My grandmother’s jewellery
These two coins from the 1920s-1930s and a silver bracelet from the 1970s connect me to my childhood in the early 1990s. Given the timing of this submission in 2021 and the subsequent need to revisit the history of my family and our familial jewellery, these objects connect three generations of Soviet Central Asian women in the last hundred years.
The larger silver 50 copeck coin was minted in 1924. The heads depict the USSR’s national coat of arms with an inscription underneath: “Пролетарии всех стран, соединяйтесь!” (Workers of the world, unite!); “СССР” (USSR); and, “Один Полтинник» (One Poltinnik - 50 copeck or half a rouble). The tails depict a blacksmith at anvil. The edge is lettered with the information on the silver value of the coin, which is 9 grams of pure silver.
The smaller copper-nickel alloy 20 copeck coin was most likely minted in 1932. The third figure in the year was lost when a hole was drilled in the coin to attach it on a hair ornament. The heads depict the USSR’s national coat of arms circled with an inscription “Пролетарии всех стран, соединяйтесь!” (Workers of the world, unite!). The tails depict a worker with a hammer holding a shield contour. Inside the shield, the coin’s value is indicated – 20 copecks. The tails side is rimmed with the lettering “Союз Советских СоциалистическихРеспублик» (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics).
These coins have accompanied my childhood in the 1990s as I would occasionally take out my grandmother Kanymkul’s jewellery from an ornately embroidered black velvet bag to look at her hair pieces (sholpu) and bracelets. The sholpu was many strands of small coral bead strings attached to silver plaques and decorated with old silver Soviet coins. The abundance of metal in sholpu made this hair jewellery impossibly heavy to wear. They would usually be attached to traditional two braids of a married woman to show her status and wealth, as well as to keep her posture correct as it is quite difficult to not to walk straight when one’s hair is pulled down with the weight of sholpu. The use of coins contributed to one of the names of this type of jewellery: sölköbay, which is a Russism, or a borrowing from Russian language. Sölköbay is a Kyrgyz phonetic adaptation of the Russian word tselkovyi, one-rouble silver coin. As sölköbay hair jewellery were often made with either one-rouble of half-rouble silver coins, they have been named after those coins.
The Soviet coins and banknotes made their way into Kyrgyz women’s jewellery as soon as they have become available in the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic in the 1920s. The coins’ original function was to serve as the currency of a new country built on the ruins of the Tsarist Russian Empire. As they travelled from the coin mills of Russia to periphery of the newly established USSR, they acquired new functions. In the case of my grandmother, they were incorporated into her jewellery. Nowadays, they are my personal tokens of generational connection, my material symbol of belonging to a line of Kyrgyz women, who lived in two centuries and in three states without moving anywhere as citizens of the Russian Empire, the USSR, and the independent Kyrgyz Republic.
My maternal grandmother Kanymkul was born in 1915 to a family of fairly well-off Kyrgyz farmers. The family was not rich enough to be wiped out by the early revolution “cleansing” from bii-manap (Kyrgyz aristocracy and rich classes), but not poor enough to avoid the repressions later on. From my mother’s stories, I was aware that my grandmother’s father was arrested, his possessions confiscated, and his kids taken by the extended family to save them from state-run orphanages. He perished somewhere on the way of his train journey from his homeland to Ukraine, where he was being deported along with thousands other Kyrgyz people. His only fault, as per our family stories, was that he owned a jatka (crop-cutter in Russian) and lobogreika (harvester of a simple design in Russian). Having more than his own two hands to farm made him an enemy of the state in the early Soviet Union.
Kanymkul grew up with her uncle’s family as her mother died in her early childhood. She was the first woman in our family to get higher education, in the late 1930s. She studied in Tashkent, where she met her first husband, also a student.
I am not aware when exactly my grandmother’s hair ornament has been made, but she passed it onto my mother in the 1980s, who, in her turn, kept it for me until the early 2000s.
Aijan Sharshenova is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the OSCE Academy in Bishkek. Dr. Sharshenova holds a PhD in Politics awarded by the University of Leeds. Prior to joining the OSCE Academy, Dr. Sharshenova has worked at the UN and UNDP country offices in the Middle East and in international development projects in Kyrgyzstan.