Rich and Poor Kazakhs
Photographs from the Akmola and Semipalatinsk regions
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. And nowhere is this adage more true than for the past, a time so removed from our own, for which a single image can have a huge impact. In this section, the editors at Qalam seek to do more than merely showcase documentary photographs from various eras—we want to tell the real stories behind these images and bring history to life. Each photograph here captures a moment that has shaped our world, and the accompanying narrative highlights its significance and context, giving us a nuanced insight into the events they depict. After all, understanding these stories can only help us appreciate the complexities of history better.
This time, we have chosen photographs taken by the renowned Franco-Hungarian explorer of Central Asia, Ujfalvy de Mező-Kövesd, in the Akmola and Semipalatinsk regions in 1877.
The renowned Kazakh ethnographer and political figure Alikhan Bukeikhanov extensively studied the lives of Kazakhs from various social strata during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, providing rich and detailed accounts of regional cultural and economic specificities. His work not only revealed aspects of property ownership, inheritance rules, and labor hiring but also explored various credit conditions for both wealthy and poor Kazakhs. He also meticulously described the practices of livestock slaughtering among rich, middle-class, and poor Kazakhs.
The differences in the welfare of Kazakhs of that time were also captured in the photographs of the renowned Franco-Hungarian ethnographer Charles-Eugène Ujfalvy de Mező-Kövesd (1842–1904), who participated in an expedition commissioned by the French government to Siberia and Central Asia from 1876 to 1878. Two of these photographs later served as the basis for illustrations used in the book by his wife, the researcher and traveler Marie Ujfalvy-Bourdon (1842–1904), titled De Paris à Samarkand, le Ferghanah, le Kouldja et la Sibérie Occidentale: Impressions de Voyage d'une Parisienne (1880).
