Kazakhstan

No landlocked country is larger than Kazakhstan, and most of it is steppe and semi-desert. In the west it touches the Caspian, crosses the Ural River into Europe and sinks, in the Karagiye Depression, well below sea level. In the east the Altai and the Tian Shan lift glaciers, and in the Tian Shan foothills grow wild apple forests, ancestors of the orchard apple. Lake Balkhash is fresh at its western end and salty in the east. Winters are fierce and summers hot.

Horse-keeping here goes back to the Botai settlements of about 3500 BC, and Saka nomads heaped gold into their burial mounds. Timur raised a tiled mausoleum at Turkistan for the Sufi poet Khoja Ahmed Yasawi. A Kazakh khanate formed in the mid-fifteenth century and passed step by step under Russian rule. The Soviet era brought famine in the early 1930s, nuclear tests near Semey and the launch of Yuri Gagarin from Baikonur in April 1961. Independence followed in December 1991.

The poet Abai Kunanbayev laid the foundations of written Kazakh literature in the nineteenth century. Hunters called berkutchi still train golden eagles to take foxes. Guests are welcomed with beshbarmak, boiled horse meat or mutton on flat noodles, and with kumis, fermented mare’s milk. Wheat from the northern steppe, ploughed up in the 1950s, is shipped across Central Asia, oil from Tengiz and the offshore Kashagan field flows west, and mines yield uranium, copper, zinc and chrome.