Karaganda

Karaganda (Russian: Караганда) or Qaraghandy (Kazakh: Қарағанды) is the capital of the audany (Russian oblast) of the same name in Kazakhstan. Pop. 437,000 (1999). It is the third most populous city in Kazakhstan, behind Almaty and Astana.

The name "Qaraghandy" approximately translates to "place rich in acacia". Karaganda is an industrial city, built to exploit nearby coal mines using the slave work of prisoners of labor camps. It was briefly considered as a candidate for the captal of the (then) recently independent Republic of Kazakhstan, but its bid was turned down in favor of Astana. In support of this bid, a large international airport was built, which today goes mostly unused.

It is the birthplace of the late Chechen president Akhmad Kadyrov.

Trivia

Karaganda is often used as the punchline in a popular joke in the former USSR. The city is fairly isolated in a vast area of uninhabited steppe, and is thought by many to be "the middle of nowhere". When used in the locative case, the final syllable rhymes with the Russian word for "where", as well as with a Russian obscenity used to answer to an unwanted question "Where?". Thus the exchange: "Where is it?" "In Karaganda!" — has a rhyming and silly sound, and its nuance could be approximated in American English as: "Where are you going?" "To Kalamazoo!" or "Timbuktu!"