Turkic Council Junior Diplomats 4th Training program participants visited Ata-beyit and Chingiz Aitmatov Memorial Complex in Chong-Tash on 7 July 2017 and laid flowers at the memorial monuments.

Ata-Beyit, (Grave of Our Fathers) is a memorial complex located in Chong-Tash, a village about 25 km south of Bishkek. The site honors two dark episodes in Kyrgyzstan’s history: mass murders that occurred in 1938 at the hands of the NKVD during Stalin’s purges, and the deaths of the revolutionaries who fought in the nation’s 2010 Revolution. Powerful sculptures and monuments pay tribute to those who died in the two conflicts, and a modest museum, shaped like a yurt, covers the political climate in Kyrgyzstan in the 1920s and 1930s, and the Stalin-era repressions.

One of the men killed in Chong-Tash was Torokul Aitmatov, a politician and father of Chingiz Aitmatov, a writer and diplomat who is Kyrgyzstan’s most famous literary figure. Chinghiz Aitmatov helped found the cemetery in Chong-Tash, and after his death in 2008, he was buried there as well. His remains lie beneath a memorial of their own, in front of a white stone gate along the far edge of the square. One side of the gate is inscribed with a quote of Aitmatov’s: “The most difficult thing for a person to do is to be a person every day.”

UNESCO has described Aitmatov as one of the world`s most-read contemporary authors. Aitmatov coined the term "mankurt" in his novel "The Day Lasts More Than 100 Years," about a Kazakh man who is torn between tradition and Soviet manipulation traveling to bury a dear friend. A number of Aitmatov`s books have been adapted into films in Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Turkey.