Category: Voices of the Returnees

“I know many rich Yaghnobis who live outside. But they are not so happy. They are always afraid of losing what they have. Here, I don’t have much — but I have peace.”—Maruf, returnee

Maruf speaks slowly, with the weight of someone who’s seen two kinds of life and made his choice. He wasn’t forced to return to Yaghnob — he came back on his own terms, after years of watching others chase money, only to grow more tired, more distant, more anxious.

“Here, I don’t need much. I buy sugar, kerosene, and matches. The rest, the land gives.”

In the high village of Garmen, the snow comes early and leaves late. It is not an easy life. But for Maruf, that difficulty carries a different kind of dignity — one that has nothing to do with salary, cement walls, or satellite television (although, he smiles, he has one now). The hard work is familiar. The rhythm of the land, of animals and seasons, is grounding.

“If you work hard here,” he says, “you’ll never starve. That’s enough for me.”

What sets Maruf apart is not just where he lives, but how he thinks. His story is not about return or loss or even resilience in the usual sense. It’s about redefining what matters. For him, freedom is not the power to choose anything — it is the power to need less.

“I used to think,” he admits, “that money meant success. Now I think being free from needing money — that is real success.”

He doesn’t frame it in political terms. There’s no complaint about governments or exile or failed promises. He speaks, instead, about the quiet logic of a life that feels enough. When his brother returned from Russia during the economic crisis of 2008, Maruf didn’t envy him. He welcomed him home.

“Before, he sent us $100 a month. That was good. But now he’s here. And that’s better.”

“I studied for eight years. Served two in the Soviet Army. I had a job, a life. But my father said we’re going back — and that was that.”—Karimjon-aka, returnee

When Karimjon-aka speaks, there’s no bitterness — but there is weight. A quiet tension between two lives: the one he started in Zafarobod, and the one he’s now building in the high mountains of Yaghnob.

He was born in the valley, but his childhood was shaped by the plains. Like many Yaghnobi families forced into exile during the Soviet deportations of the 1970s, his family tried to make the best of it.

“We had a warm house. We had salaries. Our kids went to school. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked. I never thought I’d go back.”

But in the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union crumbled and dreams collapsed with it, his father made a decision:

“He said, ‘We’re going home.’ He sold everything — our house, our cattle. I didn’t argue. He was the head of the family.”

So they returned to Dehbaland. To no electricity, no running water, no school, no clinic. Just mountains — and memories.

“I love Yaghnob. It’s my motherland. But sometimes I ask myself: was it right? For me? For my children?”

Karimjon-aka doesn’t speak out of complaint. He works hard, raises his kids, and keeps the peace in his village. But he carries the ghost of what could have been.

“In Zafarobod, I had a future — a predictable one. Here, we survive one season at a time.”

Now, as his children grow, he doesn’t want to force the same choice on them.

“I won’t decide for them. If they want to stay, good. If they want to leave, I understand. Everyone deserves a life they choose.”

Coming back wasn’t the mistake. For Karimjon-aka, the real wound was in the gap between memory and reality — between the hope of returning to a proud, self-sufficient homeland and the truth of its fragile condition after years of abandonment. His story is not one of romanticizing the mountains, nor of rejecting the lowland life that once offered him comfort. Instead, it is a story of reckoning: with the weight of generational decisions, the erosion of Soviet-era dreams, and the hard, often quiet work of rebuilding. In his quiet determination, we find the resilience that threads through so many returnee stories — not the triumphant return to a lost paradise, but the more difficult task of shaping a future from fragments of the past.

“I told him I didn’t want to go back. Not to that place. Not after all we had built. But he said, ‘We belong there.’ So we left. And I followed.”- Kurbongyl, returnee

She remembers the heat of Zafarobod summers. The cotton fields, yes — but also the home they made. “We had a big house. A real one. With radiators and tiled floors. The children had school. We even had doctors,” she says, her voice soft but steady.

Life there wasn’t easy, but it was life. Predictable. Modern, in its way. Livable.

Then, her husband said they were going back.

“I didn’t want to. My youngest daughter didn’t either. But it wasn’t our choice. He had made up his mind.”

They packed. Sold what they could. And returned to the valley Kurbongyl had once called home as a child — but which, by then, felt like another world. Cold. Harsh. Forgotten.

“When we arrived, there was nothing. No windows in the house. No electricity. No real school. We were starting from zero.”

Her husband was determined. He believed in the return, in the meaning of going home. And for a time, they tried to believe with him.

But time is cruel in the mountains. The winters are long. The isolation unforgiving. And then, ten years ago, her husband passed.

“Now it’s just me and my youngest son. He wants to leave too. But I can’t go anywhere anymore. This is my fate now.”

