Abai State Historical, Cultural and Literary Memorial Museum-Reserve
Kazakhstan's first literary memorial museum, devoted to the poet Abai Qunanbaiuly and his circle.
The museum was created by government resolution on 1 April 1940, ahead of the ninety-fifth anniversary of Abai Qunanbaiuly's birth, and opened to the public in Semey on 16 October that year. It was the first literary and memorial museum established in Kazakhstan. After several moves it settled in 1967 into the former house of the merchant Roman Ershov, a nineteenth-century town mansion in the centre of Semey. The city complex now takes in the main museum building, the mosque and madrasa of Akhmet Riza where Abai studied, and an administrative block.
Displays follow Abai's life, his education in Semey, his poetry and philosophical prose, and his work translating Russian and European literature into Kazakh. Manuscripts, early printed editions, photographs, furniture and personal belongings are shown alongside material on his pupils and successors, among them Shakarim Qudaiberdiuly and Mukhtar Auezov. The reserve also administers outlying sites, including the Abai house-museum at Zhidebai, the Auezov house at Borili, Shakarim's hunting lodge and the Abai-Shakarim mausoleum complex.
Highlights
- Housed in the nineteenth-century Ershov merchant house in central Semey
- Manuscripts, early editions and personal belongings of Abai
- Akhmet Riza mosque and madrasa, where Abai studied, within the complex
- Outlying branches at Zhidebai, Borili and the Abai-Shakarim mausoleum
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