Samarqand Press
| Samarqand Press | |
|---|---|
| |
| Type | Private Company |
| Slogan | Haqıqat Sözleydi ("Truth Speaks") |
| Founded | 1922 (as private company) |
| Location | Samarqand, Tajikistan Vıloyat, Turkestan |
| Key people | KEY PEOPLE |
| Employees | ~8,000 |
| Industry | Publishing |
| Products | Books |
| Revenue |  586,000 Som(equivalent to fiscal year 2008) |
Samarqand Press is one of the main publishing houses of Turkestan. Its particular speciality is in academic textbooks, but they also known for publishing reference materials such as atlases and dictionaries.
Samarqand Press was originally an offshoot of the Assyrian School of Samarqand, and have been printing materials on the School campus since the mid XVII Century, long before actual publishing houses as such were in existence in Turkestan.
It was in the early XIX Century, following the Tsarist Russian annexation of the Central Asian Xanates, that the Samarqand Press became independent of the School of Samarqand.
For its own survival, the School of Samarqand had adopted a policy of careful neutrality towards their Russian overlords, but the Samarqand Press staff were a different story. Patriotic Central Asians to a man, they split from the School of Samarqand and went underground, continuing to print and distribute pamphlets and broadsheets portraying "the truth about the Russian conquerors" and calling for greater autonomy and eventual independence for the Central Asian Xanates.
It was partly as a result of Samarqand Press broadsheets that the citizens of the Xanates of Xıva, Buxara, Samarqand and the others began to have their first conceptions of Turkestan as a single unified entity. During the Basmaçı Revolt, the Press went into high gear, printing out a continuous stream of propaganda in Turkestani languages to promote unity and encourage the Basmaçı troops, and in Russian, attempting to demoralise their enemy and undermine the Russian will to fight.
Following full independence in 1922, the propaganda machine was spun off into a separate company to begin printing the first Turkestani national newspaper, and Samarqand Press concentrated on the efforts of the Literacy Committee to bring better educational materials to the masses, in the new standard Soğdo script.
Today, Samarqand Press is the leading publisher of academic and reference books in Turkestan, including the translations of the Bible in both Syriac and the local Turkic and Indo-Iranian languages. The publishing house also produces the current translation of the Manesian scriptures, and several religious works dealing with the Tengriist and Burxanist faiths.
Currently, the publisher is the leading contender to gain the contract to print the new Encyclopaedia Turkestanica, the first volumes of which are expected to be finished by 2012.
