Moynaq

Moynaq stood on a peninsula in the southern Aral Sea, in a delta of reed beds, channels and shallow lakes where Karakalpak families had fished, herded and grown crops for generations. Fishing became an industry in the Soviet period, and Moynaq grew into a centre of industrial fishing and canning — the country's only port town — with a fleet of trawlers, a fish-processing plant and tens of thousands of residents, more than live here now.

From the 1960s the Amu Darya and Syr Darya were diverted on an enormous scale to irrigate cotton in the Soviet republics upstream, and the inflow that had kept the Aral Sea full largely stopped. The water level dropped, the salinity rose, and the native fish died off. The shore retreated from the town year by year; channels were dredged to keep boats afloat, and eventually the effort was abandoned. By the 1980s the sea was kilometres away, the cannery survived for a time on fish brought in by rail from elsewhere, and the fleet was left where it lay.

Today the shoreline is about 150 kilometres north, and the exposed bed has become a salt desert. Families left for Nukus, Kazakhstan and Russia, and those who stayed turned to herding, small-scale farming and government work. Efforts to stabilise the seabed have included planting saxaul to hold the sand, and the town has acquired a modest new role: it is the place people come to see what happened.

Moynaq is a Karakalpak town, and its culture belongs to the delta and the steppe rather than to the Silk Road cities. Karakalpak, a Turkic language close to Kazakh, is the everyday speech, with Uzbek and Russian used alongside it. Yurts are still put up for weddings and large gatherings, felt and embroidery are made at home, and older people can recite verses from the epics that carry the region's history.

The fishing years remain the town's central story, and one it tells readily. Households keep photographs of boats, crews and the promenade; the museum's paintings of a sea that no longer exists have become the standard illustration of the disaster in books and news reports worldwide. Visitors are usually welcomed with an interest in where they have come from, and asking about the sea is normal — though it touches directly on illness, lost work and families who left.

Since 2018 the town has also hosted an annual electronic music festival at the ship graveyard, conceived as a way of drawing attention to the catastrophe, which brings an influx of young people from Tashkent and abroad. Otherwise custom is quiet and conservative: hospitality first, modest dress, shoes off indoors, and tea before conversation.

Moynaq is a town of some 18,000 people, fewer than in the years when the port and cannery ran, though numbers have been rising again. The wide streets, the spaces between houses and the empty plots are a reminder of the years when people left, and many households still depend on money sent home by relatives working in Tashkent, Kazakhstan or Russia. Work in the town itself is mostly public sector — the school, the clinic, the district administration — with some herding of sheep, goats and cattle, small plots of vegetables, and a little income from visitors and their drivers.

The environment sets the terms of daily life. Dust and salt blown off the seabed settle on everything, drinking water is poor and often trucked or filtered, and the rates of respiratory illness, kidney and liver disease and anaemia across this part of Karakalpakstan are high and well documented. Summer heat and winter wind are both severe in a landscape with no shelter.

Days start early and follow the light. Supplies arrive by road from Nukus and Kungrad, the small bazaar and a line of shops cover most needs, and anything unusual means a trip south. Gas has been developed on the old seabed, giving some employment, and tree-planting programmes to hold down the sand employ seasonal labour. Tourism is small but steady and now underpins the few guesthouses and yurt camps, along with the drivers who bring people up from Nukus.

Moynaq's kitchen was built on fish. Carp, bream, sturgeon and the Aral roach were salted, dried, fried and canned here, and fish soup with bread was the staple of a fishing town. That food has largely gone with the sea: what fish appears now comes from the Amu Darya, the remaining delta lakes or from farmed stock brought up from the south, and it is fried simply or cooked in a broth when it is available at all.

Everyday cooking follows the Karakalpak pattern, close to that of the Kazakh steppe. Mutton, beef and sometimes horsemeat are boiled or grilled without much spicing; a festive meal means a plate of boiled meat with wide sheets of pasta and onion, and plov cooked in a kazan marks weddings and holidays. Soups are thick with potato, carrot and onion, and manti, steamed dumplings of minced meat, are common.

Dairy carries the rest of the table: sour milk, fresh white cheese, clotted cream and qurt, hard salted balls of dried yoghurt. Bread is baked in tandir ovens and eaten with everything. Fresh produce is limited by soil and water, so melons, tomatoes and fruit mostly arrive by lorry from the oases to the south. Tea — green, or black with milk in the Kazakh manner — is drunk all day and offered to every visitor before anything else happens.