At this impressive place we were accompanied by Chinggis Aitmatov's sister. She told us the story of her father and what happened here, then she also told us a lot about her brother and what it meant in Kyrgyzstan.
From here we drove to Bishkek to a cinema and saw a private film screening, the film adaptation of Djamila.
At the location in the south of Bishkek, where the memorial was built in 2000, numerous leading figures of the then Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic were shot on November 5, 1938 without a judicial decision. Among them were politicians, artists and party officials who fell into the Stalinist purges for opera, which at that time reached its climax during the Great Terror. [1]
The location of this place was only found in 1991 with the help of eyewitnesses. Thereupon 137 corpses were exhumed and buried in a communal grave, which forms the center of today's Ata-Bejit memorial. In the following years the memorial became a general place of remembrance, where the victims of the unrest before the change of government in Kyrgyzstan in 2010 were also buried. In addition, a monument was erected to commemorate the Central Asian uprising against the Russian occupiers in 1916.
On June 14, 2008, the writer Tschingis Aitmatow, one of the most famous people in recent Kyrgyz history, was buried in Ata-Bejit. This fulfilled a wish of the writer who wanted to be buried next to his father. He fell victim to the shootings at what is now Ata-Bejit in 1938 and is buried in the common grave of the victims. At the state funeral for Tschingis Aitmatov, 20,000 people paid their last respects to the writer.
Info from Wikipedia
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