Eurasia

Gas rationing, ethnic displacement and tourist-haggling cops punctuate a journalist's journey along the Tashkent-Samarkand highway.

Shady government justifications for the loss of a park beloved by Tashkent residents.

Late at night on April 7, Erkin Bulekbayev walked out of prison and into one of the toughest jobs in Kyrgyzstan: looking for evidence of financial crimes allegedly committed by the ousted regime.

Of all the intrigues in the political life of Kyrgyzstan, few can rival the mystery of Gennady Pavlyuk, a local journalist with a sharp pen.

A few days ago outside of Bishkek, people flooded onto a field and started parceling out land for themselves according to a master list someone had drawn up. There was a problem: that land already had owners.  But the land-grabbers, most of them destitute laborers, saw an opportunity in the political chaos of Kyrgyzstan. Their logic was simple. In the capital, a group of politicians seized power. So why can’t we seize land?

These days, I sleep while walking, so if I lose my train of thought, perhaps you could nudge me,” Roza Otunbayeva, the interim leader of Kyrgyzstan, said on Saturday. She was drinking strong tea to keep herself from nodding off at her desk.

In an article on how he brings foreign news reporting to new audiences, photojournalist Iason Athanasiadis pays tribute to the Pulitzer Center for funding his past reporting projects in Iran, Turkey and Greece.

Last year openDemocracy Russia editor Zygmunt Dzieciolowski travelled in Georgia and Abkhazia. In Zugdidi he met Georgian refugees from Abkhazia with one question uppermost in their minds - would they ever be able to go back?

I crossed from Abkhazia into Georgia to reach the town of Zugdidi, and my thoughts inevitably turned to my mother. She had never visited Georgia, but I saw that the people there had faced exactly the same dilemmas that she faced back in 1939: should they flee and abandon everything, or should they risk staying?

I'm not sure I can recommend the Abkhazian house wine that gets served in the bars and restaurants of Sukhumi. The Abkhazians make some drinkable wine, like the 'Psou' brand that is served in Moscow's upscale Aromatniy Mir supermarket chain, but their rough and ready house wine is something to be avoided.

In August 2008 Zygmunt Dzieciolowski was in Georgia. He interviewed Mikheil Saakashvili, as it happens just twenty hours before the war with Russia broke out. Zygmunt was assured by the President that there were no plans for military action, but later that night he felt very sure that the war could begin at any moment.

Iason Athanasiadis is reporting from Turkey on a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

ISTANBUL | A group of Istanbul's liberal intelligentsia clustered outside the Tutun Deposu gallery, an old tobacco warehouse in a working-class neighborhood of Istanbul to mark the anniversary of a 1915 pogrom.

Inside the renovated building, an all-female choir performed a selection of folk songs from the musical traditions of minorities persecuted during the last spasms of the Ottoman Empire.