She sits by the window of their rough-built house. Outside, the mountains rise — beautiful, yes, but also silent, vast, unrelenting.

“Zafarobod had heat. Doctors. Work. I had my life there. But here, in Yaghnob, it’s like time stands still.”

And yet, she’s still here. Still waking up each morning. Still boiling tea. Still telling her story.

Because sometimes staying isn’t a matter of love or longing. Sometimes it’s what happens when you follow, and they don’t come back.

“He believed in this place. So I followed him. Now he’s gone. And I’m still here.”

“There were no roads, no homes, no money. Only mountains. But also we had our people. And that was enough to begin again.”

— Returnee, Bedef village

When the Soviet Union collapsed, a door quietly opened.

It wasn’t a wide door. It wasn’t marked. But through it came the quiet, determined footsteps of families who had been waiting decades for the chance to return.

By the early 1990s, the first wave of Yaghnobi returnees began making their way back to the valley. Not through any government decree. Not with funding or support. Just with memory — and hope.

Some had heard whispers that the old villages were still there, covered in snow and silence. Others had never seen the valley before — only heard of it from parents who still spoke the language of Sogdiana in low voices at night. They left behind Soviet blocks, the salt-sick earth of Zafarobod, and the wreckage of civil war. They brought with them little more than what they could carry.

“We walked most of the way. My youngest son was only three. He rode on a donkey. The older children carried blankets.”— Elder from Pskon

What they found upon arrival were ruins. Stone walls, half-swallowed by grass. Roofs caved in. No electricity, no schools, no clinics. But also: the river still running. The wind still carrying the scent of wild mint. And a silence they remembered.

They got to work.

Entire families rebuilt villages by hand — Garmen, Bedef, Naumetkharv. They mixed mud, carried logs, stacked stones. One house at a time. One path at a time. They took turns digging and cooking, watching each other’s children, hauling water in old plastic jugs from mountain springs.

“We had no hammer. My brother and I used stones to pound the nails.”— Returnee, Khishtud

“We shared everything. One man had a saw, another had bread. We needed each other. And so we survived.”— Woman from Piskon

There was hunger, especially in the first winters. And cold that clung to the bones. But there was also warmth — in the way people leaned on one another, how food was passed from home to home, how songs in Yaghnobi were sung again by children born in exile.

Some slept in tents made from tarpaulin. Others sheltered in caves until walls could be built. And yet, when asked if they would do it again, the answer was the same:

“We had left our souls behind when we were deported. Coming back — even to nothing — was how we became whole again.”
— Elder man, Dehbaland

In the evenings, elders told stories of Zoroaster and the old gods, of the Arab invaders and the mountain spirits, of how the helicopters came in 1970 and tore them away from their valleys. Now, they told new stories — of return, of rebuilding, of staying.

There were arguments, too. Not everyone agreed. Some younger returnees debated leaving again. The valley was still harsh, still lacking. But even in disagreement, there was a sense of shared fate.

“We had come back not for comfort, but for meaning.”— Woman, Garmen

Years later, many of those early homes still stand. Some have satellite dishes now. A few host hikers and researchers in the summer. But their foundations are made of more than stone and mud. They’re made of trust, of memory, of stubborn, collective love.

They came back with nothing. And yet, somehow, they had everything.

“We have TV, we have cars — but what does it matter if you can’t build a life here?”

Musharif was born in Yagnob but grew up in exile. He has returned twice — once with his father, and once with his older brother — but each return was met with the same internal question: Should I stay?

The landscape of the Yagnob Valley is majestic, but for Musharif, it also feels like a trap. “There’s nothing here except mountains,” he says, his words tinged with both reverence and resignation. “Snow for months, no schools, no work. How can we raise children in this?”

He isn’t alone. Among younger returnees, there’s a growing tension between honoring their parents’ dream of return and building a viable future for themselves. For Musharif, Yagnob is his heritage — but it may not be his home.

“My father sees it with his heart. I have to see it with my eyes.”

His father and brother remain committed to the valley, viewing it as a place of spiritual and cultural redemption. But for Musharif, the struggle is more practical: lack of infrastructure, no stable income, limited access to education for his children. It’s a portrait of modernization colliding with tradition, where the cost of preservation is opportunity.

And yet, he hasn’t fully left. Something still pulls him back — the mountains, the soil, the buried memories of his early childhood. But unlike the generations before him, Musharif doesn’t see identity as something rooted only in place.

“I’m Yaghnobi, but I have to make choices for the future too. Maybe my children won’t come back — and that’s okay.”

His story reflects a deep intergenerational dilemma now shaping the valley: how to balance the weight of memory with the urgency of survival.

“To be Yaghnobi for me means to have rights and obligations… not just to live for myself, but for my community.”
— Ahmad, agrarian

Ahmad, a quiet but respected figure in his mountain village, speaks with conviction about what it means to belong — not just to a place, but to a people. His voice carries the weight of a generation that returned to Yaghnob not only out of longing, but out of responsibility.

