Zhambyl Regional Museum of History and Local Lore
Regional museum in Taraz with Silk Road finds, Turkic stone figures and a picture gallery.
The museum was founded in 1931 as a town museum and was raised to regional status at the end of the 1940s. Since 1978 it has occupied a three-storey building on the central square of Taraz, covering roughly 2,000 square metres. Thirteen halls are arranged in chronological order and hold some tens of thousands of items: fossil marine animals from the Karatau ridge, stone tools and bronzes, material from the medieval towns of the Talas valley, and sections on the Kazakh khanate, resettlement, the Soviet decades and the Second World War.
A reconstruction completed in 2002 added three pavilions. One is devoted to ancient Turkic runic inscriptions and to balbals, the carved stone figures set up over graves across the steppe, which stand in rows in the museum grounds. Another holds a picture gallery built around the work of the artist Leonhard Brummer, who lived in Taraz after deportation. The museum takes part in excavations at sites such as Tektursmas and runs talks and round tables on regional history.
Highlights
- Rows of carved Turkic balbal stones in the grounds
- Finds from the medieval Silk Road towns of the Talas valley
- Pavilion of ancient Turkic runic inscriptions
- Picture gallery centred on the artist Leonhard Brummer
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