THE INHABITANTS OF BOKHARA, 1820
BY DR. EDUARD EVERSMANN

Alexander Eduard Friedrich Eversmann (1794-1860) was a Prussian Dr. of Medicine and Surgery, biologist and explorer. Planning to travel into Central Asia to collect natural history specimens, he studied the local languages, customs and Moslem religion of the peoples of the area, and then, in 1820, set off for Bokhara disguised as a merchant, a journey he described in  Reise von Orenburg nach Buchara: nebst einem Wortverzeichniss der Afgahnischen Sprache (Journey from Orenburg to Bokhara: together with a dictionary of the Afghan language), published by E. H. G. Christiani in Berlin in 1823.

Presented here is the only passage concerning Greek love, which comes from the section titled “The Inhabitants of Bokhara”. The translation from the original German and footnotes are this website’s.

 

The Mohammedan religion has greatly corrupted morals here, too, by permitting polygamy and by regarding women only as slaves who have to be bought;^[1] only the rich can satisfy their physical instincts as nature would have it, while the poorer seek to disgrace themselves as best they can. I could tell incredible facts if shame did not hold me back. Certainly in no country, not even in Constantinople, is pederasty so much in favour as here; nor is any secret made of it at all, so that it is known to every lover (Mächschuck, Dschuan, Künti, Kirchur, as they are called more noble and less noble); the Khan himself maintains a whole flock of boys (40 to 60 of them) in his fortress on top of his wives,^[2] although he severely punishes such crimes committed by others. If the Persians still have beautiful love feelings, the Bokharan has no concept of fine feelings, although all the books of the Persian poets are available here and are also read by the scholars; the Bokharan only seeks to satisfy his physical desires. “Where do you want to go?” I asked one of my local acquaintances whom I met on the road, “I want to go to the market and buy a wife for my slave,” was the answer. A European would notice this, but a Mohammedan would find nothing special in the answer, believing it to be a good deed.

Not only girls and boys serve to satisfy their animal lusts, but also all kinds of livestock that feed the Bokharans serve for practising the vice of Sodom and Gomorrah. Of all these vices, however, fornication with girls and women, and that with dogs, is punished most severely, almost always with death, in that the criminal is thrown down from the highest tower: the former because the female sex is regarded as a commodity and the owner loses it; the latter because the dog is the most despised creature in creation, for according to the beliefs of the Mohammedans, an angel never comes into a house where there is a dog; the few dogs that are in Bokhara do not belong to any master, but roam freely and seek their own food. Fornication with donkeys is the most common vice throughout Bokhara and, like that with boys, is punished most leniently; the first time rarely (or almost never) with death, but only if the criminal is caught the second or third time. If he is caught for the first time, the following procedure is carried out on him. The active as well as the passive, if this was a boy, are beaten half to death with sticks, then they are tied hands and feet together, almost naked, like a piece of merchandise, loaded onto a camel, and led through the broader streets of the city; the executioners go behind them with large sticks, beat the criminals continuously, and in this way force them to proclaim their crime to the public in the vilest terms, without interruption and in a loud voice.^[3] [pp. 83-5]

^[1] This exaggerated view of women’s low status arises from common European misunderstanding of the bride price that had to be paid in Central Asia when a marriage was agreed. European custom at the time had long ordained the exact opposite: that a bride brought her husband a dowry. One might as well say that European women bought their husbands (some effectively did!)

^[2] This Emir of Bokhara was Haydar bin Shahmurad, who reigned from 1799 to 1826. His last four successors, who reigned from 1827 to 1920, are also all individually attested by various travellers to Bokhara to have maintained large collections of boys for love-making. They all also maintained harems of beautiful females, which does not say much for the supposition of some Europeans that Bokharans only interested themselves sexually in boys because they had no access to females.

^[3] Though sodomy remained always technically illegal under Islamic law, which prevailed until 1920, the many later accounts of the exceptionally ubiquitous practice of Greek love in the emirate of Bokhara do not mention its punishment.