Aralsk

Aralsk owes its existence to the railway. The Orenburg to Tashkent line was built between 1899 and 1905, the station opened in 1905, and in the same year Russian merchants organised fishing companies in the settlement at the head of a sheltered bay. Shipbuilding yards followed, and the place grew into the chief port of the Aral Sea and a major supplier of fish to the surrounding region.

After the revolution the station settlement took the name Aralsk, and in 1938 it became a town and the centre of its district within the newly formed Kzyl-Orda oblast. Through the Soviet decades the fleet, the yards and the trade in fish supported the town, and the catch went out by rail to the cities.

From the 1960s the rivers that fed the sea, the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya, were diverted on a huge scale to irrigate cotton and rice. The sea fell, the water grew saltier, the commercial fish died out and by the 1980s the shoreline had retreated far beyond the quays. Vessels were abandoned where they sat, the port closed, and much of the population left. Relief came with the Kokaral dam, completed in 2005, which holds the Syr Darya's flow in the northern basin: the North Aral Sea has risen, its salinity has fallen, fish have returned and the water has moved back to within about 12 kilometres of the town, against roughly 100 kilometres before the dam was built.

Aralsk thinks of itself as a fishing town even in the years when there was almost nothing to catch, and the memory of the sea shapes local identity more than anything else. Older residents describe a childhood of boats, ice and gulls in a place that is now steppe, and the return of fish to the northern basin is discussed with a mixture of pride and caution. The town has appeared repeatedly in documentary films and photography about the Aral Sea, and visitors asking about the disaster are received matter-of-factly rather than as a novelty.

The district is strongly Kazakh-speaking, with Russian used less than in the north of the country. Customs of hospitality are kept firmly: a guest is fed before being questioned, tea is poured in small bowls and refilled constantly, and elders are deferred to in seating, speech and the sharing of meat. Islam is part of ordinary life, observed without display, and family events — weddings, the naming of children, memorial meals — are the main social occasions.

Music and oral tradition belong to the wider Syr Darya country, the land associated with Korkyt Ata, the legendary sage credited with the kobyz, whose memorial stands on the steppe further up the river. Nauryz in March is the year's great celebration, with swings, wrestling, horse games and cauldrons of nauryz köje in the square.

About 30,000 people live in Aralsk, which is the administrative centre of the Aral district of Kyzylorda Region. The population fell heavily in the late Soviet and early independence years as the fishery collapsed, and the town has not regained its former size. Work is found in local government, schools and the hospital, in the railway, in trade at the bazaar, and increasingly again in fishing and fish processing in the villages nearer the water.

Housing is mostly low: Soviet apartment blocks of a few storeys near the centre, and beyond them single-storey houses with yards where families keep a cow, sheep or chickens and grow vegetables through the short season. Water quality, dust and the health effects of the dry seabed have been long-standing grievances, and piped water and heating are recurring subjects of complaint.

The day starts early and pauses through the worst of the afternoon heat in summer. Trains arriving at the station are small events, drawing taxi drivers and traders. Many younger residents leave for Kyzylorda, Aktobe or the oil towns of the west and return for holidays, and money sent home matters to a good number of households. Talk in the town turns often to how far the water has come back and whether a second dam will be built to bring it further.

Fish is the point of local pride. Flounder, introduced to survive the saltier water, along with pike-perch, carp, bream and catfish from the northern sea and the Syr Darya, is fried, baked, dried or smoked, and dried fish sold in strips at the bazaar is a standard gift to take away. Fish soup and fish baked whole with onions and tomato appear on tables and in the town's cafés when the catch is good.

The rest is steppe cooking. Beshbarmak — boiled mutton or horse meat with broad sheets of pasta and onion broth — is the dish for guests and celebrations. Plov, lagman noodles, manty dumplings and samsa baked in a tandoor fill the canteens, and kuyrdak, offal fried with onion, is everyday food. Rice grown along the lower Syr Darya around Kyzylorda is the local grain, and melons and watermelons arrive in late summer.

Dairy and bread accompany everything: baursak, small pieces of fried dough, kurt, hard balls of dried salted curd, and in the camel-herding country around the town shubat, fermented camel's milk, which is drunk both as refreshment and as a health remedy. Tea, black and with milk, is poured all day, and the bowl is filled only part way so that it can be refreshed often.