Semey

Semey began in 1718 as Semipalatinsk, a Russian fort on the Irtysh built during the campaign to secure the river against the Dzungars. The name came from the ruins of a Buddhist monastery complex nearby, understood as 'seven chambers'. The fort flooded repeatedly and was moved 18 kilometres upstream to drier ground in 1778, growing into a customs post and trading town, because the Irtysh carried goods north into Siberia while caravan routes ran south towards Central Asia and China. Tatar merchants settled and built mosques, Russian merchants built brick warehouses, and Kazakh clans of the Middle Horde traded livestock at its markets.

Empire also used the town as a place of exile. Fyodor Dostoevsky was sent here as a private soldier after his Siberian prison sentence and lived in the town from 1854 to 1859, and was a friend of the Kazakh ethnographer Shoqan Walikhanov, whom he met on the way there. In the hills to the south, Abai Kunanbayev, the poet and translator regarded as the founder of modern Kazakh written literature, was born in 1845; Semipalatinsk was where he read, argued and published. In 1917 the town became a centre of the Alash Orda, the Kazakh autonomist movement suppressed after the Bolshevik victory.

The Soviet period brought industry — meat packing, textiles, a river port — and then the decision that shaped the city's modern reputation: from 1949 the Semipalatinsk Test Site on the steppe to the west was used for 456 nuclear tests, atmospheric at first and later underground, until protests led by the Nevada–Semipalatinsk movement helped close it in 1991. The city was renamed Semey in 2007, and in 2022 became the capital of the new Abai Region.

Semey calls itself a cultural capital, and the claim rests on literature. Abai's poems and his prose 'Words of Edification' are learnt in every Kazakh school, and the city keeps his memory in museums, monuments and the annual commemorations held in August. Two other writers deepen the association: his nephew Shakarim Kudaiberdiev, and Mukhtar Auezov, whose novel about Abai is a national epic. The Dostoevsky museum, in the house connected with the writer's years of exile, marks the other literary tradition the city claims.

Its population has long been mixed. Kazakhs form the majority, with Russians, Tatars, Ukrainians and Germans among the older communities; the Tatar quarter's nineteenth-century mosques and the Orthodox cathedral stand a short distance apart, and the city has a reputation for religious learning as well as literary learning.

The nuclear tests are part of local identity in a way that is hard to overstate. Families across the region carry illnesses attributed to fallout, the anti-test movement of 1989 began here, and 29 August — the date the site was closed — is marked each year and has been adopted internationally as a day against nuclear testing. Monuments in the city address the subject directly. Otherwise manners are those of the steppe: guests are fed first and generously, tea is endless, age is respected, and hospitality is offered to strangers as a matter of course.

More than 300,000 people live in Semey, which makes it one of Kazakhstan's larger cities and, since 2022, the capital of Abai Region. It is spread widely on both banks of the Irtysh, with the historic centre on one side and Zhana Semey and the railway districts on the other, connected by the suspension bridge and the older crossings.

The economy runs on food processing — the city's meat and sausage products are known nationally — along with textiles, building materials, transport and a large education and medical sector, including a long-established medical university whose work on the health effects of radiation is internationally known. Administration has added jobs since the region was created. Wages are modest and many young people leave for Astana and Almaty.

Daily life is unhurried and centred on family, the markets and the river. Heating runs for half the year, buses fill in the mornings, and in summer the city moves to the beaches, the pine forest across the water and the dachas. Health remains the region's defining public issue, alongside the condition of housing and roads inherited from the Soviet decades; the closure of the test site is now a generation in the past, but its consequences are still treated as current business rather than history.

Semey's table is Kazakh with a strong Tatar and Russian overlay. Beshbarmak — mutton or horsemeat boiled and served on wide sheets of pasta with onion broth — is the dish of hospitality, preceded by kazy, a sausage made from horse rib meat, and accompanied by sorpa, the broth drunk from bowls. Kuyrdak, offal fried with onion and potato, and horse meat in many forms are everyday foods rather than delicacies, and the city's meat-processing plants have made its sausage a souvenir carried to other regions.

Tatar merchants left a baking tradition: belyashi, round fried pastries stuffed with meat, samsa baked in the oven, and chak-chak, small pieces of fried dough stuck together with honey and served at celebrations. Russian cooking adds pelmeni, borscht, pirozhki and preserved vegetables, and the bazaars sell Korean salads made by families deported here in the 1930s.

Dairy is central. Kurt, hard salted curd balls, is eaten as a snack; irimshik and suzbe appear on the table with tea; and kymyz and shubat, fermented mare's and camel's milk, are drunk in summer and treated as restorative. Tea, black and usually with milk, is poured constantly and served with baursak and Altai honey brought down from the mountains to the east. River fish from the Irtysh, fried or smoked, rounds out a kitchen built on meat and milk.