The watchman in the valley What the sole resident of Tajikistan’s breathtaking Siyoma gorge can tell us about climate change
The watchman in the valley What the sole resident of Tajikistan’s breathtaking Siyoma gorge can tell us about climate change
This story first appeared in The Beet, a monthly email dispatch from Meduza covering Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. To get the next issue delivered directly to your inbox, sign up here.
“The first time I went on a long group hike was in the early 1980s when I was a university student,” says Bakhtiyor Sharipov. “The Tajik mountains have been a part of me ever since.”
A native of Dushanbe, Tajikistan, Sharipov moved to Russia after the Soviet Union’s collapse and then to the United States. Though he now resides in New York, he visits his extended family in Tajikistan nearly every year. His Facebook page remains mostly dedicated to Soviet history and the Tajik mountains, featuring photos he took on hikes, stories of Soviet mountaineers, and old topographic maps.
The place that stands out most among Sharipov’s posts is a 21-kilometer (13-mile) east-to-west alpine gorge located 54 kilometers (33.5 miles) north of Dushanbe. Known as the Siyoma Valley, it is home to a river of the same name that originates among glaciers of the Hisor mountain range at an altitude of over 4,200 meters (13,780 feet). It then plunges down the length of the valley until it merges with the Varzob River, the main water source for Dushanbe.
When asked what the Siyoma Valley was like during his first visit over 40 years ago, Sharipov laughs, his voice tinged with bittersweet nostalgia. “It was late May, and the valley was entirely covered in snow. It was so stunning that I couldn’t believe my eyes. It’s changed a lot since then, unfortunately.”
The narrow, steep Siyoma Valley used to receive some of the heaviest annual precipitation in Central Asia. Once home to magnificent glaciers, dozens of minor rivers and streams, and picturesque fields of tall wild foxtail plants, it was known only within small circles of mountain enthusiasts during the late Soviet era. Today, the valley is often filled with inexperienced weekend tourists, shows unmistakable signs of climate change, pollution, and overgrazing, and is losing its turquoise glacier-melt water to a beverage production plant linked to the country’s elites. Once a hidden gem, it now epitomizes the challenges facing Tajikistan’s mountains and hints at troubles ahead for the country’s future.
“People keep advertising the valley on social media, attracting more and more tourists who don’t know how to treat the mountains properly,” Sharipov says. “It is sad how much that beautiful place has changed. The only remaining constant, thankfully, is Ivan Bragin.”
The Siyoma Hermit
“I moved [to the Siyoma Valley] in 1993. Someone needed to look after its hydrometeorological station for some time,” says Bragin. “I volunteered and then just stayed on.”
Known to those who frequent these mountains as “the Siyoma Hermit,” “the Recluse,” and “Uncle Vanya,” Ivan Bragin is the valley’s lone permanent resident and a person with an almost mythical aura. Notoriously private and elusive, he is hard to locate and to interview. (This story builds on a series of in-person conversations I’ve had with Bragin since 2015. To complete the reporting, I asked a friend to make the day-long trip to the Siyoma Valley to deliver my final questions.)
Bragin is quite untalkative and answers questions begrudgingly, owing to decades of mostly solitary life. He often shrugs off more personal questions and hates being photographed. A 2021 profile in Asia Plus, Tajikistan’s only major independent news outlet, published his likeness without his consent, sparking a minor controversy and pushback on social media from Bragin’s friends. That same profile, however, garnered hundreds of reshares, positive reactions, and admiring comments on Facebook, with readers warmly recounting their own memories of meeting Bragin and praising his work. The half-dozen people I interviewed for this story, on and off the record, described Bragin as “having character,” the Russian equivalent of calling someone “difficult.” But they also spoke of him in admiring terms and with an air of protectiveness, mirroring my own feelings about the valley and its watchman.
“I was 16 when I saw Ivan’s hut on a hike for the first time,” says Abrorkhon Akhmedov, who ran one of Dushanbe’s first commercial hiking companies in the 2010s and has visited the Siyoma Valley many times. “The hut was pristine, and he had carved all of the doorknobs, window frames, and ornaments himself. Ivan seemed tough and unfriendly at first, but he clearly loved and took care of the nature around him.”
Standing at roughly five feet eight inches, with a wiry build, pale-blue eyes, and grey stubble, Bragin’s low, hoarse voice, knotty knuckles, and finger joints swollen from arthritis betray his age and decades of rugged living. A week away from his 70th birthday, he nonetheless moved around the valley’s boulders and creeks with an assuredness rooted in an eventful and adventurous life.
