Museum sights in Almaty
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A
Central State Museum
The city's best museum stands 300m up Furmanov from Respublika alanghy. The Central State Museum takes you through Kazakhstan's history from bronze-age burial mounds to telecommunications and the transfer of the capital to Astana, with many beautiful artefacts. A large replica of the Golden Man stands in the entrance hall.
The downstairs rooms cover archaeological finds and early history up to Jenghiz Khan (with models of some of Kazakhstan's major monuments); the ethnographic display upstairs features a finely kitted-out yurt and some beautifully worked weaponry and horse and camel gear, plus musical instruments and exotic costumes going back to the 18th century. The upp…
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B
Kazakhstan Museum of Arts
The Kazakhstan Museum of Arts has the best art collection in the country, including works of artists banned during the Soviet period. There are also collections of Russian and Western European art. Particularly interesting are the room of modern Kazakh handicrafts and the large collection of paintings by Abylkhan Kasteev (1904-73), to whom the museum is dedicated.
Kasteev's clear portraits, landscapes and scenes of Soviet progress (railways, hydroelectricity, collective farming) obviously toed the party line but his technique is fabulous. Marshrutkas heading west on Satpaev, including No 520, will stop here.
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C
Museum of Kazakh Musical Instruments
In a striking 1908 wooden building (also the work of cathedral architect Zenkov) at the east end of Panfilov Park is the Museum of Kazakh Musical Instruments, the city's most original museum. It has a fine collection of traditional Kazakh instruments - wooden harps and horns, bagpipes, the lutelike two-stringed dombra and the violalike qobyz. If you're there at the same time as a tour group you'll hear tapes of the instruments and see the attendant strum the dombra.
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D
Geology Museum
The intriguing Geology Museum is in the bowels of a building opposite the Hotel Kazakhstan. The country's mineral wealth is on display, with relief maps and touch-screen computers to provide quick geology lessons in English.
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E
Almaty City History Museum & Museum of Repression
The combined Almaty City History Museum & Museum of Repression was closed for renovations at the time of writing but is well worth checking on. The Repression Museum goes into haunting detail about the fate of thousands who earned Stalin's ire.
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