Almaty & the Southeast

The foothills of the Tian Shan were the home of the Saka, Iranian-speaking nomads whose burial mounds line the plain east of Almaty. In 1969 a kurgan near Esik yielded the "Golden Man", a warrior buried in a costume covered with gold plaques, which became a national symbol after independence. The rock carvings of Tamgaly, north-west of Almaty and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, show that the region was sacred ground far earlier.

In the Middle Ages the northern branch of the Silk Road ran along the mountains, and towns such as Taraz and Talgar grew rich on trade under Turkic and later Karakhanid rulers. Taraz is one of the oldest cities in Kazakhstan, mentioned in written sources from the 6th century. The Mongol conquest and the shifting trade routes left most of these towns in ruins, and the land became the summer and winter pasture of the Kazakh Great Horde. The region's name, Zhetysu, "seven rivers", describes the streams that flow from the mountains towards Lake Balkhash.

Russia arrived in the mid-19th century, founding the fort of Verny in 1854 on the site of today's Almaty. Earthquakes in 1887 and 1911 levelled much of the town, which was rebuilt in wood and low brick. Renamed Alma-Ata, it became the capital of Soviet Kazakhstan in 1929 and grew into a city of institutes, parks and film studios. In December 1986 young Kazakhs demonstrated here against the appointment of a Russian party leader, protests now remembered as Zheltoqsan. Almaty lost the status of capital in 1997 but remained the country's largest city, and it was the centre of the violence of January 2022, when the city hall was set on fire.

The southeast is Kazakhstan's most varied corner. Almaty is cosmopolitan and largely Russian-speaking, a city of universities, cafés, galleries and independent music, and the country's liveliest place for film and fashion. The countryside is Kazakh-speaking and more traditional, and the region is home to the country's largest Uyghur community, concentrated in the valleys east of Almaty towards the Chinese border, and to Dungan villages, descended from Chinese Muslims who fled Qing China in the 1870s, in Zhambyl Region near the border with Kyrgyzstan. Koreans, deported from the Soviet Far East in 1937, also settled here in large numbers.

Kazakh customs are prominent in the villages: weddings with hundreds of guests, the kiz uzatu farewell for a bride leaving her family, and horse games such as kokpar and kyz kuu, the chase in which a young man pursues a young woman on horseback. Eagle hunters keep birds in the mountain villages, and felt, leather and silver crafts are sold at Almaty's markets.

The apple is the regional emblem. The wild apple forests of the Tian Shan foothills are regarded as the ancestral home of the cultivated apple, and the city's name has long been connected with the fruit. Taraz, for its part, is proud of its antiquity and of the akyn Zhambyl Zhabayev, the folk poet after whom Zhambyl Region is named.

Almaty, with about 2.2 million people, is the country's financial, commercial and cultural capital, and far larger than anywhere else in the region. Its grid of tree-lined streets slopes up towards the mountains, with the old Soviet centre below and newer apartment towers and villas climbing the foothills. Taraz, with more than 350,000 people, is the main city of Zhambyl Region; Taldykorgan is the capital of the Jetisu Region created in 2022, and Konaev, on the Kapshagay reservoir, became the capital of Almaty Region the same year.

Almaty's economy runs on banking, trade, technology, media and services, while the surrounding regions farm grain, sugar beet, fruit and vegetables on irrigated land and graze sheep and horses in the mountains. Zhambyl Region has phosphate mining around Karatau, and rural families supply the city's bazaars.

Almaty residents escape to the mountain gorges at weekends for walks, picnics and shashlyk, and in winter to Shymbulak's slopes. The city's problems are traffic, rapid growth into the foothills and winter air pollution from coal-fired heating, and debate about building in the mountains is a constant local issue.

The southeast has the country's richest food mix. Almaty's restaurants serve Kazakh feasts of beshbarmak and kazy alongside Uyghur cooking, which gives the region its most popular everyday dish, lagman, hand-pulled noodles topped with stir-fried meat and vegetables. Uyghur manty, samsa baked on the walls of a tandoor and polu, the Uyghur version of plov, fill the bazaars. Dungan cafés serve spicy cold noodles and steamed buns, and Korean salads, especially morkovcha, spiced grated carrot, are sold at every market.

The Green Bazaar in Almaty is the place to taste the region's produce: dried fruit and nuts, honey from the mountain valleys, horsemeat, kurt and irimshik, and in autumn the big Aport apples for which Almaty was once famous. Strawberries and apricots come in early summer, melons and grapes later.

Tea is drunk with milk and served with baursak, fried dough puffs. Kymyz is sold at roadside stalls in the mountains in summer, and a few wineries in the foothills east of Almaty produce Kazakh wine. Kazakh brandy, beer and vodka are widely available, and Almaty has the country's liveliest café and coffee scene.

Almaty itself deserves two or three days: the wooden Zenkov Cathedral in Panfilov Park, the Central State Museum with its Golden Man, the Kasteyev art museum, the Green Bazaar, the Arasan baths and the cable car up Kok Tobe hill. Above the city, the Tian Shan mountains begin almost at the last streets. The Medeu skating rink and the Shymbulak ski resort lie in the gorge to the south-east, and Big Almaty Lake, a turquoise reservoir beneath peaks of more than 4,000 metres, is reached by road through the Ile-Alatau National Park.

East towards China lie the classic multi-day trips. Charyn Canyon cuts through the steppe for tens of kilometres, and its Valley of Castles is a walkable gorge of red sandstone towers leading down to the Charyn river. Further south-east, the Kolsai Lakes form a chain of three mountain lakes among spruce forest, with the first lake reachable by road and the upper lakes by trail, and nearby Lake Kaindy holds the grey trunks of a drowned forest standing upright in the water.

To the north, the Zhetysu steppe opens out: the Singing Dune and painted hills of Altyn-Emel National Park, the Tamgaly petroglyphs, the Kapshagay reservoir and Lake Alakol near the border. In the west, Taraz has the medieval Karakhan mausoleum and a reconstructed old quarter, and the 11th- or 12th-century tomb of Aisha Bibi, decorated with carved terracotta tiles, stands in a village just outside the city.