Kentau City Museum

Historical museum located in Turkistan Region, Southern Kazakhstan, is dedicated to displaying documents and exhibits on the development of Kazakh culture in the region with a focus on the contributions of geologists and miners to the exploration of the mountains in the area.
Kentau City Museum
Image Source: Museum Instagram Page
Type: Historical Museum
Country:
Kazakhstan
Establishment: 1977

The Kentau City Museum (Kazakh: Кентау қалалық музей) is a historical museum located in Turkistan Region, Southern Kazakhstan, is dedicated to displaying documents and exhibits on the development of Kazakh culture in the region with a focus on the contributions of geologists and miners to the exploration of the mountains in the area.

History

The museum was created in the 1970s, following requests from several residents of Kentau as well as miners working in the region, one of the first exhibits the museum displayed was a collection of minarls collected by Kazakh geologist Nurlan Tukenovich Tukenov (Russian: Нурлан Тукенович Тукенов).[1]

The museum was established when Kazakhstan was part of the Soviet Union in a building constructed in the mid-20th century following exploration in nearby mines during that time. The first intentions to create a museum dedicated to the cataloguing of minerals in this region of Kazakhstan came after the establishment of the Achisay Metallurgical Plant (Russian: Ачисайский полиметаллический комбинат ; Kazakh: Ащысай полиметалл комбинаты) in the 1920s.[2]

In the early 1990s, several small museums dedicated to minerals were merged into one in Kentau, in total about 496 different minerals were collected with the help of the Kazakh and Uzbek SSRs state archives as well as several historical archives located in Moscow and Leningrad.[2] Among the works collected by the museum are books by the Russian geologist and historian Semyon Ulyanovich (Russian: Семен Ульянович), as well as reports dating back to 1929 on zinc deposits in Karasay District.[3]

Collections

The museum houses approximately 8,000 exhibits including historical documents about the region that survived the economic decline of mining in Kentau after the collapse of the Soviet Union.[4] The museum also has in its possession works of the Kazakh scientist Sak Maulenkululy Maulenkulov (Kazakh: Сақ Мәуленқұлұлы Мәуленқұлов) who contributed to the development of mining in this region during the Soviet period.[5]

Kentau City Museum - Image A
Geological Exhibition (2024) - Image by Kentau Muzey via Facebook
Kentau City Museum - Image B
Traditional Textiles (2021) - Image by Kentau Muzey via Facebook

References

  1. Хранители истории. (2023-12-06). ЮКинформ. (in Russian)

  2. Orazbekova, A. (2023-12-19) "Об огромном металлургическом комбинате в Кентау напоминает лишь музей" NewTimes.kz (in Russian)

  3. "Здесь "камень в свинец плавят"" [Translation: Here "stone is melted into lead"] (2015-01-05) Kazpravda.kz (in Russian)

  4. Limarenko, M. (2022-08-01) "За будущее городского музея" [Translation: To the future of the city's museum] Yujanka.kz (in Russian)

  5. Историографическое Исследование Становления и Развития Города Кентау [Translation: Historiographical study of the formation and development of the city of Kentau] (2024-06-30) DOI:10.51889/2959-6017.2024.81.2.014 ISSN: 2959-6017 (Page 5) (in Russian)

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