Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ALMATY
АЛМАТЬІ
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727 / POP 1.4 MILLION / ELEV 850M
This leafy city with a backdrop of the snow-
capped Zailiysky Alatau has always been
among the more appealing Russian crea-
tions in Central Asia. Today Almaty's new
rich have expensive suburban apartments,
large SUVs, glitzy shopping malls, Western-
style coffee lounges, expensive restaurants,
dance-till-dawn nightclubs and new ski
resorts to help them enjoy life to the full.
Meanwhile the less lucky from the city's
outer districts and the countryside squeeze
into packed buses and rickety marshrutkas
around the Green Market (Zelyony Bazar) or
Sayakhat bus station.
This is Kazakhstan's main transport hub
and a place many travellers pass through.
Stay a few days and you'll find that Almaty
is quite a sophisticated place - one for en-
joying green parks and excellent museums,
shops and markets, and for eating, drinking
and partying in Central Asia's best selection
of restaurants, cafes, bars and clubs. And
great mountain hiking and skiing are right
on the doorstep.
The downtown area stretches roughly
from the Green Market in the north to Re-
spublika alany in the south. South of here is
the new business district along streets like
Al-Farabi. Some people find a lack of distinc-
tive landmarks on Almaty's long, straight
streets confusing. Keep in mind that the
mountains are to the south, and that the city
slopes upward towards them.
History
Almaty was founded in 1854, when the Kaza-
khs were still nomads, as a Russian frontier
fort named Verny, on the site of an old Silk
Road oasis called Almatu, which had been
laid waste long before by the Mongols. Cos-
sacks and Siberian peasants settled around
Verny, but the town was almost flattened by
earthquakes in 1887 and 1911. In 1927, it be-
came the capital of Soviet Kazakhstan, with
the name Alma-Ata (Father of Apples). The
Turksib (Turkestan-Siberia) railway arrived
in 1930 and brought big growth - as did
WWII, when factories were relocated here
from Nazi-threatened western USSR and
many Slavs came to work in them. Numbers
of ethnic Koreans, forcibly resettled from
the Russian Far East, arrived too.
In the 1970s and '80s Kazakhstan's leader
Dinmukhamed Kunaev, the only Central
Asian member of the Soviet Politburo, man-
aged to steer lots of money southeast from
Moscow to transform Alma-Ata into a wor-
thy Soviet republican capital. Hence the
number of imposing late-Soviet buildings
such as the Arasan Baths, the
Hotel¨Kaza-
khstan
(Dostyk 52)
and the
Academy¨of¨Sci-
ences
(Shevchenko)
.
In 1991 Alma-Ata was the venue for the
meeting where the USSR was finally pro-
nounced dead and all five Central Asian
republics joined the Commonwealth of
Independent States. The city's name was
changed to Almaty, close to that of the origi-
nal Silk Road settlement, soon afterwards.
Almaty was replaced by Astana as Ka-
zakhstan's capital in 1998 but remains the
country's business, social and cultural hub.
Office towers, apartment blocks and shop-
ping centres continue to push skyward, es-
pecially in the south of the city.
1
¨Sights
o
Central¨State¨Museum¨
mUSEUm
(
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264 55 77; www.csmrk.kz; mikrorayon Samal-1,
No 44; admission 100T;
h
9.30am-6pm Wed-mon)
Almaty's best museum, 300m up Furmanov
from Respublika alany, takes you through
Kazakhstan's history from Bronze Age buri-
als to telecommunications and the transfer
of the capital to Astana, with many beautiful
artefacts. A large replica of the Golden Man
(p62) stands in the entrance hall.
Downstairs, hall 1 deals with archaeologi-
cal finds and early history up to Chinggis
Khan, with
balbals
(totemlike stones bear-
ing the carved faces of honoured warriors
or chieftains, placed at sacred spots by no-
madic early Turks) and models of some of
Kazakhstan's major monuments. Next to it
is the 'Open Collection', an exhibit of out-
standing ancient gold adornments, mainly
from Scythian burials between the 6th and
3rd centuries BC, which requires a special
1300T ticket (you do get a tour in English,
Russian or Kazakh for your money). The
ethnographic display in hall 2, upstairs,
features a finely kitted-out yurt and some
beautifully worked weaponry and horse
and camel gear, plus musical instruments
and exotic costumes going back to the 18th
century. Halls 3 and 4 on floor 4 deal with
the 20th and 21st centuries, including ex-
hibits on some of Kazakhstan's many ethnic
groups. It's just a pity that the museum's
signage in nonlocal languages is limited to
'Don't touch, please!' Get there by bus 2, 63,
73 or 86 up Furmanov.
