Astana — Capital of Kazakhstan

Astana has changed its name twice since becoming Kazakhstan's capital, a rare distinction that makes its recent history unusually well documented and dated. The city, then called Akmola, was designated Kazakhstan's new capital in 1997, replacing Almaty, the country's largest city and its capital since Soviet times, in a move driven partly by Almaty's earthquake risk, limited room for expansion hemmed in by mountains, and a government desire to develop the country's underpopulated northern and central regions.

The city was renamed Astana — simply meaning 'capital' in Kazakh — in 1998, shortly after the government relocation was completed, and it underwent a rapid, state-driven building program through the 2000s and 2010s that transformed it from a modest Soviet-era provincial city into a showcase of contemporary architecture, including landmark buildings designed by internationally known architects such as Norman Foster.

In March 2019, the city was renamed a second time, to Nur-Sultan, honoring Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan's first president, who had just resigned after nearly three decades in power and who had personally championed the original capital relocation from Almaty in the 1990s.

That name lasted just over three years: in September 2022, following political unrest earlier that year and Nazarbayev's declining political standing, Kazakhstan's parliament voted to rename the city back to Astana, restoring its 1998 name and effectively removing the former president's name from the country's most prominent civic landmark.

Despite the repeated renaming, the underlying city itself has kept developing consistently since the 1997 relocation, with major landmarks including the Bayterek Tower, a 105-meter observation tower symbolizing a legendary golden poplar tree from Kazakh folklore, and the Khan Shatyr entertainment complex, a giant transparent tent-shaped structure designed to shelter an indoor park from Astana's extreme continental climate.

The city hosted Expo 2017, an international exhibition themed around future energy, which brought a wave of additional construction including the large spherical Nur Alem pavilion, and the event was widely treated within Kazakhstan as a coming-out moment for the new capital on the world stage, roughly two decades after the 1997 relocation began.

Astana's continental climate is among the most extreme of any national capital, with winter temperatures regularly falling well below -20°C and summer temperatures sometimes exceeding 35°C, a seasonal swing the city's planners have had to design around directly, including through covered and climate-controlled public spaces like Khan Shatyr.

Much of Astana's rapid post-1997 architectural development was overseen with direct involvement from Kazakhstan's first president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, whose vision for a striking, purpose-built capital shaped commissions for internationally known architects including Norman Foster and Kisho Kurokawa, and whose own name was attached to the city itself for over three years before the 2022 reversion to Astana.

Astana's location on the flat northern Kazakh steppe, chosen partly for its central position within the country's territory rather than for any pre-existing major urban center, meant that most of the city's now-prominent skyline was built essentially from open ground over roughly two and a half decades, a compressed construction timeline unusual among the world's national capitals.

The Nazarbayev Center, a research and archival institution documenting the first president's role in Kazakhstan's independence and the capital's founding, sits within the city's government district alongside the presidential residence and several ministries, forming part of a cluster of monumental buildings the government has used to project a deliberately modern, forward-looking image for the young capital both domestically and to visiting foreign delegations.