Zhibek Zholy Metro Station

Construction on the Almaty Metro began in 1988 under Soviet rule, but when the USSR collapsed three years later, funding vanished and the tunnels sat dormant. For over a decade, the half finished stations gathered dust until Kazakhstan’s government resumed the project in earnest in 2001, formalizing a new development plan two years later. When the system finally opened in 2011, 23 years after breaking ground, it became the first metro built independently by a Central Asian nation after the Soviet collapse, complete with South Korean trains instead of Russian ones. The Zhibek Zholy station, named for the Silk Road, features elaborate ceramic murals of ancient trade routes, a fitting tribute for a city that waited two decades for its underground connection.

There is no ceremony to the wait showing on the platforms themselves. Fifteen years of stalled tunnels and shifting funding plans produced a system that looks, station for station, like it was built all at once and built to impress: marble walls, mosaics, chandeliers, a whole line’s worth of decorative ambition for a network that, even today, runs a single line. The trains are Korean, purchased new, air conditioned and modern in a way that has nothing to do with the Soviet-era gauge they run on. Almaty got its metro two decades late and gave it a better ceiling than most systems that opened on time.