The Toktogul Dam

[fivemack]

In the pub on Thursday, some dismay was expressed that I had posted pictures from upstream and from downstream of this dam but had unaccountably not shown the dam itself.



This is the second dam (the one at https://goo.gl/maps/CLZOE if you like scrolling around Google Maps); there is a bigger dam at https://goo.gl/maps/qRzya but it is three kilometres from the road over a 4000-foot-high ridge, and besides it is considered a strategic facility of Kyrgyzstan and visitors are not encouraged.

The second dam has a convenient car park and viewpoint just overlooking it, and this rather splendid statue (I think in concrete painted sort-of-brass-colour) of САТЫКЕЙ БААТЫР, about whom all the information I can find on the Internet is in Kyrgyz, a language with a vague resemblance to Turkish but written in Cyrillic script further to deter casual readers.

Comments

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

OK, searching on БААТЫР gets a page on Kyrgyz Wikipedia which does have a cognate in English Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghatur : it's a title "hero", used as something like a order of knighthood among the Mongols and successor states - it's equivalent to the 'baatar' in the name of Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia.

(I had an extra bit of information, which is that there were other statues across Kyrgyzstan with БААТЫР on the base, so it probably wasn't a surname)

I also found a Russian tourist's photos of Kyrgyzstan including one of this very statue, which again doesn't really help.

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

Right. I should have mentioned that.

Out of curiosity, I tried searching for "Kyrgyz hero" an came up with some hits on the Manas, an epic poem. The eponymous subject is apparently depicted in your previous statue photo.

It's possible this statue is another character from the epic, but with a little skimming, the closest hit I'm getting is "Semetei", which is way too far off plausible Anglicizations for "САТЫКЕЙ", except at the begining and end. (Mechanically, it's "Satukey", but having worked with Russian emigres, I've been led to believe that there's no accepted standard for writing Cyrillic in English.)

[del-c.livejournal.com]

There is a site in the Kyrgyz two letter domain called namba.kg with a user called "satykei", and the string САТЫКЕЙ appears on that site, but I can't see anywhere it's in a sentence, only apparently as a list of names, probably of that same user.

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

I think "Seitek" is the anglicisation that is prevalent, from a bit of searching.

[del-c.livejournal.com]

Hey, somebody here has a genealogy for "Satykej baatyr"

http://www.sanjyra.kg/genealogy/index.php?sons_id=4856

Any of those names ring a bell?

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know one of those guys. :)

No, they're not at all familiar. I was hoping one of them would be one of the real or imaginary rulers of Kyrgyzstan.