Current Time in Semey, Kazakhstan

Semey lies in the northeast of Kazakhstan on both banks of the Irtysh River, close to the border with Russia and on the edge of the steppe where it begins to rise towards the Altai mountains. The city is the second largest in the Abai Region, of which it is the administrative centre. Its continental climate is severe, with long freezing winters, hot dry summers and wide swings of temperature within a single year.

Approximately three hundred and fifty thousand people live in Semey. The economy rests on food processing, especially meat and dairy, on textiles, building materials and machinery, and on its position as a road and rail crossing point on routes between Russia, China and central Kazakhstan.

The city was founded in 1718 as a Russian fortress named Semipalatinsk, a reference to seven ruined halls of a Buddhist monastery found nearby. It grew as a customs post and trading town on the caravan route to Chinese Turkestan, with a mixed population of Kazakhs, Russians and Tatars. Fyodor Dostoevsky spent five years here in the 1850s as an exiled soldier after his imprisonment in Siberia, and the wooden house where he lived is now a museum devoted to his life and to his friendship with the Kazakh ethnographer Shoqan Walikhanov.

Semey occupies a central place in Kazakh intellectual history. The great poet, composer and philosopher Abai Kunanbaiuly lived and worked in this region, and his memorial complex at Zhidebay, together with the literary museum in the city, attracts visitors from across the country. The writers and reformers of the early twentieth century Alash movement were also closely associated with the town.

The most sombre chapter of its past is the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site, established on the steppe west of the city in 1947, where hundreds of Soviet nuclear tests were conducted until 1989. The Nevada Semipalatinsk anti nuclear movement, founded here in 1989 by the poet Olzhas Suleimenov, campaigned successfully for closure, and the site was shut in 1991 shortly before independence. The Stronger Than Death monument commemorates the victims, and the city has become a centre for medical research into the long term effects of radiation.

Landmarks include the elegant suspension bridge over the Irtysh, opened in 2001 and one of the longest of its type in central Asia, the restored Tatar mosques of the old quarter, the Orthodox Resurrection Cathedral and a fine regional history and art museum. Riverside parks and pine forests along the Irtysh offer summer recreation, and the road east leads towards the lakes and mountains of the Altai.

Higher education is well represented by the Semey Medical University, Shakarim University and several technical and pedagogical institutes, giving the city a substantial student population.

Semey is important for its literary heritage, its role in the anti nuclear movement and its position as a historic meeting point of Kazakh, Russian and Central Asian cultures.