Kegen

Kegen grew where the mountain valleys meet: a natural crossing point between the pastures of the Kazakh Great Horde, the Kyrgyz country beyond the Karkara valley, and the caravan roads towards the Ili and the Chinese frontier. Nomadic families moved their herds through this ground for centuries, wintering low and taking the animals up to the summer pastures on the slopes above.

Russian expansion into Zhetysu in the second half of the 19th century brought administration, Cossack settlers and peasant farmers into the valleys, and permanent villages of low brick and timber houses replaced seasonal camps. The Karkara valley a few kilometres to the south-east, on the route into the Kyrgyz country, was a meeting ground for herders and traders from both sides of the mountains. In 1916 the uprising against wartime conscription swept these districts; in its suppression many Kazakh and Kyrgyz families fled east over the mountain passes into China, a flight remembered across the region.

Soviet rule turned the herds and fields into collective and state farms and made Kegen an administrative centre, with a school, a hospital, a house of culture and the low official buildings that still line its main street. Collectivisation settled most of the remaining nomadic households. After independence in 1991 the farms were broken up and many younger residents left for Almaty, while the roads east of the village, built for the frontier and for the farms, began to carry travellers heading for the canyon and the lakes instead.

This is a Kazakh-speaking countryside, more traditional in habit than Almaty four or five hours away, and the customs of the pastoral world remain part of ordinary life. Horses are worked as well as kept, families move animals to higher ground in summer, and the skills of riding, slaughtering and preserving meat and milk are everyday knowledge rather than heritage display. Weddings are large, prepared over weeks and attended by extended families from across the district.

Hospitality is close to obligatory. A visitor who reaches a house is given tea, bread, butter, cream and whatever else is available, and refusing everything is awkward; the place of honour at the table belongs to the eldest guest. Nauryz, the spring new year in late March, is the main festival of the year, with visiting between houses, music and communal cooking, and mounted games such as kokpar are held at holidays and celebrations in the district's villages.

Islam here is practised in a form long blended with older steppe custom: respect for ancestors and for the spirits of place, visits to family graves, and modest village mosques. The district has also long been mixed, with Kyrgyz families on the border side, Uyghur and Dungan households in the wider region, and Russian surnames left from the farming settlements. Dombra music, sung poetry and the reputation of a good horseman still carry weight.

About eight and a half thousand people live in Kegen, making it a large village rather than a town, and its role is to serve the farms and hamlets around it: the district offices, the school, the clinic, the bazaar and the fuel station are here. The economy is livestock above all — sheep, horses and cattle grazed on pasture that is green only for part of the year — with hay, potatoes and vegetables grown on irrigated plots, and wages from public sector jobs, transport and a growing trade in guesthouses and drivers.

Houses are single storey with courtyards, sheds and stacked fuel for the winter, and most families keep animals even if someone in the household also has a salary. The rhythm follows the light and the season: early work with the herds, a long afternoon, and a return to the house before the cold comes down. Summer empties part of the village upwards as families go to the pastures; winter turns it inward, with snow on the valley and long evenings indoors.

The pressures are those of rural Kazakhstan generally — young people leaving for Almaty and Astana, reliance on a single road for supplies, and patchy services and mobile coverage in the side valleys. Against that, the flow of visitors heading to Charyn and the Kolsai lakes has given some households an income that did not exist a generation ago.

The cooking is meat, milk and bread, the food of a herding valley. Mutton, beef and horsemeat are the staples; kazy, the horsemeat sausage made from rib meat, is brought out for guests and holidays, and beshbarmak — boiled meat served over broad sheets of pasta with onion broth, eaten with the hands as its name suggests — is the dish of a celebration or an honoured visitor. Sorpa, the broth that goes with it, is drunk from bowls.

Dairy is everywhere and much of it is fermented or dried: ayran, the thick sour milk; kurt, hard salted balls of dried curd carried as a snack; irimshik, a dry crumbly curd; and in the warm months kymyz from mares and shubat from camels, sold from roadside stands and considered restorative. Butter and thick cream are set out with bread at any table.

Bread comes as flat rounds baked in a clay oven and as baursak, small squares of fried dough that accompany tea. Tea itself, black and taken with milk, is served constantly and in quantity. The everyday restaurant dishes are those of the wider southeast: lagman noodles under stir-fried meat and vegetables, steamed manty dumplings, samsa pastries and shashlyk grilled over charcoal at the roadside, with potatoes, carrots and onions doing most of the work of the vegetable side.