Trip to Borovoye.

“Sweetness shudders through the land
    as if, freed from the heat,
                                                    nature’d scooped spring waters in her hand
                                  and splashed her burning feet”

 Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev. “Summer evening”.

Silk Route between Almaty and Astana.

There are many legends and stories about Borovoye. “When the God was creating the world one of the nations got the lands rich of forests, another got the fertile fields with a large rivers, and the third got the beautiful mountains and blue lakes.
But Kazakh got just feather-grass steppe… It offended him and he asked the God to endow him with a part of natural beauty. The God took the mountains, rocks, beautiful pine and deciduous forests, blue lakes with pure water, emerald fields covered by grasses and flowers from his korzhyn and spread them with a bountiful hand to boundless steppes.
It was the appearance of Borovoye of one of the most picturesque places of Kazakhstan, which for its beauty and rarely harmonically combination of mountains, forests, lakes, and unique flora and fauna got the poetic name “The pearl of Kazakhstan.”
There is, of course, a legend connected with the Burabay rock: once upon a time there lived a beautiful white camel that would change its shape whenever an enemy approached, fly onto the mountain and warn the people with loud bellows.
In this way, it protected the local population from danger. One day, however, the camel was on its way to the waterside to drink when it met the hunter Kasym Khan, who considered the fine animal merely as game and shot an arrow at it.
The wounded beast began to bellow and sank to its knee, while still trying to reach the watering place, but the merciless hunter kept shooting arrows at it and mortally wounded it. The camel never reached the waterside, died on the spot and turned into a stone hill, from that day forward known as bura, or camel.
These days, hunting is strictly forbidden, and 223 different species of bird and 54 different species of mammal inhabit the national park. The legend of the region's formation tells how God granted the Kazakhs this wonderful landscape after they had complained about the scanty steppes, which had been allotted to them during the world's creation.
Roaming through the forests and climbing up to vantage Points to take in the view, it's easy to imagine the Kazakhs of old, believers in the spirits of  nature, coming together on this holy spot and wondering how these formations had come into existence with their shapes of camels and fortresses, witches and sleeping knights.
It is only natural that each peculiar rock formation should be given its own magical tale of origin, such as the following.

Authority:
From the advertising guidebook across Kazakhstan. The ministry of tourism of Kazakhstan.

Photos
Alexander Petrov.