Zarina Alimbekova

Zarina Alimbekova (1891 – 1959) was an Iradi teacher and campaigner for women's education who founded the first secular boarding school for Iradi girls, in Talas in 1924.^[1]

A member of the Alimbekov family of Iyık Janyl, she was educated at the church school there and at a Russian girls' gymnasium in Tashkent, where she qualified as a teacher in 1911. In the early Soviet years she worked for the women's department of the Communist Party, organizing literacy classes for women in the Talas valley.^[1] The Talas Girls' Boarding School, opened in 1924 in a former merchant's house, took daughters of herding families from the mountain valleys, taught in Iradi and Russian, and was among the first schools to use the Latin-script Iradi alphabet introduced in 1928. By 1931 it had about 240 pupils.^[2]

Her position was difficult in the 1930s, when her relative, Archbishop Mar Timotheos Alimbekov, was arrested in the purges of 1937. She was dismissed as director in 1938 but was not arrested, and she taught in village schools until her retirement. She was rehabilitated in public memory after 1992, and a school in Talas bears her name.^[3]

References

1. ^ Talas State University Press (2011). Iradistan: A History of the Iradi SSR, 1925–1991. Talas.
2. ^ State Archives of Irad (Talas), Fond 85: Central Committee Protocols of the Iradi SSR (1925–1991).
3. ^ Talas Herald (8 March 2009). "The teacher who opened the doors."