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toward Alma-Ata, he asked me to ride with him to take
a string of horses out to Lake Issik. He wanted to present a horse to this great scientist to help him along on
his expedition.”
To their surprise, Vavilov politely declined the
horses, noting that a newly fashioned motor vehicle
was being sent out for them to use for a bit of local
exploration before they set o= for China. Then
Vavilov looked at the boy and asked the stable
owner if young Aimak could accompany him
for the day while he checked out the wild
apple forests edging the Zailijskei
Alatau slopes above the city of Alma-Ata. These are the northernmost
highlands of the Tian Shan, and
Vavilov needed someone with him
who spoke the local dialect of
Kazakh and who more or less knew
the terrain.
Aimak Dzangaliev grins as he tells
of their time together. “Vavilov . . .
reviewed everything around Almaty in
just one day. Given his genius, his mind
>gured out just about everything!” he
exclaims, meaning everything about the ecology of the region’s apples.
Vavilov’s own notes, edited for inclusion in his
book Five Continents, relate his side of the story: “In
literal translation Alma-Ata means ‘Father of the
Apple.’ Thickets of wild apples stretch out in every
direction from the city, covering the slopes of the
mountains with extensive forests. In contrast to the
small, wild apples of the Caucasian Mountains to
the west, the wild apples of Kazakhstan are mostly
large-fruited varieties, ones that hardly di=er in their
qualities from fully domesticated ones.”
Vavilov arrived on the >rst of September, just in
time for the apples to ripen. “I could see with my own
eyes that I had stumbled upon the center of origin for
the apple,” he noted, “where wild apples were di;-
cult to even distinguish from those which were being
cultivated. Some of the wild ecotypes in these forests
were so superior in quality and size that they could be
taken directly from an orchard to market without anyone knowing the di=erence. . . . That is not withstanding the fact that the orchards here already
include some of the >nest, largest and most ?avorful
of the European cultivars, not the least of which is the
famous Apport [or Constantine] apple.”
“He >gured out everything,” Aimak Dzangaliev
repeats, as if all of his own research over the following half century had been anticipated by Vavilov’s
notes from little more than a day in the >eld. “He had
declined our horses, but he devoted himself to our
apples.” He pauses for a moment, and swallows
deeply. “It became my dream to be with this learned
man, this mind. As a person, I am usually calm
and in control of myself, but this time, I was
inspired. Why, I asked myself, have our
wild apple trees attracted the attention
of such a genius?”
Dzangaliev’s answer to this question set him on a trajectory that
dominated the next seven decades
of his life. If a world-renowned
scholar from Leningrad had risked
his life to see the wild apples of
Kazakhstan, weren’t those apple
forests worthy of further attention by
the Kazakhs themselves? By the time
he was sixteen years old, Aimak
Dzangaliev aspired to get enough education to be able to study with Vavilov and then
return to Kazakhstan to study its wild fruits in
depth. Within a decade, he had made it to Leningrad,
where he learned from Vavilov and his collaborators,
and joined in e=orts to advance their research on the
geographic origins of crops. Hundreds of >eld trips,
thousands of plantings, and dozens of research publications later, Aimak Dzangaliev remains fascinated
by this one species’ natural diversity, and feels that he
has not yet answered all the questions about apples
he set out to answer some seven decades earlier.
Of course much has changed since 1929,
when Dzangaliev >rst showed Vavilov the forests
that literally surrounded the ancient city of Alma-Ata. Where wild apple trees once grew along streams
and fence lines, now there are condominiums, shopping malls, and international banks in their stead.
Today, the modern city of Almaty has the forest fragments surrounded. Some apple and pear trees still
linger on the rough edges of the valleys, but ironically,
most of their former habitat has been intentionally
planted with European cultivars of domesticated
apples. Tatiana Salova >nds this worrisome, for the
