Karakol

Karakol was founded on 1 July 1869 as a Russian military and administrative post in newly annexed territory, on a site chosen where the Karakol river leaves the mountains near the eastern end of Lake Issyk-Kul. Surveyors laid the streets on a grid with water channels along them, and settlers from Russia and Ukraine built single-storey wooden houses with carved frames, many of which still stand. A caravan road to Kashgar crossed the passes behind the town, and Karakol became a supply point for expeditions into the Tian Shan.

Two waves of migration shaped it. Dungans — Chinese-speaking Muslims — fled the Qing empire after the failure of a revolt and settled in and around the town from the 1880s, followed by Uyghur families; between 1904 and 1910 a Beijing architect and Chinese craftsmen built the wooden mosque that is now the town's emblem. After an earthquake destroyed an earlier brick church, the Orthodox community rebuilt its cathedral in wood in 1895. The explorer Nikolai Przhevalsky died at Karakol in 1888 while preparing an expedition to Tibet, and was buried above the lake; the town was renamed Przhevalsk in 1889. It recovered its old name in 1921, was renamed Przhevalsk again in 1939, and became Karakol once more in 1991.

In Soviet times it was a closed regional centre with light industry, a military presence on the lake and a sanatorium economy along the shore. Those factories largely closed after independence, and the town turned instead to what surrounds it: the trekking valleys, the hot springs, the ski slopes and the lake, which have made it the centre of mountain tourism in Kyrgyzstan.

The town is a study in coexistence. A Russian Orthodox cathedral of wood and a mosque built like a Chinese temple stand a short walk apart, and Kyrgyz, Russian, Dungan, Uyghur, Kazakh and Tatar families share the same streets. Russian remains the common language between communities, while Kyrgyz dominates in the villages around. Orthodox Easter and the Muslim holidays are both visible in the town's calendar, and mixed neighbourhoods mean neighbours attend one another's weddings and funerals.

Dungan culture is the most distinctive strand. Brought from north-west China in the nineteenth century, it survives in a spoken dialect of Mandarin written in Cyrillic, in elaborate weddings with dozens of dishes served in strict order, and in a cuisine unlike anything else in Central Asia. Uyghur families contribute their own music and food. Kyrgyz tradition is strongest in the valleys above the town, where families still move animals to summer pastures and where felt-making, horse games and the epic of Manas remain part of ordinary life.

Since independence Karakol has also become an outdoor town. Mountain guides, ski instructors, horsemen and guesthouse families make up a large part of the working population, and community-based tourism organisations have given herding families a stake in it. Hospitality follows Kyrgyz rules: a guest is fed first, tea is poured in small amounts as a sign that it will be refilled, and elders are served and greeted before anyone else.

About 85,000 people live in Karakol, making it the largest town of Issyk-Kul Region and its administrative centre. The population is mixed and the town is low-built, with most families in single-storey houses on large plots where fruit trees, potatoes and a cow or a few sheep supplement wages. Soviet apartment blocks stand in a few districts, and new guesthouses have gone up along the roads towards the mountains.

The economy rests on agriculture, public administration, trade and tourism. The lake shore produces apricots, apples and honey; the surrounding valleys are grazing country; and the Kumtor gold mine in the mountains to the south is the region's largest industrial employer, drawing workers on rotation from the town. Summer trekking and winter skiing now support hundreds of households directly, and remittances from relatives working in Russia and Kazakhstan reach many more.

Days begin early, with the bazaar busy soon after dawn and the animal market filling the edge of town on Sunday mornings. School, work and errands are done by mid-afternoon, and evenings are spent at home or in the parks. The seasons govern everything: the move of herds to the jailoo in June, the harvest and preserving in late summer, and a long winter when the snow closes the high roads and coal smoke hangs over the streets. Emigration of young people to Bishkek and abroad is a constant concern, as is pressure on the lake from unregulated building.

Karakol's best-known dish is ashlan-fu, a cold, sour noodle soup that belongs to the Dungan kitchen: wheat noodles and squares of firm starch jelly in a vinegary, chilli-spiked broth, eaten with a flat fried potato pastry on the side. It is a market food, sold from stalls by women who have made nothing else for years, and it has spread from Karakol across the country.

Dungan cooking goes far beyond it. A formal Dungan meal runs to a long sequence of small dishes — cold salads of shredded vegetables dressed with vinegar and garlic, funchoza noodles, fried mutton with peppers, dumplings and soups — and several families in town serve such meals to visitors in their homes. Uyghur laghman, hand pulled and either fried or in broth, is the other staple, alongside manty, samsa baked on tandyr walls and shashlik grilled over charcoal.

Kyrgyz food appears at celebrations and in the valleys: beshbarmak, boiled meat shredded over flat noodles with onion broth; kuurdak, fried offal and meat with potatoes; boorsok, fried dough squares heaped on the table; and kymyz, fermented mare's milk, drunk in the summer pastures above town. The bazaar sells kurut, hard salty balls of dried yoghurt, mountain honey, apricots and Korean-style salads left by the deportations of 1937. Tea, green and salted or with milk, accompanies everything.