Semey | Central Asian City, Historic Trade Hub | Britannica (original) (raw)

Semey, city, eastern Kazakhstan. It is a port on the Irtysh (Ertis) River where the latter emerges into the West Siberian Plain.

It was founded as a Russian fort in 1718, 11 miles (18 km) downstream from the present site, near the ruins of a Buddhist monastery consisting of seven buildings, from which it got the name Semipalatinsk, meaning “seven-halled.” It was moved to its present site in 1778 to escape regular flooding in the spring. Semipalatinsk lay at the junction of caravan trails from Mongolia to Russia and from Siberia to Central Asia, and before the 1917 Revolution more than 11,000 camels passed through annually. The writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky spent the years 1854–59 in Semipalatinsk in exile as a soldier in a line battalion. The city’s growth was furthered by the arrival of the railway from Siberia in 1906 and the completion of the Turk-Sib line to Central Asia in 1931. Its name was changed to Semey after Kazakhstan’s independence in 1991.

The chief economic activities are food processing and other light industries. The city has one of the largest meatpacking plants in Kazakhstan, as well as textile, clothing, and footwear factories and a large cement works. Higher education facilities include a teacher-training institute and a medical school. Cultural institutions include a theatre and several museums. The gates of the 18th-century fort survive. Pop. (2006 est.) 281,814.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Noah Tesch.