Pavlodar

Pavlodar began as a Cossack post on the Irtysh. Koryakovsky fort was founded in 1720 as part of the Russian fortified line along the river, set up to control the salt lakes that gave it its early trade, and it grew into a river village handling salt, grain and livestock. In 1861 it was raised to the status of a town and renamed Pavlodar in honour of a newborn Russian grand duke. Steam boats on the Irtysh tied it to Omsk and Semipalatinsk, and merchants built brick houses and warehouses along the bank.

The Soviet period rebuilt the town completely. The Virgin Lands campaign from 1954 made the region a grain producer and brought thousands of settlers, and from the late 1950s Pavlodar was developed as an industrial centre: a tractor works, an aluminium smelter fed by bauxite from the region, an oil refinery supplied by pipeline from Siberia, chemical plants and the coal and power complex at nearby Ekibastuz. The population multiplied several times over as workers arrived from across the Union, and the city was laid out with wide avenues and standard apartment districts.

The region also carries a darker Soviet history: deportees and special settlers were sent to the area in the 1930s and 1940s, and the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site lay to the south-east, its fallout affecting parts of the Irtysh valley. After independence many Russian and German residents emigrated and the population fell, while the industrial base was privatised and partly revived. Pavlodar remains one of Kazakhstan's principal manufacturing cities, with the embankment rebuilt and the mosque and cathedral of the 1990s and 2000s giving the centre a different profile from the Soviet one.

Pavlodar is one of the most Russian-speaking cities in Kazakhstan. Russians and Ukrainians remain a large share of the population, and German families, many descended from deportees, were numerous before emigration in the 1990s. Russian is the language of the street and of most schools, though Kazakh is increasingly used in official life, and the city's calendar mixes Nauryz, Orthodox Easter, Victory Day and Kurban Ait without much friction.

The region takes particular pride in two figures from the Bayanaul district to the south-west: Mashkhur-Zhusup Kopeev (1858–1931), the Kazakh poet, historian and collector of oral folklore whose name the central mosque carries, and Kanysh Satbayev, the geologist who became the first president of the Kazakh Academy of Sciences. The poet Pavel Vasilyev, born at Zaysan in 1910, and the writer Sultanmakhmut Toraigyrov, who grew up in Bayanaul and whose name the state university in Pavlodar carries, are also local names, attached to streets, schools and museums.

Cultural life is provincial in scale but steady: a Russian drama theatre, a Kazakh music and drama theatre, the regional philharmonic, art and history museums, and the concert hall on the embankment. Sport matters — football, ice hockey, wrestling and boxing above all — and outside the institutions life revolves around the dacha, the river and the family table. Kazakh custom sets the pattern for hospitality across communities: guests fed at once, elders served first, and large gatherings for weddings, namings and funerals.

About 350,000 people live in Pavlodar, making it one of the larger cities of northern Kazakhstan. The economy remains industrial to a degree unusual even in this region: aluminium, alumina refining, petrochemicals, oil refining, electricity, machine building and food processing, with the plants concentrated in the northern zone and much of the workforce housed in the estates near them. Grain farming and livestock fill the surrounding district.

The centre is where public life happens. Families walk the embankment in the evening, markets open early, students fill the universities and institutes, and the cafés and shopping centres of the middle streets take the strain in the cold months. Housing is mostly Soviet-era blocks, with newer building in the central and southern areas and private houses in the older river quarters.

Two issues recur. One is air and water: emissions from the plants and from coal heating, and the state of the Irtysh, a river shared with China and Russia whose flow is a long-standing concern. The other is population: like the rest of the north, Pavlodar has lost residents to emigration and to internal migration towards Astana and Almaty, and holding on to graduates is a constant local argument. Winter shapes the daily routine for five months, with heating, transport reliability and icy pavements the shared preoccupations.

Pavlodar eats across two traditions at once. From the Kazakh side come beshbarmak, boiled meat served over squares of pasta with onion sauce and a bowl of sorpa broth; kazy and shuzhuk, cured horsemeat sausages, sliced onto cold platters; and kuyrdak, fried offal and potato. Autumn brings sogym, the slaughter of a horse or cow for winter meat, and the cured products that follow it are a matter of family pride.

From the Slavic and German settlers come pelmeni, borscht, cabbage soup, salted and pickled vegetables, sour cream with everything, potatoes and dill, dark rye bread and yeast pastries — the grain belt means good local flour, and baking is taken seriously. The Irtysh supplies the city's own speciality: river fish, smoked, salted or fried, sold at the markets and served in beer halls and restaurants along the embankment.

Everyday eating is shaped by Central Asian street food and by migration from the south. Samsa baked on the walls of a tandoor, lagman noodles in a spiced meat sauce, manty and plov are sold in small cafés across the city, alongside Korean salads, above all morkovcha, spiced grated carrot, from the communities deported here in the 1930s. Kurt, hard salted balls of dried sour milk, and irimshik, a sweet dried curd, are sold at every market counter, and tea with milk, served with baursak, closes nearly every meal.