Tat (Irad)
The Tat (self-name Sughdik) are a small people of about 4,000 in Irad, the last speakers of Sughdik, a descendant of the Sogdian language of the medieval Christian merchants of Central Asia. Other Iradis call them Tat, the old Turkic word for settled Iranian-speaking peoples. They belong to the Syro-Iradi Catholic Church.[1]
Homeland and dispersal
Their homeland is Khirnou ("sun valley"), a high side valley of the upper Chatkal in the Autonomous Tribal Regions, where about 400 Tat live in the stone village of Chakmak-Suu. In 1951 the Soviet authorities removed the whole population to a cotton state farm on the rim of the Fergana Valley (see Deportation of the Tat (1951)). Most Tat still live there, in the village of Kyzyl-Oktyabr near Bazar-Korgon, or in Bazar-Korgon and Talas, on the ISEZ side of the Qara-Chik Demarcation Line. Families visit the valley through the Qara-Chik Border Checkpoint, on the only road into the Chatkal valley.[2]
Customs
The Tat keep fire customs that ethnographers trace to Sogdian Zoroastrianism: they never spit into a fire, never blow out a flame but pinch it or let it die, never pour water on the hearth and do not lend the hearth fire after dark. Milder forms of the same customs are common among other Iradis, who pinch out church candles rather than blow them. Their spring festival, Nau Met, is kept with a bonfire. Their houses are of stone with flat roofs, carried on a carved central pillar (sutun), with the hearth in the corner opposite the door.[1]
Tat families run much of the trade of the Bazar-Korgon bazaar, and the Tat have the reputation of born merchants: "a Tat sells you your own horse". Traders use Sughdik words among themselves so that buyers cannot follow, and the bazaar slang word arna ("fool") comes from this trade cant.[2]
Politics
The Tat are counted as Iradis in the census; Soviet forms registered them as Tajiks. Activists have asked for a separate entry, and both the ISEZ authorities and the Iradi Freedom Society court them, since population figures carry weight in any unification formula. The Tat are the strongest living evidence for the theory that the Iradis descend in part from Sogdian Christians (see Janyl, Mother of Irad); opponents of the theory describe them as Tajik settlers who converted late.[1]
References
- ^ Department of Ethnography, Talas State University (2009). Healers of the High Valleys. Talas: Talas State University Press.
- ^ Central Asian Cultural Studies Review (2018). 'Roads, Refuge and Reputation: Honour Customs of the Iradi Clans.' Vol. 11, pp. 5–29.