In a Turkish shop

Me: Bonjour, un melon

Her: 1,95 euro

ME: teshekkurler (thanks)

Her: Turkmisin? (are you a Turk?)

Me: No, I am from Uzbekistan

Her: Ah Uzbaekistan, Uzbek?

Me: Evet, amma, Tajik (Yes, but Tajik)

Her: Tajik? (puzzled)

Me: Fors (Persian as language)

Her: Fors…? (pause) Non. Turk

I smiled. She is sure all the people living on that part of the world are Turks. No matter what you say, you are a turk for her. It was amusing. I think she was never there, and she has never seen how ‘colourful’ and diverse we are, even among Uzbeks, Tajiks and others.

But no need to go to a Turkish shop in Europe to hear people rejecting your identity, plenty of them do it in Uzbekistan too, even on TV, in pseudo-scientific books too. I met a couple of fellow Tajiks, non-accidentally, i assume, they all have been through Turkish-brainwash-lyceums, who believe there is no such an ethnicity as Tajik, that identities based on it are false and based on ignorance. Since they are the ones who know the truth, their brother from abroad shared this truth with him. They tell me: We are just Turks who lost their language, as we lived under oppression of Persian rulers, moreover Persian was more fashionable those days. But in the last six centuries the rulers of Central Asian city-states were members of various Turkish tribes, and they spoke perfectly Persian to communicate with their peoples. Why should ‘we’ be forced to speak Persian under the Turkish rulers? If you traveled a lot in Uzbekistan and have seen many towns and villages, you must know that one can find some villages in the middle of nowhere where people still speak their Persian language (very often it is their first and only language). They have various dialects in different villages and different cities. When Bukhrian Tajik and Samarkandi Tajik come together they laugh about differences and dialects of each other. The same can be said about diverse dialects of Uzbek, (Kazakhi dialect in Tashkent, Turkmen dialect in Khorezm, Tajik dialect in the south, and pure or high-Uzbek in Fergana Valley, but this is just a general division, there are many more dialects, Uzbeks in Dzhizzak speak a different dialect than the Uzbeks of Kashkadarya).