Almaty

The city stands on a site used for centuries: a medieval settlement called Almatu lay on a northern branch of the Silk Road here, on ground watered by streams coming down from the mountains, and Saka burial mounds are scattered across the plain below. Russian expansion reached the foothills in the middle of the 19th century, and in 1854 a fortification was built that was named Verny. Cossacks, peasants and traders settled around it, and the town grew on a grid of wide streets planted with trees and supplied by irrigation channels known as aryks.

Earthquakes shaped it. Shocks in 1887 and 1911 destroyed most of the buildings, and the survival of the wooden Ascension Cathedral became part of local legend; afterwards the town rebuilt low and in timber. Renamed Alma-Ata in 1921, it was made the capital of Soviet Kazakhstan in 1929; the Turkestan–Siberia railway and the road links to the city were finished by 1930, and it grew quickly through the 1930s. The Second World War brought evacuated factories, institutes and film studios. Post-war decades added apartment districts, the Medeu rink, the opera house and the ceremonial Republic Square.

In December 1986 young Kazakhs demonstrated on that square against the appointment of an outsider as party leader, protests suppressed with force and now commemorated as Zheltoqsan. The Alma-Ata Protocol, signed here on 21 December 1991, confirmed that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist and founded the Commonwealth of Independent States. The city was renamed Almaty in 1993, and in 1997 the capital moved to Astana, taking the ministries but not the banks, universities or businesses; Almaty kept growing, absorbing surrounding villages. In January 2022 it was the centre of the country's worst unrest since independence, with the city hall and other buildings set on fire.

Almaty is Kazakhstan's cultural capital in practice if not in title. The country's film industry, publishing, galleries, theatres, music scene and most of its universities are here, and the city produced much of the Kazakh New Wave cinema of the late Soviet years. Its café and coffee culture is the most developed in Central Asia, and the pedestrian part of Zhibek Zholy, the parks and the terraces of the central grid carry an evening life that few other cities in the region match.

It is also the country's most mixed city. Kazakhs, Russians, Uyghurs, Dungans, Koreans, Tatars, Germans and Caucasians have all left their mark, and the languages, festivals and food overlap constantly; Russian remains dominant on the street while Kazakh grows steadily, especially among younger arrivals from the south. Nauryz, Kurban Ait, Orthodox Easter and Victory Day are all public occasions here.

Mountains are part of the identity. Residents ski, skate, hike and picnic in the gorges, climbers have used the Trans-Ili Alatau for generations, and the skyline of snow peaks appears in the city's logos, films and songs. So does the apple: the wild apple forests of these foothills are regarded as the ancestral home of the cultivated apple, the large Aport variety was a local speciality, and the name Almaty is popularly linked to the fruit. Kazakh custom governs hospitality — tea served immediately, a loaded table before guests sit, respect shown to elders — even in the most cosmopolitan households.

About two million people live in Almaty, making it by far the largest city in the country, and the population continues to grow through migration from the south and the villages. It is the financial centre — banks, insurance, the stock exchange, trading companies — as well as the base for technology businesses, media, retail and tourism, and salaries and rents are the highest in Kazakhstan.

The city reads by altitude. The upper districts, cooler and cleaner, hold villas, new apartment complexes and the wealthier households; the central grid mixes Soviet blocks, offices and restaurants; and the flatter north has older housing, industry, markets and the railway stations. Families spend weekends in the gorges, at dachas, at Medeu or in the shopping centres, and the working day is shaped by heavy traffic on Al-Farabi and the main north–south avenues.

Three issues dominate local argument. Winter air pollution, caused by coal-fired heating, traffic and the basin's trapped air, is the most visible. Building in the foothills, which blocks the airflow and eats into the national park, is the most contested. And the earthquake risk beneath the whole city keeps construction standards, and the fate of ageing Soviet blocks, permanently in the news.

Almaty has the most varied food in Kazakhstan. The Kazakh table is served at celebrations and in national restaurants: beshbarmak, boiled horsemeat or mutton with squares of pasta, onion sauce and sorpa broth; kazy and shuzhuk, cured horsemeat sausages; kuyrdak, fried offal with potato; and baursak, fried dough puffs, with tea. Autumn sogym, the slaughter for winter meat, still shapes many families' cooking.

Uyghur cooking supplies the everyday dishes. Lagman — hand-pulled noodles topped with stir-fried meat, peppers and tomato — is the city's default lunch, beside manty, large steamed dumplings, samsa baked on the wall of a tandoor and polu, the Uyghur form of plov. Dungan cafés, run by descendants of Chinese Muslims who came in the 1870s, serve spiced cold noodles and steamed breads, and Korean food from the community deported in 1937 is so familiar that morkovcha, spiced grated carrot, counts as a local salad.

The Green Bazaar is the place where all of it meets: horsemeat rows, dairy counters selling kurt and irimshik, honey from the mountain valleys, dried apricots and walnuts, and in autumn the big red Aport apples. Kymyz, fermented mare's milk, is sold in summer at roadside stalls on the mountain roads, and shubat comes from camel's milk. A few wineries in the foothills east of the city make Kazakh wine, local brandy and beer are widely drunk, and the central streets hold the country's best-developed run of coffee houses and bakeries.