Unfortunately, we have had to make the difficult decision to cancel the 2026 summer school in Kyrgyzstan. This is the first time this has happened in our about 30 years of organizing summer schools in Siberia, Mongolia, and Central Asia.

The main reason is that we didn’t have enough participants for the summer school to be self-sustaining. As you can probably imagine, I have financial obligations not only to you but also to our fairly large team (lecturers, the kitchen staff, assistants, and drivers).

The second reason (less important but nevertheless) is the situation between Iran and the U.S. It has led to higher fuel prices and higher airfares. The best way to get to Kyrgyzstan is via Istanbul, which is also not very safe at the moment.

But I am very optimistic that we will be able to manage it in August 2027.

Next year, we will try to secure financial support from the DAAD for your participation in the summer school. The main DAAD office for Central Asia was recently relocated to Bishkek (the capital of Kyrgyzstan).

Next year, we plan to promote our summer school more actively, not only among students in the faculty of landscape architecture, but also among students in the faculties of forestry and agriculture at HSWT. We have already received some support from these faculties. We will try to ensure that students from these faculties receive academic credit for their participation in the summer school.

We will return to our previous practice of inviting participants to the summer school from other universities (not only from HSWT). Thanks to our positive experience in previous years, I very much hope this will be of significant help to us.

I will provide you with more information as early as November 2027, when we launch our recruitment campaign.

I have saved the email addresses of everyone who was interested in participating in Summer School 2026, and I will contact you in November of this year.

We will also try to keep our website updated, although, as I mentioned before, we are primarily scientists and university lecturers, not a professional travel agency.

Sincerely yours,

Pavel Barsukov on behalf of the Summer School team in Kyrgyzstan