Despite it often being joked about as being mostly populated by Uzbeks, Shymkent stood out in my travels around Kazakhstan as the city with most Kazakh speakers. This is not to say that there are not any Uzbeks in town, in fact, there are quite a lot of them. But what really grabbed my attention was how even some Russians (and certainly many Uzbeks) in Shymkent seemed to speak Kazakh quite fluently, and how I struggled to even order some pizza with my rudimentary Russian, and not because of my own ‘shortcomings’ this time! Join me as a I go over some of the highlights of Shymkent, and why a visit there is well worth it if you have an extra day or two.
As I arrived in Shymkent at night, the first true glimpse of the city that I saw happened when I woke up and left my rental for the first time. On the corridor, this broken glass pane allowed me to see what was going on outside. Shymkent is a sizeable city of well over a million people that nevertheless feels like a big village than anything else. There are not that many tall buildings here, and the ones that do exist are in disrepair like this one. As I stayed next to Abay Park, I can say that this was one of the most central locations in town too.
The current center of the city seems to be its Arbat Street, where you can find a lot of lively cafes and restaurants, an amusement park, and many wonderful art installations like this one. It is well worth a walk during the day and at night, as the overall atmosphere changes significantly between the two.
The more you move away from the current city center, the more graffiti like this you will come across. It seems that other than sponsored projects, a lot of freelancing artists took the challenge to beautify this otherwise a bit banal town. I can say that they are doing a great job!
What truly surprised me about Shymkent was just how it was not only some street artists that dedicated their work to the memory of the Great Patriotic War. Apparently, the city itself built a huge monument to commemorate the victory over the Third Reich during the Second World War as it is known to the rest of the world, in 2010 no less! That is 19 years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and though it is not unheard of, it certainly is rare to see an ex-USSR country (that is not the Russian Federation itself) take on a project to immortalize the Soviet feats of the past.
It is no simple memorial as well. The whole installment takes almost half the space of Abay Park, which in itself is a rather sizeable area. Names of locals that fell during the Great Patriotic War are written in golden letters on the two sides of a path that leads to an old MiG fighter jet. There is also a stele that does not look like much and do not fit well into any photo I took, hence its absence here.
At times it feels like Abay Park is less of a park and more of a collection of monuments. Other than the massive war memorial, there is this much smaller yet interesting one dedicated to the work done by border guards.
A few meters beyond the aforementioned monument one can find yet another one, this being dedicated to the war in Afghanistan. It goes without saying that a part of the local population lost their lives during this conflict as well.
Perhaps the monument that surprised me the most was this one of Lenin. I assumed it would be gone already, given how its counterparts are not fairing very well in other parts of the region, but to my amusement it was in fact still around. One more for the collection it is! You need to go out of your way to the Metallurgists’ Park near the outskirts of the city but hey, beggars cannot be choosers. At least it exists…
Just next to Lenin one can find this lovely painting on the façade of a nearby house. I am not going to go ahead and say that street art in Shymkent is above and beyond others, but for its unassuming looks and non-touristic status, it certainly proved much better than I anticipated.
Keeping it in line with parks and monuments, one should also visit the Independence Park if they are already in Shymkent. It is not a big place by any means, but it has some steles dedicated to the independent years of the relatively recently founded Kazakhstan.
The centrepiece of that park is this golden monument, which seems to be a lantern of sorts, or perhaps a torch. It signifies the independence of the country, which is only logical given the park it is located in…
A look to the city from above proves what I said about it at the beginning of this article. It is far from being a very urbanized town. Though there are some apartments in this photo, do keep in mind that this is pretty much the dead center of the city, looking at its most urbanized parts specifically. There are still a lot of one-story buildings and even village houses in all this mess, for those with a keen eye!
For my luck, one of the days I walked around Shymkent there was a lot of mist, which is why I had to see most of those sights twice. This should explain the duality in the quality of some of the photos of similar places found in this work of mine. It is also fair to say that once there is this much mist in town, it may be best to just stay at home as you do not see all that much in this kind of weather…
To be fair, the old citadel that is now being renovated does not offer all that much to see anyways, so perhaps it did not matter I came here only on the misty day. It was free to get in at the time, which was likely due to its half-constructed nature, but even then, there was not much to write about this place.
If you are into museums, I would instead suggest you pay a visit to Retro Garage, which has a lot of retro cars in its collections as its name suggests. All of them are in superb condition as well!
Now, when I say “a lot” do take that with a pinch of salt. As a small two-story museum, I think the collection included around 30 cars tops, but that is more than enough to spend some time there. All the cars are complemented with some cut-outs of historical figures or movie characters which makes the whole exhibition more interesting.
With all of that being said, do not let any of this Soviet and vintage talk confuse you. Though it is surprising to see Lenin and a new memorial to the Great Patriotic War in Shymkent, it is still the most Kazakh town I have seen in Kazakhstan. People here are avowedly Kazakh, they speak Kazakh, statues of Alash intellectuals are seen here and there, their names live on in streets and boulevards dedicated to them, and 1991 sure is a better year to remember than, say, 1917. It is reassuring to see that the recent past of the country has not been neglected like it is in many other countries of the ex-USSR space, but it does not mean that such works are done/preserved in an effort to hold on to some sort of nostalgia.
Shymkent is changing, and you can see that everywhere. Despite its connections to the past, its many Soviet apartment blocks now offer upper scale lounge bars and Asian restaurants beneath them. Its people are friendly and seem hopeful, though my language barrier did mean that I could hardly do much talking with any of them. It is an extremely young city as well, where kids and teens reign supreme at almost every street corner. This is much welcome to someone who spends 90% of his time surrounded by the staff and students found in a university…
Ultimately, I would say that Shymkent is well worth a visit. In order to understand Kazakhstan better, to really see how Kazakhs live and work in their day to day lives in a more vividly Kazakh space, it is a must see even. This is not to say that you should add it on your long Central Asian itineraries for sure, but given its location and ease of access to Uzbekistan, it can prove to be a fun little stopover on your route to other better known destinations like Almaty or Tashkent.