Pervomaiskiy
Almaty's Northern Frontier
It seems suitable that, after nine months of living in the middle of town, treading those central streets to death, I would eventually be pushed out into Almaty's lesser-known trim. To save money on summer rent before summer travels, I've been staying with a friend in Kökzhiek, a kind of pioneer settlement of families living in subsidized apartment blocks. Our courtyard is quite literally the last one in the city. You walk out past our ring of buildings and you're standing in a straw-yellow field.
It may be marginal, but Kökzhiek feels somehow more alive than downtown. There you've got wine bars and coffee shops and designer boutiques, but the courtyards are strangely dead, devoid of children, the apartments all clung on to by an elderly generation. In this housing project, meanwhile, there's a new school and the mini-soccer fields are teeming with kids. They play until one in the morning, the teenagers sit on low fences and chew sunflower seeds and chat in Kazakh with their friends, and you can imagine what the projects in western Almaty might've felt like in the 60s, when the trees there were also skinny saplings and it felt like the future.
While it's human element is electric, Kökzhiek's architecture has nothing to say to me, so my friend and I set off to explore, looking for the old sovkhoz (совхоз; "collective farm") across that yellow field and over the river Esentai. The community is called Pervomaiskiy [Первомайский], which means The First of May. If you think it's odd to name a whole village after a socialist holiday, consider that there's a street in Almaty that the Soviets actually dared to call "Fifty Years Since the October Revolution." Anyway, The First of May is famous for its First of May Lakes, two hands' worth of finger-shaped ponds pointing out towards the steppe from the city.
It may be marginal, but Kökzhiek feels somehow more alive than downtown. There you've got wine bars and coffee shops and designer boutiques, but the courtyards are strangely dead, devoid of children, the apartments all clung on to by an elderly generation. In this housing project, meanwhile, there's a new school and the mini-soccer fields are teeming with kids. They play until one in the morning, the teenagers sit on low fences and chew sunflower seeds and chat in Kazakh with their friends, and you can imagine what the projects in western Almaty might've felt like in the 60s, when the trees there were also skinny saplings and it felt like the future.
While it's human element is electric, Kökzhiek's architecture has nothing to say to me, so my friend and I set off to explore, looking for the old sovkhoz (совхоз; "collective farm") across that yellow field and over the river Esentai. The community is called Pervomaiskiy [Первомайский], which means The First of May. If you think it's odd to name a whole village after a socialist holiday, consider that there's a street in Almaty that the Soviets actually dared to call "Fifty Years Since the October Revolution." Anyway, The First of May is famous for its First of May Lakes, two hands' worth of finger-shaped ponds pointing out towards the steppe from the city.
There was an obstacle. Standing between me and Pervoe Maiskoe was a drunk guy in that straw-yellow field, poking my chest and telling me that it was rude to photograph people without asking. Never mind that I was shooting a rose and he and his beet-red girlfriend happened to walk into the frame. "Can't you give me anything?" he begged me when he got bored with castigation. "I just buried my brother and I've been drinking and I'm broke and…", and he rambled on while I thought about how to extricate myself from the situation, trying not to stare at the mess of razor-blade scars on his arms. My friend told them that we were just tourists and had no money. They found it understandably amusing that tourists would be in Kökzhiek, amused enough to let us wander off toward the river and over to the cottage-lined town.
The town itself wasn't much friendlier. We walked a string of admittedly endearing homes, squat and wood-planked, but the road became a dead-end guarded by a guy taking out his trash who was unhappy to see a big camera snapping shots of his neighbor's eaves. We used the line about tourists on him too, which only pissed him off, and he demanded to see our passports, which only made us laugh. He gave us the same incredulous dismissal, rooted in distrust, that I've heard a million times on my walks: "What's so interesting about a bunch of old houses?" We must have been up to something more sinister.
Our evil plot carried us onward, past a one-road "downtown" made of samsa stalls and convenience stores, past the walled cemetery where the drunk guy had buried his brother; past a woman collecting leaves and burning them in a bonfire on the roadside, past a church with its steeple burning in the treetops and a factory with fans that blew out air stinking of fish. There next to the smelly building was one of the First of May Lakes, not freshly rural as we had hoped but full of trash and neglect, disrespected like the periphery always is. The sunlight was burning out so after a not-so-long walk we declared this our final destination, and as we traced power lines back to our brave outpost we decided we were lucky to be here while it was still on the edge, when it felt wild and sad and entirely ours.
The town itself wasn't much friendlier. We walked a string of admittedly endearing homes, squat and wood-planked, but the road became a dead-end guarded by a guy taking out his trash who was unhappy to see a big camera snapping shots of his neighbor's eaves. We used the line about tourists on him too, which only pissed him off, and he demanded to see our passports, which only made us laugh. He gave us the same incredulous dismissal, rooted in distrust, that I've heard a million times on my walks: "What's so interesting about a bunch of old houses?" We must have been up to something more sinister.
Our evil plot carried us onward, past a one-road "downtown" made of samsa stalls and convenience stores, past the walled cemetery where the drunk guy had buried his brother; past a woman collecting leaves and burning them in a bonfire on the roadside, past a church with its steeple burning in the treetops and a factory with fans that blew out air stinking of fish. There next to the smelly building was one of the First of May Lakes, not freshly rural as we had hoped but full of trash and neglect, disrespected like the periphery always is. The sunlight was burning out so after a not-so-long walk we declared this our final destination, and as we traced power lines back to our brave outpost we decided we were lucky to be here while it was still on the edge, when it felt wild and sad and entirely ours.
