Almaty

Almaty is a relatively new city, but it is heir to the many influences which have shaped Central Asia. This land of vast deserts, sweeping steppes, ancient cities and high mountains has been a crossroads of cultures and conquerors for millennia.

The earliest people here were Aryans, members of a "white" race. It is said that the Kazaks, despite their current oriental appearance, were in the beginning fair and long-nosed. Conquest and intermarriage have produced the people we see today. Their history began around 2000 BC, when tent dwelling nomads started moving south and west across Central Asia. They had no written language, but the Assyrians wrote of them in the 9th century, BC. It is thought that they may have been the ancestors of the Medes and Persians, who originated the first monotheistic religion, named after its founder, Zoroaster.

They were succeeded by new groups of Aryans, the Scythians and Sarmatians, who had a similar nomadic life style. Although they, too, were without a written language, they are known to have been extremely clever, taming the horse, inventing the stirrup, and producing crafts of great beauty and utility. Both the Greeks and the Romans have left us written records of their encounters with these skillful mounted warriors.

Next came the Huns, or Hsiung-nu, as the Chinese called them, another race of fierce fighters on horseback. Unlike their predecessors, who spoke an Iranian language, the Huns were the first of the Turkic peoples to sweep across Central Asia. According to the Chinese who described them as, "hairy", they had prominent noses and deep-set eyes. When the Chinese subdued the Hsiung-nu in 52 BC, wealthy Roman matrons began to wear diaphanous silk from China. With Central Asia at peace, several trade routes were developed which ultimate1y came to be known as the Silk Road.

There was never on the Silk Road, but rather a network of routes across mountain, steppe and desert. Starting from the Han capital of Chang-an, near the Yellow River, these routes traversed Asia and the Middle East, ultimately ending in the Levantine ports of Antioch, Acre and modern-day Beirut. From there, the precious cargos of silks, spices and crafts were carried by ship to Rome and Alexandria in the ancient world and ultimately to Venice and Constantinople during the Middle Ages.

As the Silk Road developed, some nomads became town-dwellers. Although the horse was still important to their way of life, they lived most of the year in houses, and they had shops and farms. The Sogdians, for example, ruled a powerful empire from their capital at the site of present-day Samarkand. Defeated by Alexander the Great in 329 BC, they nevertheless maintained a sophisticated civilization until the 7th century. The nomadic Kushans also settled and reigned over a Buddhist empire stretching from Northern India to the shores of the Aral Sea from the first to fourth centuries. Other nomads, including the Huns, were reluctant to give up their vagabond lifestyle, and waves of these peoples periodically rolled across Central Asia, disrupting the Silk Road trade from time to time.

Throughout the era of the Silk Road, powerful cultural influences traveled both east and west. Nestorian Christians and Manichaeans fled east, driven first by Zoroastrian and more orthodox Christian prejudice and then by the jihad (holy war) of Islam. Buddhist pilgrims like the widely-travelled Hsuang-sang came west to study at famous centers of learning.

In 674, the Zoroastrian King of Persia fled to China before the fierce onslaughts of the soldiers of Islam. Both the Tibetans and the Western Turks allied themselves with the Arabs against the Chinese in a power struggle for Central Asia. In 749, a Chinese army was defeated near modern-day Tashkent by a joint Arab-Turk force. The Muslims swept aside their Turkic allies once tile Chinese were defeated. All of Central Asia was forcibly converted to Islam, and Buddhist, Manichaean and Christian shrines were destroyed or desecrated.

The Arab Caliphate soon disintegrated because of sectarian struggles, and Central Asia again fell prey to a series of conquerors, including the Seljuk and Uighur Turks. The most successful of these were the Mongols, led by Genghis Khan and his descendants. Their rapid conquest of the lands stretching from the Yellow River to the Black Sea brought another era of stability along the Silk Road, allowing Marco Polo and other Europeans to live to tell the tale of their adventures.

Unlike the peoples who had previously conquered Central Asia, the Mongols were described by contemporaries as yellowskinned with slanting eyes and high cheek-bones. It is the blending of these two ethnic groups which produced the modern-day Kazaks whom you'll see on the streets of Almaty and other cities of Kazakhstan.

