Welcome to City of Settlers, a collection of personal migration stories from new Bishkekians. Before you begin this journey, I’d like to take a moment to share the personal motivation behind this project.

My name is Lilit Dabagian, and I am the creator of City of Settlers. Paradoxically, for a project about migration to Bishkek, I have never experienced moving to Kyrgyzstan’s capital - or even changing my address within the city. I grew up in the heart of Bishkek, in the same apartment where my family has lived for seventy-two years. Needless to say, this shaped my deep-rooted sense of being a Bishkekian.

Last year, I moved to Berlin. As a farewell gift, my mother gave me a photo album filled with images of different family members. The family photo album opens with the oldest picture taken in a photo studio in Van in the eastern Ottoman Empire in early 1915. A family of six - four children of different ages, a mother in an ornate gown sitting on the left, and a father in a fez on the right. The second photo was taken fifteen years later in a Tbilisi studio. The same couple is dressed modestly this time. The woman no longer wears a sumptuous dress but a simple outfit with a headscarf, and the man’s fez is gone. These are my great-great-grandparents - refugees from the Ottoman Empire who resettled in Tbilisi. Their grandson would later move to Yerevan as a repatriated Armenian, and his son - my father - would decide to leave Yerevan for Bishkek to join my mother after the Soviet Union dissolved.

The oldest photo from my mother’s side, dating back to 1938, is a studio photograph of a 15-year-old girl (my grandmother) who had recently arrived in Frunze (now Bishkek) from the village of Jon-Aryk near Karabalta. Born into a poor Kyrgyz family in a yurt, she was the first in her family to attend school. But at fifteen, her parents insisted she leave school to help at home - and likely prepare for future marriage. On the way back from collecting her school certificates, she stopped at the train station, mesmerized by the locomotive. Whether it was curiosity about a train she had never ridden or a desire to escape the life that awaited her in the village, she made a spontaneous decision to board the train and see where it would take her. The train headed to Frunze.

Looking at these photos, I realized something strikingly obvious. Despite my deep-rooted sense of belonging in Bishkek, migration has been woven into my family’s history. That realization made me wonder: How much of Bishkek’s history is, in fact, a history of migration?

My family’s story includes both urban migration - from a village to the capital - and international migration to Bishkek. With City of Settlers, I wanted to bring these two types of migration together - two experiences often seen as separate or even opposed. What happens when we look for shared themes in different migration stories? What do they reveal about arriving, settling, adapting, or perhaps not adapting to Bishkek? And what can internal and external migration stories tell us about the kind of city Bishkek is?

In this multimedia zine, you will dive into the migration stories of people who moved to Bishkek—some from other parts of Kyrgyzstan, such as Talas, Uzgen, and Tereksay, and others from countries like Taiwan, Russia, and the U.S. Despite the diverse circumstances surrounding their migration, unexpected similarities emerge between these experiences. Recurring themes include the search for home, the experience of being an outsider or a stranger, and questions of belonging.

Guliza Urustambek kyzy from Uzgen and Yulia Pogodayeva from Russia examine the idea of making a home through objects. However, their approaches fundamentally differ and are shaped by their professions. Photographer Guliza Urustambek kyzy explores her search for home and comfort through a visual medium, resulting in a compelling photo project. Yulia Pogodayeva, a theater director, also uses photography, but in her case, it serves as a foundation for a text infused with elements of magical realism.

Bermet Malikova from Talas and Huai-Tse Yang from Taiwan center their reflections on language. Bermet Malikova examines how bilingualism shapes her experience of Bishkek, her feelings of being a stranger, and her attempts to build connections in the city. Huai-Tse Yang, an anthropology PhD student, takes an academic approach. In his essay, he looks at his experience as an outsider who tried but "failed" to build bridges with a Uighur community in Bishkek, yet discovered ways to engage with their world indirectly, guided by clues and signs hidden in the language.

Tynymgul Eshieva from Tereksay and Lily Nemirovsky from the U.S. created interactive maps to visualize their search for a place of belonging. Tynymgul Eshieva recounts how Bishkek has gradually become home for her over several decades. Lily Nemirovsky, reflecting on her international background, grapples with the limits and possibilities of belonging to multiple places - and, in this context, explores the question of why Bishkek feels like home.

Now, let me hand it over to the contributors of this project.

Lilit Dabagian