Halloween 2026 in Almaty was celebrated on a particularly grand scale. However, the city itself and venues did not prepare much for this relatively new informal holiday for Kazakhstan. Kursiv LifeStyle personally witnessed a huge number of teenagers and adults in scary and funny costumes. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing Kursiv Media.

Arbat Filled with Youth

On Saturday, October 29, already by 16:00, Almaty's Arbat (the pedestrian part of Zhibek Zholy Avenue — editor's note) began to be filled with groups of teenagers with painted bruises, cobwebs, pale, sickly and green faces.

Among the most popular types of festive makeup were the Joker and Harley Quinn faces, as well as Tim Burton's gothic aesthetic, and various Shreks. The leaders of costumes among girls were witches and dead brides. Guys, with rare exceptions, dressed more modestly, although some wore wigs and heavily painted their faces, and some "cut" their heads with prop saws.

How the Celebration Went

It is worth noting that there were no drunk or provocatively behaving young people. At any holiday in the 1990s or early 2000s, the situation in this sense was much worse at any city event. By 23:00, the "sabbath" on Arbat had noticeably subsided, and young people filled buses, trolleybuses and the metro, heading home.

Opinions Online

Opinions online were divided. Some called for banning the "alien" holiday. Others, on the contrary, praised those who were not afraid to radically change their image for just a day or a night. For many in Kazakhstan, Halloween has become at least partially a universally recognized carnival, which many lack in their gray daily lives.

Psychologists' View

Modern psychologists (including followers of Carl Jung) agree that carnival and Halloween are an ideal cultural "pressure relief valve" for the human psyche.

In everyday life, we are often constrained by social roles, and these holidays legally allow us to release our "Shadow": to try on forbidden masks, to be silly or eccentric. Moreover, most citizens limited themselves to non-scary costumes in the style of the "queen" of Halloween — supermodel and TV presenter Heidi Klum.

Halloween, among other things, works as a safe play therapy against existential fears — turning frightening images of death, monsters and witches into ridiculous costumes, through which hidden anxieties are overcome through laughter.

Earlier, Kursiv LifeStyle told about how the first-ever rave at the Green Bazaar was unexpectedly moved.