Gorno-Badakhshan

Gorno-Badakhshan, officially the Badakhshan Mountainous Autonomous Region, is an autonomous region in eastern Tajikistan, in the Pamir Mountains. It makes up nearly forty-five percent of the country's land area but only two percent of its population.

Name

The official English name of the autonomous region is the Badakhshan Mountainous Autonomous Region. The name Badakhshan (from Russian: Бадахшан; Tajik: Бадахшон) is derived from the Sasanian title bēdaxš or badaxš. "Gorno-Badakhshan" literally means "mountainous Badakhshan" and is the Russian name of the autonomous region, Gorno-Badakhshanskaya avtonomnaya oblastʹ (literally Gorno-Badakshan autonomous oblast). The Russian abbreviation "GBAO" is also commonly used in English-language publications by national and international bodies such as the government of Tajikistan and the United Nations.

History

Borders and political authority in the Western Pamir had always been contested by imperial powers. Between the 17th and 19th century, several semi-self governing statelets, including Darwaz, Shughnun-Rushan and Wakhan, ruled over the territories that are today a part of Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region in Tajikistan and Badakhshan Province in Afghanistan. In the late 19th century, the emirates of Kokand and then Bukhara held political authority over the region until the Western Pamir was colonized by Russia, completed in 1896. Although Russia and the British empire in 1896 denominated their shared border through the Pamir, which resulted in the creation of the Wakhan corridor, other regional powers like China and Afghanistan, but also the ruling elites of Badakhshan, Bukhara, Kashgaria and Kashmir equally worked for expending their influence in the Pamir.