KZBlog

my wife and i collectively lived in taraz from december 2009 through november 2010. the place definitely had a bad reputation in kazakhstan as a whole. whenever we spoke with kazakhs from other parts of the country they clearly thought that taraz was a dangerous place to be and would warn us to be careful or suggest we move somewhere else.

and yet, i felt completely safe there. i did know one foreigner who was the victim of an attempted mugging (someone saw her with an iphone (smart phones are extremely rare in a down-and-out place live taraz), pushed her down and tried to grab the phone. she held on to the phone and the perp ran away). but that was it among the people we knew.

the locals in taraz were a little defensive about their town’s reputation. one told me that shymkent, not taraz, was the “crime capital of kazakhstan”. another claimed that taraz’s reputation was the product of anti-kazakh racism from the mostly russian or russified kazakh north. it is true that southern kazakhstan was more “kazakh” in the sense of the ethnic makeup of the place and the prevalence of the kazakh language instead of russian on the street. one of the ex-pats i knew who had lived in taraz for 8 years told me that the city’s bad reputation came from a few grizzly murders from a few years ago. the murders were related to organized crime (i.e. it wasn’t random violence, like the kind that we might have been the victim of) but it made national news because the facts of the killing were so gruesome. (i never really got the details tho)

meanwhile, almost all the locals in taraz agreed that the dangerous areas were all in the microregions (the high-rise developments along the periphery of the city, which seemed to be like housing projects), not the city center where we were living.

our translator, who lived her entire life in taraz, was pretty blasé about the alleged dangers. on a regular basis, she told us to be careful , but didn’t seem to think there was a problem for her (a 19 year old woman) to walk around alone at night in badly lit areas. the one time she referred to violent crime was when we were walking in the city center and there was a big red stain on the sidewalk. “is that blood?” i asked. “i told you it is dangerous in taraz” she said with a big smile. i wasn’t sure if she was serious or if she was making fun of me for assuming it was blood.