While the contours of Bragin’s biography are known, the details can be hard to pin down. Born on October 24, 1955, in Russia’s Far East, Bragin grew up travelling around the taiga — the Eurasian boreal forests — with his father, who made a living herding reindeer, trading fur, hunting and foraging, and transporting goods. Bragin credits his father for instilling in him a love for nature, survival skills, and resourcefulness in the face of adversity. His mother was a descendant of the gentry, a practical woman skilled at managing their household and five unruly sons. She taught Bragin how to cook the wild berries and vegetables his father foraged and the catch he brought home.
“My father was a hopeless romantic who would’ve happily lived out his life as a taiga nomad,” Bragin recalls. “But with each new child, such a lifestyle was more and more unsustainable, and my mother convinced him to settle down and to give us a different life.”
The family eventually made their home deep in the uninhabited taiga at the headwaters of the Sym River, the western tributary of the Yenisey River in Russia’s Krasnoyarsk Krai. But Bragin didn’t stay there long. In 1978, he left Siberia and traveled around the Soviet Union until he ended up in Tajikistan’s Pamir mountains, where he picked up mountaineering and ascended several local peaks. Awe-struck by the mountains, Bragin settled down in Roghun, a city in central Tajikistan. There, he got married (his wife, Nafisa Bragina, who lives in Dushanbe, did not respond to my interview request), became a father to his son Dmitry, and witnessed the beginning of Tajikistan’s long struggle to construct the Roghun Dam.
Then, in 1992, Tajikistan was plunged into a five-year civil war that would kill an estimated 150,000 people and displace as many as 1.2 million others. Bragin considered moving his family back to Siberia. But in 1993, he was asked (Bragin won’t say by whom) to look after a small hydrometeorological station located at the confluence of the Siyoma and Igizak rivers, about five kilometers (three miles) into the Siyoma Valley. Tajikistan’s Soviet-educated scientists and specialists were fleeing the civil war en masse, hollowing out the nation’s knowledge base; left unattended, its critical infrastructure was being quickly looted. The Roghun Dam project had been abandoned, as was the hydrometeorological station.
Bragin took the job.
‘The river is slowly shrinking’
In the years that followed, Bragin worked to keep the hydrometeorological station’s equipment from rusting and slowly built out its facilities, adding a storage shed, an outhouse, and a bathhouse to its living quarters. His efforts were rewarded in 2004, when the Tajik government officially reopened the station, built a helicopter pad nearby, and started providing Bragin with a meager salary, monthly food and gasoline deliveries, and the necessary tools for consistent hydrometeorological observation.
“See this? That’s a manual limnimeter. It helps me accurately measure the river’s water levels,” says Bragin, pointing to a graduated measuring stick mounted vertically in the Siyoma River and surrounded by a couple of basic pressure transducers and a makeshift float system.
A limnimeter, an old rain gauge, and a simple snowboard are among the observation tools that Bragin regularly checks during his rounds of the gorge. His water level and precipitation data are used by Tajikistan’s Agency for Hydrometeorology, the Emergency Situations Committee, the National Commission on Irrigation and Drainage, the Energy and Water Resources Ministry, and local governments for weather forecasting, agricultural projections, emergency preparedness, resource use planning, and many other purposes. The Siyoma hydrometeorological station is unique — similar facilities on the Maykhura River and the Karakul Lake were shuttered long ago.
“It’s hard to automate this kind of work because it requires manual and visual verification and a nuanced understanding of how this valley works,” Bragin explains.
Since 1993, Bragin has spent most of each year in the valley, relocating to Dushanbe to live with his family only during the coldest months. Over three decades of living there, recording observations, taking photos and making sketches of the local flora and fauna, and meeting every passer-by, Bragin has witnessed the drastic changes that the Siyoma Valley has undergone. When asked about this transformation, he frowns and stares at the river for a while, betraying the feelings the question evokes.
“There is less snow, both in the valley and up in the mountains, so the river is slowly shrinking. I can see it in the data and with my own eyes,” Bragin finally responds as the turquoise waters rush below, foaming over the protruding rocks.
He reminisces about the times when there was so much snow in the valley deep into July that it hurt his eyes on sunny days; when the glaciers in the surrounding mountains fed several dozen smaller streams that rolled down the sides of the valley into the Siyoma River. Nowadays, most of the snow melts in late May, and most of the valley’s side streams have vanished, leaving behind dry riverbeds and reducing the Siyoma River’s water flow.
