Karaganda

From Free net encyclopedia

Image:AbdirovStatue.jpg Karaganda (Russian: Караганда) or Qaraghandy (Kazak: Қарағанды) is the capital of Qaraghandy Province in Kazakhstan. It is located at Template:Coor dm. It is the third most populous city in Kazakhstan, behind Almaty and Astana, with a population of 437,000 (1999 census). However the population fell by 14% 1989-1999. In the 1940's up to 70% of the city's inhabitants were ethnic Germans. 100,000 have since emigrated to Germany.

The name "Qaraghandy" translates as "black stone" (i.e., coal). Karaganda is an industrial city, built to exploit nearby coal mines using the slave work of prisoners of labor camps. In the early 1990s, it was briefly considered as a candidate for the capital of the (then) recently independent Republic of Kazakhstan, but its bid was turned down in favor of Astana. In support of this bid, a large international airport was built, which today goes mostly unused.

It is the birthplace of the late Chechen president Akhmad Kadyrov. It is also the home city of Kazakh World War II hero Nurken Abdirov. A statue in Abdirov's honor is located in the center of the city.

The original site of Karaganda is now labeled on city maps as the "Old Town," but almost nothing remains on that site. In exploiting the rich coal deposits next door, the Soviets undermined the entire city, and the town had to be abandoned completely and moved several miles to the south. Only three or four buildings remain in the ghostly Old Town, of which one is the old (and once ornate) theatre, and another an old fire station mentioned in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago.

Trivia

Image:Landsat qaraghandy .jpg Karaganda is often used as the punchline in a popular joke in the former USSR. The city is fairly isolated in a vast area of uninhabited steppe, and is thought by many to be "the middle of nowhere". When used in the locative case, the final syllable rhymes with the Russian word for "where", as well as with a Russian obscenity used to answer to an unwanted question "Where?". Thus the exchange: "Where is it?" "In Karaganda!" — has a rhyming and silly sound, and its nuance could be approximated in American English as: "Where are you going?" "To Kalamazoo!" or "Timbuktu!"

A local legend tells of founding of the city: Many years ago, a group of nomadic Kazakhs were breaking down their campsite, and throwing rocks on the fire to extinguish it. A boy threw a rock onto the fire, and it burst into flame. Thus were the coal deposits found, and the city was built nearby.

Template:Kazakhstan-geo-stubde:Qaraghandy eo:Karagando fr:Qaraghandy kk:Қарағанды nl:Qarağandı pl:Karaganda ru:Караганда sv:Qaraghandy