This was our first morning of touring Almaty. All of these locations were a short walk from each other. It was very overcast and rain was predicted but it was a nice morning of walking and touring.

The first photo is in Panfilov Park. Almaty had some beautiful parks with lots of statues, big trees, wide walkways, flowers and roses and the parks were very nice places to visit.

Zenkov Cathedral is the second photo. It’s a 19th century Russian Orthodox church and the fourth tallest wood building in the world. Unfortunately, the outside was undergoing a major renovation as you can see in the photo. But you can still see the front of the church and you can see photos of it on the right side of the construction wall. We went inside the cathedral and it was in the middle of a service. We were still able to walk around inside which was very interesting but no photos and it was very crowded. Still, I’m glad that we got to go in and see and hear some of the service.

The third photo is part of a war monument and you can see the eternal flame towards the middle of the photo. This monument honored multiple wars and conflicts.

The fourth photo is also part of the war monument and is a World War II monument. This statue is called “Feat” and features the faces of soldiers from all 15 of the (at that time) Soviet republics. We doubted the count but after we walked all the way around this statue, we finally came up with the fifteen number of faces. Some of them are on the sides and back.

The last building is the Kazakh Museum of Folk Musical Instruments. It’s a 1908 wooden building designed by Zenkov, the famous cathedral architect and designer of the Zenkov Cathedral in the second photo. We toured the whole museum and I must say that they have some incredible musical instruments. It has over 1000 instruments in 60 different instrument categories. As I recall, I counted some 64 strings on one stringed instrument. The variety of instruments was very impressive.