Chorek – a Symbol of Wealth and Wellbeing
The Turkmen people taught their grandchildren to love and respect bread from childhood. They greeted the guests with bread and salt and treated them to green tea. Chorek was compared to gold, the sun and the life itself. They revered and cherished it. They created songs, poems, stories and legends about bread. There are proverbs and sayings about it. “Bread is a nourisher”, “Bread and salt are friends” and “When there is bread, there will be a song” – these wise thoughts are about the main adornment of Turkmen dastarhan. In ancient times, Anau was located at the crossroads of the Great Silk Road and had strong trade and economic ties with the countries of the East and the West. In 1904, an archaeological expedition led by an American explorer Raphael Pumpelly found several soft wheat awns, the age of which is 5,000 years, in the strata of the III millennium BC in Anau. Now, they are displayed at the world’s only Wheat Museum in Anau – the administrative centre of the Ahal velayat. The museum collection features grains, stone grain grinders (II millennium BC), hand millstones (III-II millennia BC), an oil press for sesame seeds, figurines of the goddesses of fertility (Namazga-Depe, IV millennium BC), a bronze hoe (II millennium BC), an arrowhead, a bronze knife (III-II millennia BC), ceramic dish fragments with monochrome and polychrome patterns and other inte