The Mongols conquered the largest empire in history, but their days of glory lasted little more than a century. In 1368, they were driven from China, although their Western arm, ultimately known as the Tatars, continued in power in Russia for another 300 years.

One of Genghis Khan's collateral descendants, Tamerlane, established another empire in Central Asia, with its capital in Samarkand. His cruelty and munificence were both legend. The glories of his city, including his tomb and the ruins of the mosque he built in honor of his favorite wife, are still visible today. Tamerlane also left behind important structures in western Kazakstan.

The next group of conquerors were the Uzbek Turks, who gave their name to our neighboring country, Uzbekistan. They, too, were known for their ferocity in war and their artistic sensibilities in peace. It was an Uzbek who founded the Mogul dynasty in India in 1526.

Now the Russians began to move, first driving out the Tatars, then colonizing Siberia in the 16th and 17th centuries. In the 18th, they successfully took the Caucasus from the Shah of Persia but suffered defeat in their first attempt at establishing power in Central Asia. They were not to be defeated for long.

During the 19th century, the Russians and the British played a "Great Game" of geopolitics and espionage with Central Asia as the prize. In its own way, each empire won and lost. The British kept the Russians out of India and Afghanistan. The Russians took the Central Asian khanates in rapid succession: Tashkent in 1865, Samarkand and Bokhara in 1868, Khiva in 1873 and the Turkoman fortress of Goek-Tepe in 1881. One of the first steps in the Russian expansionism was the quiet annexation of Kazakhstan during the first half of the 19th century, followed by the establishment of a fortress at the site of modern-day Almaty in 1854. The "Great Game" was only ended by the advent of World War I and the rise of the Bolsheviks.

The Russian fortress was built at the site of a former Silk Road town originally called "Almaty" by the Kazaks and destroyed by the Mongols. The Russians named the new town which grew up around the fort "Vierney", and by 1887, when it was destroyed by earthquake, it had a population of 12,000. In the early 20th century, Vierney was hit by two more transforming forces: another earthquake in 1911 and Soviet takeover in 1921.

The 19th century was the period when perhaps the most famous Kazak in history lived, Abay Kunanbayev. His memory is honored today in Almaty with a statue at the intersection of Dostyk and Abay Avenues and by the Abay Kazakh State Theater of Opera and Ballet. A poet, educator and composer, Abay was born into a traditional family in Semipalatinsk. Educated in a Koranic madrassah, he was also versed in Kazakstani folklore and greatly admired Russian culture, especially writers like Pushkin and Tolstoy. Influenced by exiled Russians in the 1870s and 80s, he became an ardent champion of friendship and brotherhood between the two cultures. His poetry and other writings helped pave the way for the social and economic revolution which came to Kazakstan in the next century.

By World War I, the Kazaks had developed their own political leadership. They were initially exempt from serving in the war, but in 1916, they were conscripted, and they rebelled against this infringement of their rights. After the 1917 Revolution in Russia, the Kazak leader Ali Khan Bukeiklianov commanded a Kazak army called the Alash Orda and demanded independence from Russia. During the Russian Civil War which followed the October Revolution, the Alash Orda fought both the Red (Bolshevik) and the White (monarchist) armies but ultimately had to submit when the Reds won.

The Soviets renamed Vierney "Alma-Ata", a Russification of the original Kazak name meaning "Father of Apples." They also made it the capital of Soviet Kazakstan and began to lay out the modern city we see today with its broad, tree-lined streets, monumental buildings and many parks. Before the modern city really developed, the Soviets used Alma-Ata as a place of exile, Leon Trotsky being the most famous of those banished to repent between mountain and steppe.

The Soviet cultural influence was strong in both city and country. Many urban Kazakhs today are very "Russified", and visitors with experience elsewhere in Asia may be surprised to find the Kazakhs not as "Asian" as one might expect. Religious observances were discouraged and even banned, and most churches and mosques were closed. Kazakh singers were retrained so that the "plaintive" Asian sound was replaced by that of Russian opera. The ballet and symphony were nurtured, while traditional music and dance were neglected. Russian dishes came to be served along side, or even instead, of traditional Kazakh foods.

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