“As recently as 15 years ago, one couldn’t safely cross the river on foot anywhere below the confluence with the Igizak. Even in the fall, it was that full. The river used to kill people easily,” Bragin recalls as he motions east, the general direction of a minimalist monument dedicated to the alpinist Mikhail Kraynov and his friend Tamara Soynova, who died in the river in a tragic accident in 1978.
“On my first trip to the valley in 2009, the river was so full that you could only safely cross from the north bank to the south using the trolley,” says Akhmedov, referring to the rudimentary chain-pull cable trolley that connects the banks of the Siyoma River near the hydrometeorological station. On that first trip, Akhmedov badly chipped his front tooth when he pulled the chain too hard and collided with the trolley’s railing. “You still have to use the trolley most of the year, but the river is definitely not as full anymore, and it is troubling,” he says.
Melting the Third Pole
The high mountains of Asia are often called the Third Pole because they contain the planet’s largest water reserves outside the Arctic and Antarctic. Tajikistan, with its approximately 14,000 glaciers, holds about 60 percent of the water reserves in Central Asia, a largely arid region. In winter, these glaciers go through accumulation: layers of snow fall and compact, compressing the bottom sheet into ice and increasing the glacier’s overall mass. During summer, sunlight and warmer air melt the surface layers, which then trickle down to feed Tajikistan’s Amu Darya and Zeravshan river systems. These waters flow downstream to Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan.
The Soviets built Tajikistan’s entire energy system — and Central Asia’s agriculture industry — around the country’s abundant water resources. Today, Tajikistan produces 95 percent of its electricity by harnessing glacier-fed rivers through large hydropower reservoirs. The Roghun project, which officially resumed construction in 2016 with support from the World Bank, is now shaping up to be the world’s tallest dam. (It’s also projected to cost over $9 billion and to displace more than 60,000 people.) Once it’s completed, just two hydropower plants, the Roghun and the Nurek, are expected to generate 90 percent of Tajikistan’s electricity.
Such over-reliance on hydropower will exacerbate Tajikistan’s unique vulnerability to climate change, despite the country contributing only 0.05 percent of the global historical total of carbon emissions. Studies reveal that Tajikistan’s average annual temperature has risen by 1.2 °C over the past six decades, double the global average of 0.6 °C. More than 1,000 of the country’s glaciers have already entirely disappeared, and glacier collapse has become more frequent.
According to the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), rising air temperatures could cause the glaciers in the Pyanj and Vakhsh river basins to shrink by 75 percent and 53 percent, respectively, by 2050, significantly impacting water supplies across Central Asia. In the basin of the Amu Darya, arguably the region’s most important river, runoff could decrease by about 30 percent compared to the average of the past decade, producing less water to power Tajikistan’s energy system and to irrigate Central Asia’s agricultural fields.
The Tajik authorities have imposed country-wide electricity use limits and halted electricity exports on several occasions in the past five years due to low water levels in the Nurek hydropower reservoir. The reduced water flow in the Varzob River can already be felt in Dushanbe, a city with more than a million people. Known among locals as the Dushanbinka, the river divides the city into western and eastern banks and was once its beating green heart. But in recent years, it has been drying up. The Siyoma beverage production plant, opened in 2019 by the Avesto Group, a conglomerate with ties to the country’s elites, extracts 50 tons of meltwater from the Siyoma River daily. Choked off by sand and gravel mining and rapid urban redevelopment, the water that reaches the city is no longer capable of cooling it down or helping regulate its air pollution.
In 2024, Tajikistan ranked sixth among the most-polluted countries in the world. Air quality is especially poor in Dushanbe, where emissions from construction dust, cement production, and numerous waste- and coal-burning sites drift towards the Siyoma Valley’s critically important glaciers just 54 kilometers north. The pollution darkens the glaciers’ surfaces, increasing their absorption of sunlight, raising their temperature, and speeding the melting of the ice.
“Not only do we have climate change slowly reducing the Varzob River, but the Dushanbe authorities are making it worse with their senseless redevelopment [projects],” says a local environmental activist, who asked to remain anonymous. “More roads mean more car exhaust, more high-rises mean more concrete production, more coal burning means more soot. All of that pollution rises and harms the mountains around the Hisor Valley.”
