ALMATY – For generations of Almaty residents, fountains have marked the rhythm of summer. They are meeting places, playgrounds, works of art and fragments of history hidden among the city’s trees. Dandelion Fountain, completed in 1978 outside today’s Kazakh National Academy of Arts.
Photo credit: The Central State Archive of Film and Sound Recordings. Click to see the map in full size. The map is designed by The Astana Times. Today, Almaty operates more than 120 fountains and fountain complexes, making it the undisputed fountain capital of Kazakhstan.
Sixty-three belong to the municipality, while the remainder are privately owned. Unlike many cities where fountains exist primarily for decoration, in Almaty they were conceived as part of the city’s environmental infrastructure. Nestled against the northern slopes of the Zailiysky Alatau mountains, the city experiences long, hot and relatively dry summers.
The fountains, together with the famous network of mountain-fed irrigation canals known as “aryks,” were designed to cool streets, humidify the air and make public spaces more comfortable long before air conditioning became commonplace. For decades, guidebooks confidently stated that the city’s first fountain appeared in 1948, when ornamental fountains were constructed near the Abai Opera and Ballet Theatre.
Local historian Alois Nazarov, however, challenged this widely repeated claim. A cascade of pools in the square near the Abai State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre. 1964. Photo credit: The Central State Archive of Film and Sound Recordings. According to Nazarov, the 1948 date referred only to the first fountains constructed from durable materials – not the first fountains themselves.
The earliest documented fountain connected with the region dates back even further. According to the archival documents, in 1878, physician, botanist and explorer Albert Regel visited the summer residence of Semirechye Military Governor Gerasim Kolpakovsky near the mouth of the Butakovka River.
His travel notes describe a landscaped estate complete with a pond and two fountains. Although these stood outside the city of Verny (now Almaty) and cannot truly be considered urban fountains, they remain the earliest recorded examples in the area. Fountain on Lenin Square, now Republic Square.
1961. Photo credit: The Central State Archive of Film and Sound Recordings. One curious reminder survives in the city’s old street names. Present-day Tulebayev Street was briefly known as Fontannaya (Fountain Street) in the early twentieth century. The name had nothing to do with decorative fountains; instead, it referred to one of the city’s first wooden water pipelines, completed in 1901.
Along the pipeline stood public water basins and columns where water gushed with enough force that residents likened them to fountains. True ornamental fountains would arrive only after the city assumed a new role. Everything changed when the capital of the Kazakh Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic (ASSR) moved from Kyzylorda to Alma-Ata in 1929.
The city suddenly found itself at the center of an ambitious urban transformation. Government buildings, theaters, schools and apartment blocks rose rapidly across the expanding capital. Architecture embraced the functional aesthetics of Soviet constructivism, but planners also wanted the new socialist city to appear welcoming and modern.