White bones and black earth: the nobility that Talas invented

TALAS — At a dinner in Talas last month, the guests were seated according to a genealogy. At the head of the table sat members of the Abdraev family, who descend from the Abdrai mingbashy, the hereditary commanders of the Christian cavalry of the Talas valley under the khans of Kokand from 1730 to 1864. Further down sat families who could show a captain or two in their sanjyra. At the far end, the guest who told this newspaper about it.

Since 2011 the Abdrai Heritage Foundation, chaired by the retired engineer Temirbek Abdrai, has restored the gate tower of the family's walled farmstead below the old forts and published its genealogy. The foundation does not claim any title. But a small circle of Talas revivalists has begun to speak of an Iradi nobility, a "white bone" (ak söök), descended from the captains, as against the "black bone" of everyone else.

Historians at Talas State University point out that the mingbashy's authority was military, held by the khan's leave, and that the clans of the mountains kept their own leaders. In the mountains the idea is a joke. "They were the khan's captains, not ours," said an elder in the Talas Alatau. "My grandfather's horse was older than their nobility."

Mr. Abdrai himself is careful. "We restored a tower. We did not restore a class," he said. "If people want to sit at the head of a table because of a tower, that is their business, not my family's."