Atyrau

The city began as a fishing and trading post at the mouth of the Yaik, as the Ural was then called. The Russian trader Gury Nazarov built a wooden fort there in 1645; after Cossacks plundered it his family rebuilt it in stone, and the settlement that grew around it took the name Guryev from them. Its wealth came from the river: sturgeon and the caviar they yielded, salted and shipped upriver to Russia, along with seal hunting and the salt trade on the Caspian.

Guryev remained a modest river town under the Russian Empire, caught up in the Cossack risings of the Yaik; the river itself was renamed the Ural by Catherine II in 1775, after Pugachev's rebellion was suppressed. The town's transformation came with oil. A field was found on the Emba river inland in 1892, pipelines and a railway followed, and in 1945 the Atyrau Refinery opened, today one of the three largest in Kazakhstan. The town served the Soviet war effort as a link to the front and a route for evacuating people and industry.

The decisive change came after independence. The giant Tengiz field some 350 kilometres south of the city, and later Kashagan offshore in the Caspian, brought international consortiums, thousands of foreign staff and a long construction boom. Guryev had been renamed Atyrau in 1991, and within a decade it was the wealthiest and fastest-growing city in western Kazakhstan, with new offices, hotels and housing on both banks and an airport rebuilt for the traffic. The river fisheries that once made it, meanwhile, have shrunk almost to nothing.

Atyrau is a Kazakh city with an international working population, and the two sit side by side without blending much. The surrounding region is among the most Kazakh-speaking in the country, with strong clan memory, large weddings and memorial feasts, and strict customs of respect for elders. In the centre, company compounds, expatriate clubs and restaurants serve engineers on rotation from Europe, Turkey, the Caucasus and Asia, many of whom spend years here.

The river shapes local identity as much as the oil. People fish from the embankments, ice fishing continues through the winter, and older residents remember when sturgeon and caviar were ordinary food rather than a scarce and regulated commodity. The bridges, with their signs for Europe and Asia, are the city's favourite photograph and a standing local joke about crossing continents on the way to work.

Western Kazakhstan has its own musical tradition, the dombra school of the Junior Horde and the zhyrau who sang long epic poems, and the instrument is still taught and played at celebrations. Hospitality is emphatic: guests are fed before they are questioned, tea is refilled constantly, and an invitation to a family event is not lightly declined. Islam is part of ordinary life, observed without display, and Nauryz in March is the year's largest public celebration.

About 330,000 people live in Atyrau, the administrative centre of Atyrau Region, and the city has grown with the oil industry. The city is flat, low and hot, spread along both banks of the Ural, with Soviet blocks, newer apartment towers and districts of single-storey houses, and it has expanded outwards faster than its roads, drainage and water supply have kept up.

Oil dominates everything. The refinery, the service companies, the contractors and the government offices that regulate them provide most of the formal work, and a large part of the workforce spends weeks at a time at Tengiz, Kashagan or other fields before returning home for a block of days. Wages in the industry are high and prices in the city follow them, which is a persistent grievance for those outside the sector: teachers, medical staff and traders.

Daily life bends around the heat. Work starts early, the middle of the day is spent indoors in summer, and the embankments fill in the evening with families, cyclists and anglers. Winter brings wind off the open steppe and a frozen river. Air quality, flaring, the state of the river and the health of the Caspian are recurring public concerns, alongside housing costs and the traffic that builds at the bridges twice a day.

Fish defines the local table, even after the collapse of the old fisheries. Ural and Caspian fish are fried, baked whole with onion and tomato, or simmered into soup, and the cured and smoked fillets known by the Russian word balyk are the classic gift from Atyrau. Sturgeon and caviar made the city's name and its early fortune, but overfishing and poaching have made both scarce, protected and strictly controlled.

Away from the water the cooking is that of herders. Beshbarmak — boiled mutton or horse meat with broad sheets of pasta and onion broth — is the dish for guests, kuyrdak of fried offal and onion is everyday food, and horse sausages such as kazy appear at celebrations. Camel herding on the surrounding steppe supplies shubat, fermented camel's milk, while kurt, hard balls of dried salted curd, and baursak, small pieces of fried dough, accompany tea.

The oil industry has broadened the city's restaurants further than its size would suggest, with Turkish, Georgian, Caucasian, Italian and Asian kitchens in the centre beside canteens serving plov, lagman noodles, manty dumplings and samsa baked in a tandoor. Melons and watermelons from southern Kazakhstan arrive in late summer, and tea, black and with milk, is poured through the day.