Kyzylorda

The city began as Ak-Mechet, a fort built for the Khanate of Kokand on the lower Syr Darya in 1817 to hold the river crossing and tax the caravan traffic. In 1853 a Russian force under General Vasily Perovsky took it after a siege, and the rebuilt fort was named Fort Perovsky; the town that grew around it became Perovsk. The railway from Orenburg to Tashkent reached the town at the start of the twentieth century and turned a garrison settlement into a trading and administrative centre.

Its most unexpected chapter came in the 1920s. After the Soviet authorities reorganised Central Asia, the town — renamed Kzyl-Orda, from the Kazakh for red capital — was made the capital of the Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1925. Government departments, newspapers and institutes moved in for a few crowded years until the capital was transferred to Alma-Ata in 1927, leaving behind a provincial city with a sense of thwarted importance.

The Soviet decades brought irrigation on a vast scale. Canals drawn from the Syr Darya turned the surrounding desert into rice paddies, and rice became the region's identity and its economy. From 1955 the Baikonur Cosmodrome was built on the steppe downriver, and the region became the launching place of the Soviet space programme. The same irrigation that made the rice fields helped empty the Aral Sea downstream, and the consequences — salt, dust and failing water supply — have shaped policy in Kyzylorda ever since.

Kyzylorda is among the most Kazakh cities in the country: Kazakh is the language of the street, of offices and of schooling, and Russian is heard far less than in the north. Family and clan ties matter, weddings and memorial feasts are large and formal, and the customs of seating, serving and speaking in order of age are observed carefully. Islam is a steady presence rather than a display, with well-attended mosques and widespread observance of Ramadan.

The region's cultural hero is Korkyt Ata, the legendary sage, storyteller and musician of the Oghuz Turks associated with the lower Syr Darya, credited with inventing the kobyz, a two-stringed bowed instrument with a haunting sound. His memory is carried in the name of the university, in music festivals and in the monument on the steppe outside the city, whose pipes sound in the wind. The tradition of the zhyrau, the epic singer, and of aitys, sung poetic contests between improvisers, remains strong here.

Everyday manners are those of the hot south. Visits begin with tea rather than business, hospitality is taken as an obligation, and it is normal for a guest to be pressed to eat more than seems possible. Evenings in summer belong to the embankment and the parks, where families walk after dark, and to teahouses where the talk runs on rice prices, water and the fortunes of relatives working elsewhere in the country.

About 250,000 people live in Kyzylorda, the administrative centre of a large and thinly populated region. The city is low and wide rather than tall, built of two- and three-storey blocks, older single-storey houses with courtyards and newer estates on the edges. Trees and open irrigation channels line the main streets, planted against a climate that is close to desert.

Rice is the foundation of the regional economy, grown in paddies along the Syr Darya and milled and traded in the city; Kyzylorda rice is sold across Kazakhstan under the region's name. Oil and gas fields and uranium mining in the region provide well-paid rotation work, and the city also lives on government employment, the university, the railway and trade. The leased town of Baikonur and its cosmodrome sit within the region's boundaries but under a separate administration.

Water dominates local concerns. The Syr Darya is shared with upstream neighbours, and low flows, salinity and the state of the irrigation network are constant subjects of debate, along with drinking water quality and dust blown from the dried Aral bed to the north-west. Summer sets the rhythm of the day: early starts, a long pause in the heat of the afternoon, and life outdoors once the sun is low. Many young people study or work in Almaty, Astana and the western oil cities, returning for family occasions.

Rice is the local speciality, and plov — rice cooked slowly in a wide kazan with mutton, carrot, onion and cumin until each grain is separate — is the dish of hospitality and celebration. The southern style is closer to Uzbek cooking than anything found in northern Kazakhstan, and a household's plov is a point of reputation. Rice also goes into soups and into sweet dishes made with raisins and dried apricots.

The tandoor supplies the rest of the daily table: round lepyoshka bread baked on the oven walls, and samsa, flaky pastries of chopped mutton and onion, eaten hot in the morning. Lagman, hand-pulled noodles in a spiced mutton and vegetable broth, manty, large steamed dumplings, and shashlyk grilled over coals are everywhere. Beshbarmak, boiled meat with sheets of pasta in onion broth, is still the dish laid before honoured guests.

Dairy and steppe products fill the bazaars: kurt, dried salted curd balls, ayran, and shubat, fermented camel's milk from the herds kept on the surrounding plains. Fish from the Syr Darya and from the northern Aral Sea is sold dried and smoked. Melons and watermelons from the irrigated fields arrive in late summer and are eaten in quantity, and green tea, drunk plain from small bowls, is more common here than in the rest of the country.