Kazakhstan, Tomiris
Rented the movie, “The Legend of Tomiris,” and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was long, 2 1/2 hours, but didn’t drag. Well filmed and acted. It mostly had good reviews and the few negatives (subtitles not synchronized with the audio, overly long battle scenes) didn’t hold true for us. A couple of reviewers that said it wasn’t a true story or totally wrong information, with no evidence backing up those comments. One thoughtful review, among other comments I’m going to check out, said that the Saka people were Indo-European at the time of Cyrus, not Asian-looking as they now are after mixing with Mongolians and as portrayed in the movie. That may be true but I think a bit of poetic license here makes the current folks who live in Kazakhstan more able to identify with their ancestors.
Turkmenistan, Population of
Since returning to the States, I’ve come across a chart from GlobalSecurity (below) showing the population of Turkmenistan as of 2019, this year, and if I’m reading it correctly, there are only around 25,000 people in the whole country in our age group. Colorado’s 80+ population is about 78,000. I certainly can’t remember seeing any very old people around, so it must be unusual for them to see so many “oldies” out and active and that’s why we were questioned about our ages, more than the couple of times I’ve mentioned in this trip report.
Using World Bank statistics, the whole country of Turkmenistan (188,456 square miles, lots of desert and “empty” space) has a population (5.758 million) about the same as Colorado (104,185 square miles, population 5.696 million). I find it just about impossible to read their Excel spreadsheets, so I’m not putting them up here, but it looks like they say the population aged 65 and older is around 26,000 (they only have percentages for 80 and above). About the same number as Global Security shows.
Next page: Q&A, Comments
All pages: In Transit : Kazakhstan : Kyrgyzstan : Tajikistan : Uzbekistan : Turkmenistan : Notes after returning home : Q&A, Comments