Petropavl

The city began as a fortress. In 1752 Russian troops built the fort of St Peter on the high right bank of the Esil, part of the Novo-Ishim defensive line drawn across the northern steppe, and a settlement gathered beneath it. The Kazakh name for the place, Kyzylzhar, "red bank", describes the bluff above the river. Its position between Siberia and the Kazakh steppe made it a trading town: caravans came north with cotton, dried fruit, silk and livestock from Central Asia, and Russian merchants sent grain, metal and manufactured goods south.

The 19th century was the merchants' era. Petropavlovsk, as it was then, became one of the largest trading centres of the region, with a great annual fair, a customs house, mosques serving Tatar traders and brick trading houses along the main streets, many of which still stand. The Trans-Siberian railway reached the town in the mid-1890s and confirmed its importance, adding workshops, depots and a new quarter around the station.

The Soviet century industrialised it. Factories were evacuated here during the Second World War, defence and engineering plants followed, and the Virgin Lands campaign of the 1950s made the surrounding region a grain producer and brought settlers from across the Union. The region also received deportees, and the poet Magzhan Zhumabayev, who had studied in the town as a boy, was among the Kazakh writers who died in the purges. After independence the city lost much of its defence industry and a large share of its Russian and German population to emigration, and it was renamed Petropavl. It has continued to lose residents to Astana and to Russia while remaining the administrative centre of the North Kazakhstan Region.

Petropavl is one of the most Russian-speaking of Kazakhstan's regional capitals, where Russians are close to 60 per cent of the population, and the feel of the old centre — brick merchant fronts, carved wooden window frames, Orthodox domes — belongs to the Siberian towns over the border as much as to the steppe. Russians, Ukrainians, Tatars and Germans have lived here for generations alongside Kazakhs, and the mix shows in surnames, cooking and the calendar, where Nauryz, Easter, Victory Day and Kurban Ait are all marked.

Tatar merchants were an important community in the 19th-century town, and their mosques and trading houses are part of its architectural inheritance. The city's proudest literary name is Magzhan Zhumabayev, one of the leading Kazakh poets of the early 20th century, who studied at a madrasah here as a boy, was arrested in the city and was shot in 1938; a museum in the city keeps his memory. The town also remembers Abylai Khan, under whom the fortress became a major point of barter and transit trade between Siberia and the steppe.

Cultural life is small and institutional: a Russian drama theatre, a Kazakh music and drama theatre, the regional museum, a philharmonic and the usual round of school and city concerts. Sport, fishing, hunting and the dacha fill most free time. Manners are northern and direct, and hospitality is taken as an obligation rather than a courtesy: tea and food appear before a guest has sat down, and refusing outright is awkward.

About 220,000 people live in Petropavl, and the number has been falling for years as young residents leave for Astana, Almaty or Russia — the border is close enough that migration in both directions is an ordinary part of family life. The North Kazakhstan Region around it is one of the country's main grain area, and the agricultural cycle, from spring sowing to the late-summer harvest, sets the rhythm of the wider district.

In the city the employers are administration, the railway, food processing, engineering and defence-related plants, hospitals and the universities and colleges. Housing divides between Soviet apartment blocks, newer building near the centre and the wooden private houses of the lower quarters, where water, drainage and spring flooding remain live issues. Heating, road repair and the state of the hospitals are the standing complaints at city meetings.

Winter dominates. Snow lies for roughly five months, schools shut in the worst cold, and life moves between flats, offices, the market halls and a handful of shopping centres. The short summer is used intensively: the river beach, the dachas, fishing on the lakes, mushroom and berry picking, and preserving food for the winter. Cross-border trade with the Russian regions of Omsk and Kurgan shapes prices in the shops, and currency swings on one side of the line are felt immediately on the other.

The northern table is the most Slavic in Kazakhstan. Pelmeni, borscht, shchi, salted cucumbers and tomatoes, sour cream, potatoes with dill and dark rye bread are everyday food, and the grain region means strong baking traditions: pirozhki, belyashi, honey cakes and jam from garden fruit. Fish from the Esil and the lakes of the district is smoked, salted or fried and sold from the markets.

The Kazakh table stands alongside it and appears at every celebration. Beshbarmak — boiled horsemeat or mutton with wide squares of pasta, onion sauce and a bowl of sorpa broth — is the dish that marks a wedding, a naming or the arrival of an important guest. Kazy and shuzhuk, cured horsemeat sausages, and kuyrdak, fried offal with potato, belong to the same repertoire, and autumn brings sogym, the slaughter for winter meat.

Central Asian street food has become ordinary here through internal migration: samsa baked in a tandoor, lagman noodles in spiced meat sauce, manty and plov, sold from small cafés and market counters. Korean salads, above all morkovcha, spiced grated carrot, come from the communities deported to Kazakhstan in the 1930s. Kurt, hard salted balls of dried sour milk, and irimshik, a sweet dried curd, are sold everywhere, including on the station platform, and tea with milk and baursak, fried dough puffs, finishes nearly every meal.