Tajikistan, officially
the Republic of Tajikistan, is a landlocked country in Central Asia. It has an
area of 143,100 km2 (55,300 sq mi) and an estimated population of 9,537,645
people. Its capital and largest city is Dushanbe. It is bordered by Afghanistan
to the south, Uzbekistan to the west, Kyrgyzstan to the north and China to the
east. The traditional homelands of the Tajik people include present-day
Tajikistan as well as parts of Afghanistan and Uzbekistan
Iskanderkul is a mountain
lake of glacial origin in Tajikistan's Sughd Province. It lies at an altitude
of 2,195 metres (7,201 ft) on the northern slopes of the Gissar Range in the
Fann Mountains. Triangular in shape, it has a surface area of 3.4 square kilometres
(1.3 sq mi) and is up to 72 metres (236 ft) deep. Formed by a landslide that
blocks the Saratogh river, the outflow of the lake is called the Iskander
Darya, which joins the Yaghnob River to form the Fan Darya, a major left
tributary of the Zeravshan River.
134 km from Dushanbe and
23 km from the Dushanbe—Khujand road, Iskanderkul is a popular tourist
destination. To get from Dushanbe
to Iskanderkul lake, you'll first have to take a shared taxi from Dushanbe to Sarvoda. These shared taxis leave at the shared taxi station at the
end of Rudaki Street in Dushanbe. The journey is around 100 kilometers and
should cost between 50 – 65 somoni per person
The lake takes its name
from Alexander the Great's passage in Tajikistan: Iskander is the Persian
pronunciation of Alexander, and kul means lake in many Turkic languages. There
are two legends connecting the lake to Alexander. The first one states it used
to be a location the inhabitants of which resisted Alexander's rule, and in
fury, the king ordered to divert a river and annihilate them. The second legend
states that Bucephalus had drowned in the lake.
A 300 square kilometres
(120 sq mi) tract of land including the lake and surrounding mountains has been
designated a nature reserve. As well as the lake itself, habitats found in the
reserve include rivers, water meadows, broad-leaved and juniper forests,
mountain shrubland and sub-alpine meadows.
Over half of the reserve,
comprising 177 square kilometres (68 sq mi), has been identified by BirdLife
International as an Important Bird Area because it supports significant numbers
of the populations of various bird species, either as residents, or as breeding
or passage migrants. These include Himalayan snowcocks, saker falcons,
cinereous vultures, yellow-billed choughs, Hume's larks, sulphur-bellied
warblers, wallcreepers, Himalayan rubythroats, white-winged redstarts,
white-winged snowfinches, alpine accentors, rufous-streaked accentors, brown
accentors, water pipits, fire-fronted serins, plain mountain finches,
crimson-winged finches, red-mantled rosefinches and white-winged grosbeaks.
Sources :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tajikistan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iskanderkul
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