Kazakhstan renamed its steppe capital twice after leaving Almaty
Astana, population about 1.7 million, replaced Almaty as Kazakhstan's capital in December 1997. Architect Kisho Kurokawa shaped its planned skyline on the Ishim River. Akmolinsk (1832) became Tselinograd in 1961, Astana in 1998, Nur-Sultan in 2019, then Astana again—proof that place names track politics.
Long before the modern city, the Bozok settlement stood here as a military fortress on the steppe branch of the Silk Road. Fyodor Shubin founded Akmoly beside the Ishim as an okrug centre on 18 June 1830, and in 1869 Akmolinsk became the centre of a new Akmolinsk Oblast. A regional museum and state archive opened in 1923 and 1924, and during World War II machinery from evacuated factories in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia passed through the town.
From 1954 the northern Kazakh oblasts were drafted into the Virgin Lands Campaign, meant to create a second Soviet breadbasket, and in December 1960 the town became capital of a new Tselinniy Krai built from five northern regions. On 2 August 1959 the Yesil Bridge collapsed, killing 143 people; a lone police officer, Nurmukhambet Kozhakhmetov, pulled 40 to safety. As Tselinograd it was remade in the 1960s, starting its first three high-rise housing districts in 1963. After independence the Supreme Council decreed on 6 July 1994 that the capital would move here, and the city now holds the Guinness record for the most name changes by a modern capital.
It sits almost 1,000 kilometres from Almaty on flat, semi-arid steppe, covering 722 square kilometres at 347 metres above sea level; the closest large cities are Karaganda, 200 kilometres away, and Omsk in Russia, 450. Astana is the world's second-coldest national capital after Ulaanbaatar, a distinction Ottawa held until 1997. The annual mean temperature is 3.9 °C, and January averages −14.5 °C.
Source: Astana
