Mountain · Tajikistan
Ismoil Somoni Peak
Ismoil Somoni Peak is the highest mountain in Tajikistan, a snow-loaded giant of the Pamir range that has carried three different names. Today it honours a ruler from long ago.
Picture credit: Jaan Künnap (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where is Ismoil Somoni Peak?
Ismoil Somoni Peak is part of the Pamir Mountains.
You will find it in: Tajikistan.
Summit: 38.943° N, 72.016° E
The story behind it
The peak stands in the Pamir, a high tangle of ice and rock often called the Roof of the World. Surveyors puzzled over these valleys for years: in 1913 they measured a summit they called Garmo, and only the Soviet expeditions of 1931 and 1932 showed that the real giant stood next door. On 3 September 1933 Yevgeniy Abalakov reached the top, on an expedition he shared with the chemist Nikolai Gorbunov. The mountain was then named Stalin Peak; in 1962 it was renamed Communism Peak, and since 1998 it has carried the name of Ismoil Somoni, a ruler of the Samanid dynasty more than a thousand years ago. Until Tajikistan became independent it was the highest point of the whole Soviet Union, and before that of the Russian Empire. Lyudmila Agranovskaya became the first woman on the summit in 1969, and a large team made the first winter ascent in February 1986. Its prominence, the drop to the lowest saddle around it, is given as 3 402 metres by some sources and 3 404 metres by others.
Find it on the globe
Ismoil Somoni Peak is there as a small peak with its own shape — a horn, a ridge, a volcano — standing on the surface. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
How high is Ismoil Somoni Peak?
It reaches 7 495 metres, which puts it around fiftieth place among the world's mountains and makes it the highest point in Tajikistan. Everything above 7 000 metres sits in the thin air where climbers usually need extra oxygen or many weeks of acclimatisation.
Where is Ismoil Somoni Peak?
In the Pamir range in the northwest of Gorno-Badakhshan, an autonomous region of Tajikistan in Central Asia. The area belongs to Tajik National Park.
Why has this mountain had three names?
Because the country around it changed. It was named Stalin Peak in 1933, renamed Communism Peak in 1962, and in 1998, after Tajikistan had become independent, it was given the name of Ismoil Somoni, a Samanid ruler of the ninth and tenth centuries.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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