Important work
As Bragin slowly walks back to his station, he points out the dust covering the snow caps of the mountains surrounding the valley. Then his attention shifts to the north bank of the river, where severely reduced vegetation, remnants of bonfires and trash, and heaps of livestock dung indicate the recent passing of shepherds with their herds of sheep and goats.
“The overgrazing has gotten worse in the valley in the past decade,” Bragin observes. “That river bank used to be so much greener and healthier. There are many species of medicinal herbs and plants native to the valley that I rarely see anymore.”
Overgrazing occurs when livestock feed on pastures continuously without allowing adequate recovery time. The resulting vegetation loss diminishes root systems that stabilize soil, causing erosion, nutrient depletion, loss of biodiversity, and increased pollution and sedimentation in streams and rivers. Such degraded lands are often less able to retain water, resulting in floods, droughts, desertification, and dust storms — all growing problems in Central Asia.
Tajikistan, the smallest and most mountainous country in the region, has only 3.9 million hectares (9.6 million acres) of pastureland, much of which is used heavily for livestock husbandry. By some estimates, around 60 percent of households in rural areas depend on livestock as their main source of income. (Tajikistan’s livestock population has nearly tripled since 2000, reaching 9 million in 2022.) Though the actual severity of the problem can be hard to verify, some reports caution that more than half of Tajikistan’s pastures are degraded, posing an increasing threat to the rural population’s food and economic security. And who owns the herds and how the pastures are managed contribute to the problem.
“A regular household with, say, five sheep or goats and a cow or two is unlikely to be able to graze their animals in more remote pastures because they don’t have access rights to those areas, even if it would improve the health of their animals and the pasture,” explains Kramer Gillin, an environmental governance expert whose doctoral research focused on pastoral resources in Tajikistan’s Rasht Valley.
Individual households often aggregate their livestock into collective village herds as a form of economic collaboration. But it is rare for village herds or even those belonging to relatively wealthy local elites to undertake long-distance migrations. For the most part, only national-level elites can secure access rights to pastures outside their home districts, simply because the super-wealthy own most of the country’s land. (Gillin’s own research also found that personal connections to public servants and the means to pay bribes on top of standard fees shape patterns of land access.)
“Overgrazing is a huge issue, both in the Siyoma Valley and across the country,” says Alisher Primkulov, a Dushanbe-based nature photographer and avid backpacker who is friends with Bragin. “But it’s impossible to track who owns the massive herds that cause the problem — and who the owners pay to access what should be protected lands.”
As of 2023, Tajikistan’s protected areas included 17 nature reserves and four national parks, accounting for a fifth of the country’s territory (up from 3.6 percent in 1991). Sadly, the Siyoma Valley does not enjoy this status, although everyone I interviewed for this story seemed to believe it was protected. This is perhaps wishful thinking, born out of fondness for the valley, or it may be because the government installed a checkpoint at the gorge’s eastern entrance to prevent shepherds from passing through.
Nevertheless, herds numbering hundreds of sheep, costing at least $200 per head, continue showing up, usually travelling unimpeded over the mountain passes at the valley’s western end.
This unchecked use of the valley has led to visible vegetation and soil degradation on the Siyoma River’s northern bank, much to Bragin’s chagrin. But his life and work here hinge on cooperation. The passing shepherds often share fresh dairy and bread, mountain news, and their life stories with Bragin; in return, he helps them fix their rudimentary equipment and urges them to treat the valley with care. “Confronting these shepherds about overgrazing won’t change anything,” shrugs Bragin. “These guys are low-level hires from far-flung villages trying to make a living; they don’t make any decisions about herd migration.”
The watchman sounds tired after hours of talking about things that make him sad. About his beloved river shrinking, spelling trouble for Tajikistan’s energy and agricultural systems. About his valley home of more than three decades slowly losing its rich flora. About Dushanbe’s growing air pollution casting soot over the snowy peaks that form the backdrop to his days.
As his age makes long stays in the valley more difficult, Bragin has been spending more time in the capital. And yet, he always returns to continue his observations. “It’s important work,” Bragin says. “Someone has to do it.”
Hello, I’m Eilish Hart, the editor of The Beet. Thanks for taking the time to read our work! Our newsletter delivers underreported stories like this one to subscribers once a month. Like all of Meduza’s reporting, it’s free to read but relies on support from readers. Please help us keep fighting for independent journalism.
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Story by Sher Khashimov for The Beet
Edited by Eilish Hart