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

[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.