Zheng Cirino

Kant, Kyrgyzstan Zheng Cirino

Publisher Marketing: Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Kant is a city in the Chuy Valley of northern Kyrgyzstan, some 20 km from Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. It is the administrative center of the Ysyk-Ata District (formerly Kant District). The Kyrgyz word for sugar is "kant," and the city received its name when a sugar plant was built there in the 1930s. (It is an often repeated myth that the town was named after the German philosopher Immanuel Kant). Kant is an industrial and service center. Among notable local enterprises is the Abdysh Ata Brewery, whose products are well known throughout Kyrgyzstan. During the Soviet era, Kant and its surrounding area were home to a large number of ethnic Germans who had been forcibly relocated to Central Asia in 1941 from the Volga region when the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was abolished. Most left for Germany during the 1990s and after the demise of the Soviet Union when the factories where they had worked shut down. Several other nearby settlements, such as Luxemburg and Bergtal, still carry their German names, but retain only very small remnants of their Volga German and Russian Mennonite founders.