Aktau

Aktau is younger than most of the people who live in it. The Mangystau peninsula was Adai herding country, crossed by caravan tracks and dotted with the tombs of saints, with no settlement of any size on this stretch of cliff. Soviet geologists prospecting after the Second World War found uranium and then oil, and from the late 1950s a town was laid out on the bare limestone above the sea to house the workers who would extract them.

The problem was water. There is no river on the peninsula and almost no rain, so the new town was supplied by a nuclear-powered desalination plant: the BN-350 fast breeder reactor, which from 1973 turned Caspian water into drinking water and steam as well as producing electricity, on an industrial scale and for decades: it ran until 1999, when reactor operations ceased and its fuel was placed in long-term storage. Uranium prospectors had settled the site in 1958 and called it Melovoye; the place was then closed and renamed Guryev-20, became the town of Aktau in 1963, and a year later was renamed Shevchenko after the Ukrainian poet exiled nearby in the 1850s. It took back the name Aktau — white mountain — in 1991.

Because it was built at once and to a plan, the city has no old quarter and almost no street names: addresses run by numbered microdistrict, building and flat. Independence brought a difficult decade as uranium work ended and the population fell, followed by a long boom as the Tengiz and Karachaganak oilfields and the Caspian shipping trade grew. The port was expanded, the airport took on international flights, and since the 2010s the desert behind the city has brought in a steady stream of visitors.

Two things shape the city's character: it is an industrial port built by incomers, and it sits in the most tradition-minded corner of Kazakhstan. Engineers, geologists and sailors arrived from across the Soviet Union, so Russian is still widely heard, while the surrounding region is overwhelmingly Kazakh-speaking and conscious of Adai clan descent. Weddings and memorial feasts are large, elders are deferred to, and hospitality to a stranger is treated as an obligation rather than a courtesy.

Mangystau is known across the country as a land of saints: local tradition counts hundreds of holy men buried on the peninsula, and pilgrims travel between the underground mosques of Beket-Ata, Shakpak-Ata and Shopan-Ata, staying overnight in pilgrim houses and sharing meals with strangers. Many Aktau families make the journey at least once, and returning pilgrims bring back food to distribute. The desert cemeteries, with their carved stelae and ram-shaped stones, are part of the same world.

The western dombra school and the zhyrau tradition of long epic singing belong to this region, and the two-stringed dombra is still taught and played. Everyday life is coastal and outdoors: the evening walk along the cliff-top promenade, fishing from the rocks, football, and summer weekends on the beaches. Aktau people are used to visitors passing through on the way somewhere else, and to explaining their address system to every one of them.

About 200,000 people live in Aktau, the administrative centre of Mangystau Region. The city is a grid of five-storey Soviet blocks near the sea with newer towers inland, all of it on bare limestone, and almost every tree in it has been planted and is watered by hand. Water still comes from desalination, now by conventional plants, and supply, pressure and price are permanent subjects of local complaint.

Oil, gas and the port dominate work. Many residents are employed on rotation, spending weeks at a field or at sea and returning home for a block of days, a pattern that shapes family life and the rhythm of the city. Around them are the service jobs of a regional capital — administration, hospitals, schools, trade — and a growing tourism business built on desert tours. Wages are higher than the Kazakh average and so are rents.

Summer days start early and empty out at midday, and the promenade fills once the heat breaks, with families, cyclists and anglers along the cliff. Weekends run to the beaches, to the dacha plots on the edge of town or out to relatives in the villages. Regional grievances over pay, housing and water surface regularly in the oil towns inland, notably Zhanaozen, and are followed closely in the city.

The Caspian supplies the table. Fish is fried, baked whole with onion and tomato, smoked, or turned into soup, and cured and smoked fillets known by the Russian word balyk are a regional speciality. Sturgeon and caviar were once staples of these coasts, but overfishing and poaching have made them scarce and their sale is tightly regulated.

The rest is herders' cooking. Beshbarmak — boiled mutton or horse meat with broad sheets of pasta in onion broth — is the ceremonial dish, and kuyrdak, offal fried with onion and potato, is everyday food. Camel is eaten and camel's milk drunk: shubat, the fermented version, is sold in bottles and by the ladle and treated as both refreshment and remedy. Kurt, hard balls of dried salted curd, travels well and turns up on every desert journey, as does baursak, fried dough eaten with tea.

The city's cafés and restaurants reflect its make-up, with Russian, Turkish, Caucasian and Central Asian kitchens alongside the canteens serving plov, lagman noodles, manty dumplings and samsa from the tandoor. Zhent, a sweet of crushed millet, butter and honey, appears at celebrations, and tea with milk is poured all day, in bowls filled only part way so they can be refilled often.