1916
Autumn
According to information from a border post in the Pamirs the yearly precipitation does not exceed 60 mm. This dry climate excludes opportunities for growing agricultural crops and therefore the Pamirs represent a country unfavourable for agricultural investigations. As an agronomist I was nevertheless attracted to the western region of the Pamirs. An expedition there might make it possible for one to become acquainted with an original upper-montane agricultural civilization.
The route of my expedition was as follows: from Kokand [1] via the village of Zardaly over the Demri-Shaurg glacier and the valley of the Karagushkhana river and Karategin [2], Kalay-Khumb, to Khorog and the Gunt valley along the gorge of the Dusukhdara and the Dzhaushangoz [3], then back to Khorog and via Kalay-Khumb and Kulyab to Termez and home to Moscow.
The objective of my journey to the Pamirs was to collect samples of early ripening agricultural crops, much needed for our northern provinces. It could be predicted even before the journey that in the valleys of the western Cis-Pamirs, on an average situated at an elevation of more than 2000 metres and characterized by short vegetative periods, it should be possible to grow early-ripening varieties of grain crops. For example, the naked-grained barley of the Pamirs differs from the closely related Himalayan barley by its extraordinary early ripening. 
Notes:
- Kokand is on the crossroads of the ancient trade routes, at the junction of two main routes into the Fergana Valley, one leading northwest over the mountains to Tashkent, and the other west through Khujand. As a result, Kokand is the main transportation junction in the Fergana Valley. Wikipedia. [↩]
- Also known as Garm after its largest town. [↩]
- The upper Shakhdara river [↩]
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I did a quick map search on SINGER (http://singer.cgiar.org/index.jsp?page=selectionmap) and there are about 500 accessions from the Pamirs in the in trust collections managed by the international centres, the vast bulk bread wheat and barley from northern Pakistan. Only about a dozen of these accessions are of wild species, mainly wild chickpea. It seems likely that Vavilov’s original collections from the region are still the most extensive.
@Luigi -
Wow. That’s a nice use of the technology. Is there a way you could save an image to use at some point as Vavilov wanders around the region?