Mighty Almaty: Why you’ll need week to explore the brutalism and natural beauty of Kazakhstan’s largest city

There’s not much the people of Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, thank the Soviets for. They do, however, make an exception for the leftover Soviet-era architecture.

Blocky and brutalist, concrete and cool, it’s the first thing you notice when arriving in what was once the capital of this former Soviet republic. Almaty, as a local restaurateur explains, is known as “the museum of Soviet modernist architecture”.

There’s the space-age Hotel Almaty, with its neon blue Jetsons-style signage. The Palace of the Republic concert hall with its retro floating roof. And best of all, the dramatic Arasan Baths, all ornate concrete domes, over-the-top marble halls and sweeping staircases, a maze of steaming saunas and stout women with the forearms of Olympic shotputters who flagellate naked bathers with oak branches.

You’ll get a good look at all this and more on a tour with Walking Almaty, a great way to get your head around a city that likely isn’t high on the travel agenda for many Australians. But it should be.

Tour guide Dennis Keen — Californian by birth, passionate Almatian by choice — unlocks the city’s secret with finesse, revealing juicy, under-the-table tidbits. The reason the Arasan Baths are so huge and luxurious? Because the Kazakh communist leader was great mates with Leonid Brezhnev, who Keen says helped swing the cash to get it built (those communists — so egalitarian).

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The backstory to the different foods you’ll see in the colourful stalls of the Green Bazaar markets? Well, the kimchi and banchan are relics of the forced relocation of thousands of ethnic Koreans during Soviet times.

Piles of dried fruit and nuts come from the lush oasis of Samarkand, and the dozens of varieties of melons from Tashkent in neighbouring Uzbekistan.

Without Keen’s insight you wouldn’t know that the juniper branches are sold for shamanic rituals, or that the women hawking horsemeat each have their names on their stalls so customers can always do business with their favourite trader, even if she moves her wares somewhere else in the building.

All this is fascinating but don’t think that getting around Almaty requires a guide at all times. Far from it. If the only time Kazakhstan has ever crossed your radar is via Borat and his unseemly neon green mankini, delete that from your mind immediately.

Almaty is a city full of arts, culture, music and food, and it’s all perfectly accessible, friendly and safe, and there’s a direct flight from Dubai. The streets are broad and walkable (another Soviet throwback — nothing like a big, wide avenue for a bombastic military parade), and the sound you’ll hear more than any other around town is chirping birdsong.

It’s not a city for large luxury hotels at this stage — there’s a solid Ritz-Carlton, and an IHG Vignette Collection property is due in 2027. The current pick is the steppe-chic Yurta boutique hotel, swathed in leathers and woodwork that celebrate the wild extremes of the Turkic world.

Language is certainly tricky — you won’t find many English speakers or signage — but you’ll get by. Besides, there are plenty of unchallenging tourist Disneylands elsewhere in the world if you simply desire nice beaches and multiple McDonald’s.

A first stop should be the Almaty Museum of Arts, an angular limestone and aluminium structure that houses more than 700 modern works, which opened in September last year. Almagul Menlibayeva’s multidisciplinary I Understand Everything exhibit grapples with Kazakhstan’s post-Soviet identity: shaped by its nomadic roots, Soviet colonisation and the myths and legends of the Silk Road.

The Russian Orthodox Ascension Cathedral is another beauty. Made entirely of wood and built without the use of a single nail, it’s painted in lollipop confectionery colours — pinks, yellows and greens — and anyone is welcome to go inside and see the elaborate gold-framed paintings of saints and martyrs. Women are asked to cover their hair with a headscarf, plenty of which are thoughtfully provided at the entrance.

The local cuisine may be where some travellers stumble, as it centres almost entirely around horsemeat. Kazakhs were, after all, a nomadic people until barely 100 years ago, and when you spend your life galloping around the steppe on horseback, it makes sense to turn your transportation into dinner when the time’s right.

Beshbarmak is the national dish, and at traditional restaurant Sandyq it arrives in the classic way: boiled horse in a rich broth with white onion rings and flat noodles.

“In Kazakhstan we say the more tender the meat, the more respect for our guests,” a waiter explains, and here the stewed shank melts into the soup. Another, more refined version can be found at Auyl, a chic restaurant and eco hotel about 30 minutes out of town in the foothills of the mountains, whose canvas and copper-clad interiors look like a hip neo-nomadic yurt.

The city holds plenty of other culinary options. Fika is great for Swedish pastries, while Cafe Alma serves a modern take on Kazakh and Russian childhood favourites like dumplings with sour cream and pine-flavoured candies (take a local with you and watch them swoon for the nostalgia).

Pan-Asian Luckee Yu is the place for Chinese-style noodles and dumplings, and it’s worth propping up the counter at KazMyaso, run by bad-ass butcher Svetlana Khaninaeva, for a dry aged beef burger.

Kazakhstan is a gigantic country, the ninth largest in the world, but its population is only 21 million. That means for every inch of Soviet urbanisation, there are miles and miles of ancient, unspoiled nature.

Four hours east of the city, Charyn Canyon — the Grand Canyon of Central Asia — invites hikers to wander into its 12-million-year-old red sandstone belly.

At its base a bright blue river, the colour of the Kazakh flag, slices through the sedimentary stone, flanked by fluttering ash trees, relics of the ice age. Falcons swoop overhead. A group of musicians strum stringed dombra, considered one of the oldest instruments in the world.

The Soviets did their best to drag Almaty into their vision of rigid permanence, but the story of this land will forever be one of change, movement and progress. Its architecture may be brutal. Its soul is anything but.

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