ИНТУРИСТ

what is really there

the postcards are dreams, but the places are real (except the ones I improved). this is what I know about each one, from books, the Herald archive, my grandmother and going there.

01 · HOTEL TALAS

Central Square 2, the east side. Opened 6 November 1975 for the republic's 50th birthday, nine floors, 214 rooms then (178 now). From 1979 it was the Intourist hotel of Talas, with a bar on the ground floor that took only foreign money. The roof letters ТАЛАС are the original ones and still in Cyrillic. Foreign journalists lived there through the siege in 1992. It's still open, older and cheaper than the hotels on the avenue. One price for everyone since 2012.

02 · PANORAMA

The restaurant on the ninth floor of the Hotel Talas. Now it's weddings and banquets. My parents' wedding was there (2001). In my version it is always 23:40 and the band never stops.

03 · OKTYABR CINEMA

On Cinema Boulevard. It was where Talasfilm held its premieres; since 1996 it's the film archive's cinematheque. They still show the old films. I put the neon on it, the real letters are plainer. The poplars are real.

04 · KOBOZEV AIRPORT

Nurzhan was Kobozev then, and its airport was the busiest in the republic: the modernist terminal of 1968 with KOBOZEV in red letters on the roof, the Tu-154s to Moscow, Tashkent, Frunze, Alma-Ata and Novosibirsk, about 800,000 passengers in 1989. It closed in 1992. The terminal stands gutted; the old apron is the car market now. There's a new glass airport on the same site that has never had a passenger flight. This is the saddest postcard. I made it the pinkest.

05 · JYLUU-BULAK

A village in a side valley above Tash-Kömür. The water comes out of the fault at about 42 °C and smells of sulphur. The Soviet sanatorium (1968) treated joints and skin with baths and mud; since 1997 it's a small spa with about 80 beds, and the villagers bathe in an open pool below. The grand bath hall with the arches and the horse is mine. The real one is smaller and has better tiles.

06 · ALTYN-BULAK

The springs at the edge of Altyn-Bulak village, about 5 km from Iyık Janyl. The iron in the water stains the basins yellow, hence "golden spring". It's in the 1971 book of the republic's mineral waters and resorts. There is no rotunda, there's a bottling plant (since 1978) and the green bottle everyone's grandfather drinks after a wedding. I gave the spring the rotunda it deserves.

07 · TOKTOGUL RESERVOIR

The big water of the 1970s. Villages went under it, and the families were moved; many came to Talas, to Köchkön, where the streets are named after the drowned villages. They still go to the shore every August. I didn't draw a village under the water. You can't see it anyway.

08 · THE SANATORIUM ON THE RIDGE

Above Iyık Janyl there's an empty Soviet sanatorium on the ridge, and everyone in Iyık Janyl knows that its lights come on during the Feast of St. Janyl. I don't know its name. My aunt says she saw the lights in 2019. My cousin says it was the moon on the windows. I drew it lit.

+ · AK-TASH

There's one more, the small sanatorium at the warm spring above Ak-Tash, in the Talas Alatau foothills. It's across the line now, so it's not in the set. Maybe one day card nine.