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22 December 2023
Moynak – Memories of the Aral Sea
Back in the 1960s, Moynak, Uzbekistan had been a bustling fishing port on a peninsula jutting into the Aral Sea’s southern flank. Now it is around 100km from the Aral’s nearest coast. Mark Elliott when there to find what’s left of the place.
Images by Mark Elliott
Once the world’s second largest lake, the Aral is now known mostly as being one of the world’s worst ecological disaster zones, having withered away over the last 60 years due to over use (and inefficient management) of water from the Amu Darya river which used to feed it. The great inland sea has now been reduced to a few disconnected remnants barely 10% the size it was in the 1960s. Moynak resident Ali Shaddin is one of last locals who spent much of his career as a fisherman on the Aral Sea.
Ali Shaddin wearing a Karakalpak hat given to him, he claims, by the British Ambassador
Ali has come to Moynak’s new Aral Sea Museum to talk to myself and some fellow visitors about better times. He started fishing as a teenager in the late 1960s and catches appeared to be endless during the early years. The men would go out for 15 days at a time, four per small fishing barge towed or manoeuvred into position and supplied by a much larger ship from the cooperative which would collect the catch and from which meals were collected. He almost salivates with delight in remembering these meals which he recalls as being ‘the best in the Soviet Union’ with ‘even canned beef from Moscow’. And ‘even beer’ he chuckles, though that stopped when the committee bosses started realising that there was more interest in getting the beer than in offloading the catch.
Then things started to go bad. In 1976-7 he remembers there was suddenly a catastrophic drop in the catch which had once proved big enough to allow the Moynak canning factory to turn out 30 tonnes a day. This was generally shipped by cargo boats to the lake’s northeastern tip where, at Aralsk, Kazakhstan, it would be transferred onto railway carriages and distributed across the USSR.
This clever art installation beside Moynak’s lighthouse cafe helps the visitors imagine the former Aral Sea views that would have greeted them up until the 1970s.
However, by 1979 there simply wasn’t enough water for the big transport ships to maintain the link with Aralsk and by 1984 the fishing industry was itself in tatters. Boats became stranded far from port and Ali found fishing work much reduced in both catch and scope. Eventually it was limited to what had become a series of isolated minor lakes where small, open boats could still operate rather than the Aral itself whose southern section had become too salty for any life beyond Artemia – minuscule brine shrimp.
Some of the more minor lakes do still have limited stocks of fish and in rare good years (2004-6, 2016-17) it has proved worth the trouble for Ali’s sons to load up their gear for a passable catch. However, since 2018 there’s been little worth going out for.