Astana

The city began as a Russian fort. A Siberian Cossack detachment built the stockade of Aqmoly, later Akmolinsk, on the Esil (Ishim) in 1830, on a stretch of steppe long used by Kazakh herders of the Middle Horde, and it grew into a trading post on the caravan routes between Siberia, Tashkent and the Kazakh steppe, known for its livestock fairs. The railway later tied it into the network running north to Siberia.

Soviet rule made it a grain town. In 1954 Nikita Khrushchev's Virgin Lands campaign began ploughing up the surrounding grassland for wheat, and Akmolinsk became the administrative centre of the scheme; hundreds of thousands of young settlers arrived from across the Soviet Union, and in 1961 the town was renamed Tselinograd, "virgin-land city", and given the wide avenues, institutes and concrete apartment blocks of a planned Soviet capital in miniature. Its region had also been a place of exile: the ALZhIR camp, west of the town, held thousands of women imprisoned as the wives of condemned men.

After independence the city became Akmola, and in 1997 Nursultan Nazarbayev moved the capital here from Almaty, a decision explained by the new city's central position, its room to grow and the desire to anchor the north. Renamed Astana in 1998, it was rebuilt on a plan whose outline came from the Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa, with the government quarter laid out on the empty left bank. The city was renamed Nur-Sultan in 2019 in honour of the retiring president and changed back to Astana in 2022. Its population has grown severalfold since the move.

Astana is a city of arrivals. Almost everyone here came from somewhere else in Kazakhstan, mostly since 1997, and the mix of villagers from the south, Russian-speaking northerners and returning Kazakh families from China, Mongolia and Uzbekistan gives it a different feel from either Almaty or the old northern towns. Kazakh is heard far more than in Petropavl or Pavlodar, and government work means the language of officialdom matters.

The state has used architecture as narrative. Bayterek retells the legend of the bird Samruk laying a golden egg in the tree of life; the Kazakh Eli column, the Palace of Independence and the national museum set out a story of the steppe running from the Saka to the present. The Palace of Peace and Reconciliation was built for a congress of world religions that the country hosts, and Hazrat Sultan Mosque, Orthodox and Catholic cathedrals and a synagogue stand within a few kilometres of one another.

Formal culture is well funded: an opera and ballet company, a national concert hall, philharmonic and circus, and a Kazakh cinema industry that films here. Sport is followed closely, above all the Astana cycling team, the Barys ice hockey club and football at Astana Arena. Customs are Kazakh and northern at once — tea with milk poured half a cup at a time, elaborate wedding and naming feasts, respect shown to elders first — and hospitality is taken seriously even in a city of high-rise flats.

About 1.7 million people live in Astana, the second-largest population in the country after Almaty, and the number keeps climbing as people move in from the northern villages and the south. It is a young city by the average age of its residents, and one whose economy is built on government: ministries, agencies, embassies, state companies, banks, universities and the construction industry that serves them all. Salaries are higher than the national average and so are rents.

The two banks live differently. Families with government or corporate jobs fill the new estates of the left bank and the southern districts, where blocks of flats go up faster than schools and kindergartens; the right bank keeps older, cheaper housing, garages, markets and the small businesses of the pre-capital town. Commuting across the bridges at rush hour is the daily complaint, along with the quality of construction in the newest estates.

Winter sets the rhythm for five months. Life moves between heated flats, offices, underground passages and shopping centres, children are kept home from school when the temperature drops far enough, and district heating plants are watched anxiously for breakdowns. Air quality worsens in the cold months because coal remains part of the heating supply. Summer reverses everything: the embankment, the parks, outdoor cafés and the lakes north of the city fill up, and families head for dachas and for Burabay at weekends.

The capital eats Kazakh food more self-consciously than most of the country. Beshbarmak — boiled horse or mutton with flat squares of pasta, onion sauce and a bowl of sorpa broth — is the dish for guests and celebrations, and restaurants on the left bank serve it in the full ceremonial form, with the sheep's head presented to the senior guest at family feasts. Kazy and shuzhuk, cured horsemeat sausages, appear on cold platters, and baursak, small squares of fried dough, come with tea at every table.

The northern setting shows in everything else. Russian and Ukrainian cooking is ordinary here: pelmeni, borscht, pickles, smoked fish from the Irtysh and the northern lakes, and the dark bread and pastries of a grain region. Korean salads from the deported communities of the 1930s, above all morkovcha, spiced grated carrot, are market staples. Uyghur and Dungan cafés brought by migrants from the south-east sell lagman, hand-pulled noodles with fried meat and vegetables, and tandoor samsa.

Dairy from the steppe is sold everywhere: kurt, hard salted balls of dried sour milk; irimshik, sweet dried curd; kymyz, fermented mare's milk, drunk in summer; and shubat from camel's milk. Tea is the constant, drunk with milk from morning to night. Astana also has the country's fastest-growing restaurant scene after Almaty, with coffee houses, Turkish, Georgian and Japanese kitchens and a well-developed habit of delivery in the months when nobody wants to go outside.