ULUPAMIR, Turkey — Amid snow-capped mountains and sweeping valleys, a group of men watch their friend hurl a bone into the distance. They are playing "asik oyunu," a game originating from the steppes of Central Asia that involves tossing a sheep’s ankle bones, called "chuko." But these men are far from home and only a two-hour drive from the eastern Turkish city of Van.

In the mountain village of Ulupamir (literally “Great Pamir”), a handful of Kyrgyz people hold on to their traditional lifestyle. “In the summer we play a lot of Buzkashi,” says Yusuf Alp, one of the participants, referring to another Central Asian sport in which horse-mounted players seek to place the headless carcass of a goat into a goal. The game, depicted in the book “The Horsemen” by French novelist Joseph Kessel, is also known for being the national sport of Afghanistan. 

Originally from the Afghan region of Pamir, the Kyrgyz of Ulupamir were resettled in Turkey more than 30 years ago. Foreseeing a Soviet takeover of Kabul after the communist coup of 1978, a charismatic leader named Haji Rahman Kul led a few thousand of his people to neighboring Pakistan. Unable to adapt to the hot climate there, the group applied for asylum at the US Embassy in Islamabad, asking to be moved to Alaska. But upon rejection from Washington, the Pamiri Kyrgyz were offered a place in Turkey by Gen. Kenan Evren, who became president after carrying out a coup in 1980. The Kyrgyz were brought to this far-flung part of Anatolia on charter planes in 1982. 

Their coming was extolled as an expression of Pan-Turkic solidarity. The beleaguered Kyrgyz were portrayed as ethno-linguistic cousins with a natural place in Turkey. Officials drew on a notion championed by Turkish nationalists according to which all people of Turkic lineage, whether Uighur, Kazakh or Azeri, are Turkey’s ethnic brethren. Particularly after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Turkish foreign policy focused on the Turkic republics of Central Asia. In 1992, the Turkish International Development and Cooperation Agency was established to boost trade and cooperation with the newly independent countries. Former President Suleyman Demirel famously captured this idea with his repeated references to "the Turkish world from the Adriatic to the Great Wall of China.”