The West & the Caspian

The west was a crossroads of nomads and traders for millennia. The Mangystau peninsula and the Ustyurt Plateau were grazing and burial lands for Sarmatians and later Turkic peoples, and caravans crossed them between the Caspian and Khorezm. In the 13th and 14th centuries the Golden Horde built Saraishyk on the lower Ural, in today's Atyrau Region; its khans were buried there, and it was later a centre of the Nogai Horde before Cossacks destroyed it.

Russia approached from the north-west. Cossacks settled the Ural (then Yaik) river, and their town of Yaitsk, today's Oral, was the base of Yemelyan Pugachev's great rebellion in 1773–74, after which Catherine the Great renamed the river and the town after the Urals. A merchant family founded the fort that became Guryev, now Atyrau, in the 17th century, and Aktobe grew from a Russian fort built in 1869. In Mangystau the fort of Novopetrovsk held the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko as a soldier-exile in the 1850s; the town is now called Fort-Shevchenko.

The Adai clans of the Kazakh Junior Horde held the Mangystau deserts and resisted Russian rule and Soviet collectivisation fiercely. Oil was found on the Emba river in Atyrau Region in 1892 and in Mangystau in the 1960s, when the planned city of Shevchenko, now Aktau, was built beside a uranium mine and a nuclear reactor used to desalinate seawater. Since independence the giant Tengiz, Karachaganak and Kashagan fields have made the west the source of most of the country's wealth, and in December 2011 police shot striking oil workers in Zhanaozen, killing at least 14 people.

The west is strongly Kazakh, especially in Mangystau and Atyrau, where Kazakh is the language of everyday life and clan identity remains important; the Adai are known across the country for their pride and independent spirit. Oral and Aktobe are more mixed and Russian-speaking, with Orthodox churches and old Cossack streets alongside mosques.

Mangystau is known as a land of saints. Local tradition speaks of 362 holy men buried on the peninsula, and pilgrims travel between the underground mosques and necropolises of Beket-Ata, Shakpak-Ata and Shopan-Ata, spending nights at pilgrim hostels and sharing meals. The region's cemeteries are remarkable in themselves, with carved stone tombs, stelae and ram-shaped gravestones spread across the desert.

The west also has its own music: the dombra school of western Kazakhstan, and the tradition of the zhyrau, the epic singers of the Junior Horde, whose long heroic songs are still performed. Hospitality to travellers crossing the desert is taken seriously, and a guest who arrives at a herding camp is expected to stay for tea at least.

Aktobe, with more than half a million people, is the largest city in the west, a regional centre of chrome and oil industries. Atyrau and Oral each have several hundred thousand people, and Aktau around 200,000. Aktau's addresses still use the Soviet system of numbered microdistricts rather than street names.

Oil and gas dominate the economy. Atyrau is the base for the Tengiz and Kashagan fields, full of foreign engineers and rotation workers, and Aksai near Oral serves the Karachaganak gas field. Wages in the industry are high, but many residents of towns such as Zhanaozen and Beyneu feel they see little of the wealth, and housing, water and jobs are recurring grievances. Herding sheep, goats and camels continues across the deserts.

Daily routines bend to the climate: early starts in the summer heat, evenings on Aktau's seafront and Atyrau's riverside embankment, and weekends at the Caspian beaches or the dacha. Shift work on the oilfields, with weeks away from home, sets the rhythm for many families.

The west cooks from its sea and rivers as well as its herds. The Ural and the Caspian are sturgeon waters, and smoked and cured fish, known by the Russian word balyk, is a regional speciality, along with fried and baked Caspian fish and fish soup. Sturgeon and caviar were once staples of Atyrau's markets, but overfishing and poaching have made them scarce and strictly regulated.

On land the food is that of herders: mutton, camel and horse meat, beshbarmak for guests, and kuyrdak, fried liver, heart and other offal with onions. Camel herding in Mangystau makes shubat, fermented camel's milk, an everyday drink, and dried curd kurt and fried baursak accompany every meal. Zhent, a sweet made from crushed millet, butter, sugar and dried curd, is served at celebrations.

Tea with milk is poured constantly, and in the oil towns Russian and Western restaurants cater for workers and expatriates alongside the canteens serving plov, lagman and soups.

Mangystau's desert landscapes are the main draw. Bozzhira, on the edge of the Ustyurt Plateau, is a broad valley below white chalk cliffs, with ridges and twin pinnacles often compared to fangs. Closer to Aktau lie Sherkala, a lone mesa shaped like a yurt, the stone balls of the Torysh valley and the Karagiye Depression, more than 130 metres below sea level. The underground mosques are the region's spiritual sites: Beket-Ata, deep in the desert, Shakpak-Ata and Shopan-Ata, each cut into rock and surrounded by old cemeteries.

Aktau and the Caspian shore offer a seafront promenade, cliffs and summer beaches, and Fort-Shevchenko to the north has a small museum to the exiled poet. Atyrau straddles the Ural river, with bridges linking the banks and an embankment for evening walks; the site of Saraishyk lies upstream. Aktobe, far to the north-east, is an industrial city with a large modern mosque and parks, while Oral keeps Cossack-era houses, an Orthodox cathedral and a museum in the house associated with Pugachev.