Olga Manina, a resident of Penza, learned from Internet messages that in the spring of 2024, the Makhtumkuli Fraghi Museum was opened in the village of Funtovo in the Astrakhan region. This event was timed to coincide with the 300th anniversary of the birth of the classic of Turkmen poetry.
"Among the famous Astrakhan Turkmens there is my great–grandfather, a native of the village of Funtovo, one of the first publishers of the most complete collection of poems by Makhtumkuli Fraghi Abdrakhman Seidniyazov (Niyazi). I'm piecing together information about him. I made inquiries to the museums of Ufa, Bukhara, and Ashgabat. Could you help me too?", – says Olga Borisovna's letter to the teachers of the Funtovo school.
According to the director of the school Oksana Yusupova, this unusual appeal became the starting point for the beginning of a large research work. The local historians of Saratov found out that Abdrakhman Niyazi was known not only as an Islamic theologian, imam, writer and poet, but also as a book publisher. He conceived in Astrakhan the release of a series of collections of Turkmen, Tatar and Azerbaijani classical poets, united by the common name "Edebiyat kitaphanasyndan" ("From the literary library").
The first book to appear in the mentioned series was the collection of poems by Makhtumkuli Fraghi "Sofa". It was published in 1912 in Astrakhan in the private printing house of Abdrakhman Umerov in a thousand copies. According to a number of experts, at that time it was the best collection of poems by an outstanding Turkmen poet.
"From correspondence with Olga Borisovna Manina, we also learned that Niyazi has collected a huge personal library. For more than half a century, his children have carefully kept over 500 valuable books," said Alfiya Mukhtarova, head of the school museum, teacher of history, social studies and local lore at the Makhutmuka Fraghi Funtovo School. "In 1965, this literary collection, which includes books on various fields of science – from religion to astronomy, was transferred to the Central Scientific Library of Turkmenistan."
Olga Manina also sent by e-mail a drawing of her family family tree, as well as copies of the pages of the book "Khutbalar majmugasy", published in Astrakhan in the printing house of A. I. Umerov. School historians of local lore appealed to the mosque of the neighboring village of Osypny Bugor with a request to translate from Arabic into Russian some fragments of the book, which, as it turned out later, contained Friday sermons by Abdrakhman Niyazi. In them, he touched upon the themes of morality and spiritual and moral education.
In addition to copies of the mentioned publications, the exposition of the school museum will be supplemented by copies of articles by Abdrakhman Niyazi "Feel the magic of magic poems" and "Echo of the Printed Word", telling about the life and work of Makhtumkuli Fraghi.