For Ahmad, being Yaghnobi is not merely a cultural identity or a language spoken at home. It is a code of ethics, a set of expectations that extend beyond the self. It means helping relatives rebuild homes with your own hands. It means showing up when a neighbor’s herd is in danger. It means keeping the past alive not just in stories, but in action.

“There’s no government here, really,” he says with a shrug. “It’s us. If we don’t help each other, no one will.”

He returned to Yaghnob in the early 1990s, after his family fled to Zafarobod decades earlier during the forced resettlements. His reason wasn’t just nostalgia.

“The land needs us,” he says. “And we need to remember who we are.”

Despite hardship — no paved roads, limited electricity, minimal healthcare — Ahmad believes that solidarity is the true infrastructure of Yaghnob. What sustains them is not what they lack, but what they share: a language passed down in whispers, rituals carried out in small circles, and a collective commitment to protect it all.

“Culture is not something you inherit. It’s something you maintain. That’s a duty.”

In a time when economic hardship makes leaving ever more tempting, Ahmad’s words serve as a quiet call — not to nationalism, but to belonging as stewardship. In his eyes, to be Yaghnobi is to ask:

What do I owe the people who made me who I am?

“I was born in Zafarabod, lived there more than 10 years. But I consider myself Yagnobi. My citizenship is Tajikistan — but my motherland is Yaghnob.”

— Muzzaffar, age 26

 

For Muzzaffar, there were two worlds. The flat, dry lands of Zafarobod where he was born, and the snow-lined peaks of a valley he only heard about in bedtime stories. The place his parents never stopped dreaming of.

“My father would describe the wind differently. He said the wind in Yaghnob smells of snow and grass. He would pause while saying it, like it was sacred.”

In 2008, at just 26 years old, Muzzaffar packed up and moved to Yaghnob — not to visit, but to stay.

“People thought I was crazy. They asked me, what will you do there? There’s no work, no clinic, no internet. I said: I’ll build something. I’ll learn.”

Now, he runs a small guesthouse in one of the villages. In the summer, he rents donkeys to trekkers. In the winter, he patches walls with whatever he can find.

“It’s not easy. But here, I know who I am.”

Muzzaffar isn’t chasing the past. He’s part of a quiet wave of younger Yaghnobis shaping a different kind of return — one that blends survival with purpose, heritage with hustle.

“I want my children to speak Yaghnobi. Not as a museum piece — but in jokes, in lullabies, in everyday life.”

His story isn’t nostalgic — it’s visionary. A glimpse of what the future of Yaghnob might look like, if given even the smallest chance to breathe.

Every time one person tells the truth of what happened, the silence breaks a little more.

This post begins a series.

A series of voices — some quiet, some fierce — returning to the surface after decades of being buried by geography, politics, and time. These are the stories of Yaghnobi people: their forced departure from the mountains in 1970, their exile in the lowlands, and, later, their return — sometimes triumphant, often difficult, always deeply human.

We share these stories not only to preserve memory, but to reckon with it.

Too often, “development” has been narrated as progress without pause — a language of maps, budgets, plans, and paved roads. But the story of Yaghnob complicates that narrative. It reminds us that development has consequences when communities are not given a choice. That modernity, when imposed rather than invited, can be a form of erasure. That culture and ecology are not obstacles to be overcome — but wisdoms to be listened to.

The deportation of the Yaghnobi people in 1970 — justified by the state as a “protective” measure — led to the loss of lives, traditions, and language. And yet, even within that loss, something endured. In these interviews, we hear of fathers returning with their families on foot, of children learning their grandparents’ tongue, of broken walls rebuilt with borrowed tools. We hear questions of identity — not just who am I, but where am I from, and how can I return?

These stories are not just personal memories — they are mirrors. They reflect broader issues: the ethics of displacement, the fragility of minority languages, the legacy of authoritarian modernization. And they ask us to slow down — to reconsider what it means to live well, to remember well, and to rebuild with dignity.

“To be Yaghnobi Is to Choose the Mountains Again”— Shahob, returnee

This project is not about nostalgia. It is about justice. It is about the right to stay, the right to return, and the right to be heard — even decades after the world stopped listening.

Whether you’re a researcher, a development worker, a descendant of Yaghnob, or a first-time reader: we invite you to pause with these stories. Read them not just as testimonials of the past, but as seeds for future questions.

What does healing look like after forced migration?
What happens when youth are caught between memory and survival?
What could it mean to preserve a valley — not just in law, but in spirit?

We’ll begin with voices of return — from those who came back with nothing but their language, their grief, and their will to rebuild.

One story never stands alone.