The Zelenyy Bazaar (Green Bazaar) is Almaty's main food market — a sprawling indoor-outdoor complex that has anchored the city's commercial life since the 1870s, rebuilt in its current Soviet-modernist form in 1976. The bazaar is divided into halls by category: meat (the most theatrical section, with butchers carving entire horse and lamb carcasses behind their counters), dairy (kurt — dried fermented milk balls in dozens of varieties — line the displays), pickled vegetables, dried fruits and nuts, spices, halal sweets, and a flower market. A 2-3 hour walk through the market is the densest cultural experience in Almaty.
What makes the Green Bazaar memorable is the cultural collision happening in plain sight — Russian babushkas selling pickled mushrooms next to Korean women selling kimchi (Almaty has a substantial Korean population descended from Soviet-era deportations), Uyghur traders running spice stalls, Kazakh families selling their own dried meats and dairy, Uzbek bread-bakers from the southern Kazakhstan region. The vocabulary alone is fascinating: kazy (horsemeat sausage), shubat (camel milk), kumys (fermented mare's milk — the regional alcoholic beverage), beshbarmak (the national dish of horse meat with flat noodles), baursak (deep-fried bread cubes), lepyoshka (round flatbread).
The key items to taste-and-take: kazy (vacuum-packed for travel), kurt (the small pebble-sized dried milk balls that are surprisingly addictive once you're past the first few — salty, fermented, lasts months), Almaty apples (the city's name literally means 'father of apples' and the region is the genetic origin of all domestic apples on Earth), dried apricots, honey, and the Korean carrot salad (morkovcha) that originated here in the 1940s when Soviet Koreans adapted their kimchi techniques to local ingredients.
Go on a weekend morning (10 AM-1 PM) for full energy and full stalls. Most stalls are cash-only and small bills are useful. Bargaining is light; prices are mostly fixed by category but you can negotiate down 10-15% on bulk purchases. Outside the main market hall, several Korean and Uyghur food stalls do hot lunches — laghman (hand-pulled noodle soup), manty (steamed dumplings), and samsa (baked meat pies) all run 800-2,000 KZT for a substantial meal. Combine with a walk through the adjacent Panfilov Park and Ascension Cathedral for a half-day of central Almaty history.