Shymkent

Shymkent grew where the caravan road between the steppe and the cities of Transoxiana crossed the well-watered foothills, and a fortified town existed on the hill above the Koshkar-Ata by the medieval period. Nearby Sayram, far older, was the larger place for centuries and the birthplace of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi, so early Shymkent lived partly in its shadow as a market and staging point for traders moving between Tashkent, Turkistan and the pastures to the north.

The town changed hands repeatedly. It was fought over by the Kazakh khans, the emirs of Bukhara and the Khanate of Kokand, which held it in the early 19th century, and Russian forces took it in 1864 during their advance into Central Asia. Under Russian rule it became Chimkent, a provincial town known for its gardens and its bazaar, renamed Chernyaev in 1914 and Chimkent again in 1924. The railway tied it into the wider Turkestan economy, and the city later became a junction on the Turkestan–Siberia line.

Soviet industrialisation transformed it: a lead smelter, chemical plants, a cement works, textile mills and, later, an oil refinery, with workers arriving from across the union and from the surrounding villages. The city's name was respelled Shymkent in 1993 and it grew very quickly as rural families moved in. In 2018 it was separated from the surrounding province and made a city of republican significance alongside Astana and Almaty, with Turkistan taking over as regional capital, and in the following years the old citadel hill was excavated and rebuilt as a historic quarter.

Shymkent has a strong and self-aware local character. People here are known across Kazakhstan for directness, a trading instinct, loyalty to family and neighbourhood, and a love of celebration: weddings and toi feasts run to hundreds of guests and are a serious social obligation. Jokes about the city's swagger are traded in both directions, and residents enjoy them.

It is the most Uzbek-influenced of Kazakhstan's big cities. Sayram and the districts towards the border have long-established Uzbek communities, and their architecture, courtyard houses, tandoor bread and cooking have shaped the city's everyday life. Kazakh is the main language of the streets, more so than in Almaty, and Islam is practised openly, with well-attended mosques and a high observance of Ramadan and the two Eids, alongside older steppe customs of hospitality and respect for elders.

Life is lived outdoors for much of the year. Teahouses with raised platforms, shaded courtyards, parks and roadside grills fill up through the long evenings, and the city's own brewery culture and its beer gardens are part of the summer routine. Football, wrestling and boxing draw local passion, and Shymkent has produced well-known fighters. The rebuilt citadel quarter, the markets and the parks are where the city shows itself to visitors.

More than a million people live in Shymkent, which has grown faster than almost any other city in the country as families have moved in from the villages of the south. Most live in flats in the Soviet-era and newer districts or in single-storey houses with courtyards and gardens on the edges, where the city runs out into farmland. Households are larger than the national average and several generations often share a plot.

The economy rests on trade above all — wholesale bazaars supplying much of southern Kazakhstan and goods moving to and from Uzbekistan — together with oil refining, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, cement, food processing and construction. Informal work in the markets and on building sites employs a great many people, wages are below those of Almaty and Astana, and labour migration to Russia and the northern cities is common.

The day is shaped by the heat: work begins early, the middle of the afternoon is slow, and the streets, parks and teahouses fill again after sunset, with children out late in summer. The city's difficulties are those of rapid expansion — traffic, water and power supply, air quality near the industrial zone, and districts built faster than schools and clinics could follow — while the separation from the province in 2018 brought new investment, public buildings and civic confidence.

Shymkent is regarded within Kazakhstan as a city to eat in, and its cooking sits closer to Uzbek than to northern Kazakh food. Plov — rice with mutton, yellow carrot and onion cooked slowly in a wide kazan — is the dish of weddings and Sundays, and every district argues for its own version. Samsa, pastries of minced mutton, onion and fat baked against the wall of a clay tandoor, are the city's best-known street food, sold hot from bakery doorways all day.

Grilled meat is everywhere: shashlyk of mutton, beef and liver over charcoal, often with flatbread, raw onion and vinegar. Lagman, hand-pulled noodles served in broth or under a stir-fry, manty dumplings, shurpa soup and kuyrdak, a fry of offal and potato, fill the canteens, while beshbarmak — boiled meat and broth over wide sheets of pasta — remains the ceremonial Kazakh dish for guests.

The irrigated south supplies the markets: melons and watermelons in late summer, grapes, apricots, pomegranates and tomatoes, rice from the Syr Darya, and mountains of dried fruit and nuts. Dairy runs from ayran and kurt to shubat, fermented camel's milk, sold in the warm months. Green tea drunk plain from small bowls is the default in teahouses, black tea with milk at home, both served with bread, baursak and jam; the city also has a long-established brewery and a beer garden culture unusual in the south.