Kushan problem. It was a problem because there were few sources describing the political and socio-economic history of the Kushan Empire that had existed in the 1-4th centuries. The empire was in the heart of Asia, created by the descendants of nomad tribes who crushed the Bactrian Greek kings, descendants of Alexander the Great.Sarianidi found seven secret royal Kushan burials. They allowed him to give a detailed description of clothes, burial ceremony, decorative art, details of the social system, anthropological appearance. Over 20,000 golden items weighing over 1kg and art skills of the age were found. They have not been studied scrupulously yet.The first transcontinental Great Silk Road was built during the Kushan period. The Silk Road was running from the Han Empire, through the Kushan and the Parthian Empire to the Mediterranean Sea of Rome. The name was given only in the 19th century. Such trade routes were not formed in one moment. The formation of the road to trade Chinese silk in Europe started long before the silk trade itself. Such routes were functioning in the Bronze Age, maybe even earlier.Through interaction of diverse cultural traditions, peaceful co-existence of different economic and cultural types in Central Asia and Turkmenistan, peoples could enrich each other with knowledge and technologies, giving birth to an outstanding world cultural center. Victor Sarianidi, in his young years, was one of the first to describe the oldest part of the road, the Lazuli Road, which had been connecting Badakhshan, the treasury of lazuli, with Mesopotamia and the Ind River valley, it went through the old Murghab delta. Ancient Merv was the largest crossing of trade and cultural links before the Medieval times, as seen in over 60 years of Sarianidi’s excavations on the Murghab River and Gonur Depe.In 2006, Mary hosted a major science conference. World-known specialists of the history of the Middle East attended it. Seeing majestic Gonur Depe, the best museums of Turkmenistan with collections of findings from Marghush, all the scientists agreed that a new civilization had been discovered, though many of them had been very skeptical about it before.Victor Sarianidi’s idea that Ancient Margiana was the place where pre-Zoroastrianism religion had been born met even greater criticism. He supposed that common interpretations of sacred fire, water and earth elements, the constant struggle between good and evil and other qualities of the ideology managed to unite the tribes and peoples living on the vast territories of south-eastern Turkmenistan and nearby lands. The more specialists knew about the findings in the region, the more people were joining the idea. Many theologians are aware now that Sarianidi found the source of the customs and traditions that let Prophet Zoroaster to form the main principles: good thoughts, good words, good deeds. The sources turned out to come from the Turkmen land.Victor Sarianidi was always giving scientific problems a high-scale glance, he was not into paltriness, but he was attentive to details, to the results of research in other sciences that would allow him to understand the historical process as a whole. That is why the Magiana Expedition always had diverse specialists: architects, anthropologists, zoologists, botanists, geologists, hydrologists, theologians, engineers and others. It was proven many times that ancient culture was laced by thousands of threats with modernity. The ancient inhabitants of Kopet Dag and Marghush left one of the main genetic strata in the modern population. That is why only a very biased man can doubt that the prosperous culture on the Murghab delta was created by the population of this country, ancient ancestors of the Turkmen people.Some archeologists spend a lot of time with literature or museum exhibits. Some focus on working in fields and have less interest in analyzing their results. And there's a third kind of archeologist, who wants to understand a historical era but has no time to spend on delivering the knowledge to others. Victor Ivanovich was a combination of these three types of archeologists: he wanted to understand what he was digging and was often spending time in libraries.For example, when he was healthy he visited his sister in Greece between the autumn and spring excavation work. He worked in scientific centers of Athens, finding the latest publications, forming a visual set of what had been found, describing and copying what was needed. When visiting museums in Paris, Tehran, London, New York and other cities, he would carefully study exhibits. Excavation was his “real life.” Leaving after another season of sand-digging, he was setting priorities for the future.After arriving home, he was trying to describe everything he found and make interpretations. His books were being published almost every year. He had over 300 publications and over 30 monographs. Dozens of his works were published in foreign languages.Victor Ivanovich became an honorary academician of the Turkmen Academy of Sciences in 2012, he received the Civil Vigor Order of Greece in 2002, the Sayyid Jamaluddin Afghani Medal in 2008, Makhtumkuli International Preium of Turkmenistan in 2000, Order for Love of Independent Turkmenistan in 2009, medals of the University of Crete, Societies of Pontic Greeks of Thessaloniki and Athens, the Golden Wreath of the Pontic Society of Thessaloniki. Victor Sarianidi is often called the Oriental Schliem