KARAGANDA ECOMUSEUM

Certainly one of the country's most interesting museums, or at least the only one to focus on visitor interactivity. However, this interactivity will be particularly beneficial if you are accompanied by a guide (extra charge of 30 KZT on the ticket price, remember to ask for an English-speaking guide). The museum is brimming with objects and materials salvaged from all over the country and staged in such a way as to evoke the Aral Sea disaster, nuclear testing in the Semipalatinsk quadrilateral, rocket launches in Baikonur and oil drilling around the Caspian. We go from a fragment of a space capsule to the metal sheets of a 1960s fishing boat, depending on what we discover during our marauding on the steppe. All this is embellished by complex scenography, which at first evokes a gigantic jumble, but in fact responds to a global reflection that the guided tour allows you to discover over the course of a fascinating journey where you never stop flipping switches, opening and closing drawers, watching short films... The guiding line remains focused on environmental issues, a dark page for Kazakhstan during the Soviet era, each of whose facets : architecture, irrigation, industry, armaments is reviewed through these period objects. It's a totally unusual museum, and one you'd be hard-pressed to miss. There are also temporary exhibitions on the same theme.