Oskemen

The city began as a fort. In 1720 an expedition under Ivan Likharev, sent by Peter the Great to secure the upper Irtysh and look for gold, built a stockade where the Ulba joins the larger river, at the point where the Irtysh leaves its rocky gorge. The fort was first called Ust-Kamennaya; the later Russian name Ust-Kamenogorsk points to the mouth of the stone mountains. For decades it was a garrison on the line against the Dzungars, then a customs and trading post on a river route into the Altai.

Mining made the town. Silver, lead and zinc found in the Altai foothills in the eighteenth century drew imperial and later private mining ventures, and Ust-Kamenogorsk became the place where ore was gathered, smelted and shipped. Old Believers and peasant settlers filled the valleys around it, and by the nineteenth century the town had merchant houses, a river port and a growing Kazakh population trading with the steppe.

Soviet planning transformed it. The lead and zinc combine opened before the Second World War, evacuated industry arrived during the war, and afterwards came the Ulba Metallurgical Plant, the titanium and magnesium works and the hydroelectric dam on the Irtysh, making the city one of the Soviet Union's important centres for rare and strategic metals. The population passed 300,000, and blocks of flats spread along both rivers. Since independence it has kept the metals industry, taken the Kazakh name Oskemen, and become the administrative capital of East Kazakhstan Region, with the Altai increasingly promoted as a reason to come.

Oskemen feels more Siberian than most Kazakh cities. Russian is the ordinary language of the street, Orthodox churches stand near the new mosques, and the surrounding valleys hold Old Believer villages settled by religious dissenters who left Russia centuries ago and kept their own dress, songs and rules about food and drink. Kazakh language and culture have become steadily more prominent since independence, and the city now celebrates Nauryz on its main squares as fully as it does Victory Day.

Ice hockey is the local passion and the city's clearest claim to fame. The club founded in the Soviet years produced a stream of players for the Soviet, Russian and Kazakh national teams, and the arena carries the name of Boris Alexandrov, an Olympic gold medallist who began with the city's club; children learn to skate early and the sport dominates winter conversation.

The Altai is the other half of local identity. Families go to the mountains and the reservoir in summer, honey and antler products from the high pastures are sold in every market, and the region's Kazakh, Russian, Tatar and German communities all have their part in the city's music and food. Manners are straightforward and hospitable: guests are fed at once, tea is endless, elders are deferred to, and an invitation to a dacha or a mountain trip is a normal way of showing welcome.

More than 300,000 people live in Oskemen, making it one of the larger cities of Kazakhstan and the administrative centre of East Kazakhstan Region. The population is mixed, with Kazakhs and Russians in similar numbers and Tatar, Ukrainian, German and other communities alongside them, and it has been slowly changing as people move in from the surrounding districts.

Metals remain the backbone: zinc and lead processing, titanium and magnesium, and the Ulba plant with its beryllium, tantalum and nuclear fuel production, plus hydropower on the Irtysh, engineering and food processing. Universities, colleges and hospitals employ many others, and tourism into the Altai supports a growing number of guides, drivers and guesthouses.

The working day starts early and the city empties towards the rivers, the dachas and the mountains at weekends. Winter is lived indoors, with district heating, crowded buses and hockey; summer is lived outside, on the embankments, the beaches and the reservoir. Air quality is the most persistent public grievance, since the valley holds industrial emissions and coal smoke on still, cold days, and the drift of young people to Astana and Almaty is the other constant subject.

Oskemen's food comes from two directions at once. From the steppe come beshbarmak, the boiled meat and pasta dish served to guests, kazy horsemeat sausage, kuyrdak of fried offal and potatoes, sorpa broth and baursak, the small pieces of fried dough eaten with tea. From Russia and Siberia come pelmeni, borscht, shchi, pirozhki, salted cucumbers and mushrooms, and the jams and compotes of a place with a short, intense berry season.

Altai honey is the regional product above all others, sold by the jar at every bazaar along with pine nuts, dried herbs, wild strawberries, sea buckthorn and the tinctures and antler preparations made in the mountains. Fish from the Irtysh, the reservoirs and the mountain lakes is fried, salted or smoked, and the Tatar community contributes belyashi, fried meat pastries, and chak-chak, fried dough bound with honey.

Tea is drunk all day, black and often with milk, and kymyz and shubat, fermented mare's and camel's milk, appear in summer as tonics rather than everyday drinks. The city's cafés also serve the common Central Asian repertoire of manty, samsa, plov, lagman and shashlik, which is what most people actually eat when they go out.