BATKEN

Batken is situated in the extreme South West of the Republic, and consists of four mountainous regions, with altitudes ranging from 400 to 5621m asl.

The oblast was created in 1999 after incursions by armed militants of the Islamic Movement for Uzbekistan seeking to cross Kyrgyz territory between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

The administrative center is the town of Batken. The oblast includes a number of enclaves belonging to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, created when the borders of the republics were settled by a commission of the Soviet Union in the time of Joseph Stalin. There are seven enclaves altogether — some very small, not much more than the size of a farm. The largest is the Sokh enclave which belongs to Uzbekistan.

The region is not very well known — there is not a lot of information available, even in the Republic itself — and most tourists tend to come from within Kyrgyzstan itself or the surrounding republics — and there are a number of tour-bases around the oblast, (notably the «Pyramida-dolina» in the Batken region, Ak-Suu, and Ozgorush in the Laylak region, and Dugaba in the Kadamjaiski region) which have been host to a number of international mountaineering expeditions. There have also been attempts to develop skiing and caving in the region.

There are a number of sites of antiquity scattered throughtout the oblast.

The oblast was created in 1999 after incursions by armed militants of the Islamic Movement for Uzbekistan seeking to cross Kyrgyz territory between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and a number of governments still advise against travel to this region, so if you are thinking of including it in your itinerary, you should consult the travel advisory notices issued by your own government.