Astana & the North

The northern steppe holds some of the oldest evidence of horse-keeping in the world. At Botai, in North Kazakhstan Region, archaeologists have found a settlement of around 3500 BC where people lived largely from horses, and the site is central to the debate about where horses were first domesticated. Later the plain was grazing land for nomads, and by the 18th century it lay within the territory of the Kazakh Middle Horde.

Russia advanced into the region along its river lines. Petropavl was founded as the fortress of St Peter on the Esil (Ishim) in 1752, Pavlodar grew from a Russian outpost on the Irtysh, and the fort of Akmolinsk, the seed of today's capital, was built in 1830. Kostanay followed in 1879. Slavic peasants settled the black-earth lands in large numbers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Soviet rule transformed the north. The 1930s famine emptied the steppe of herders, and the region filled with deportees and prisoners: Germans, Chechens, Poles and others were exiled here in the 1930s and 1940s, and the ALZhIR camp outside Akmolinsk held thousands of wives of men condemned as enemies of the people. From 1954 Nikita Khrushchev's Virgin Lands campaign ploughed up vast areas of grassland for wheat, bringing hundreds of thousands of young settlers, and Akmolinsk was renamed Tselinograd, "virgin-land city", in 1961.

After independence the city became Akmola, and in 1997 Nursultan Nazarbayev moved the capital here from Almaty. Renamed Astana in 1998, Nur-Sultan in 2019 and Astana again in 2022, it has since grown into a city of well over a million people.

The north is the most Russian-influenced part of Kazakhstan. Russians, Ukrainians and Germans remain a large share of the population in North Kazakhstan, Kostanay and Pavlodar regions, Russian is the everyday language of most towns, and Orthodox churches stand alongside mosques in every city. Many families descend from Virgin Lands settlers or wartime deportees, and the memory of exile and the camps is part of local identity.

Astana is different again: a city of migrants from every part of the country, where civil servants and students from the Kazakh-speaking south have made Kazakh far more audible than in the older northern towns. Its public architecture is a deliberate statement of a new national story, from the Bayterek, said to represent the mythical tree of life with a golden egg laid by the bird Samruk, to the Hazret Sultan Mosque and the Astana Opera.

Kazakh traditions run strongly in the villages and at holidays. Nauryz in March and the Day of the Capital in early July bring concerts, yurts set up in the parks and horse games such as kokpar. Pavlodar Region is proud of its links with the scholar and poet Mashhur Zhusup Kopeiuly and the geologist Kanysh Satpayev, both born in the Bayanaul district, and Kokshetau's hills are woven into legends of Abylai Khan, the 18th-century ruler who united much of the Kazakh steppe.

Astana, with well over a million people, dominates the region. It is a city of ministries, embassies, universities, banks and construction sites, with young families on the left bank's new estates and the older Soviet town on the right bank of the Esil. Pavlodar, with over 300,000 people, Kostanay and Petropavl, each with a little over 200,000, and Kokshetau are the regional capitals.

Outside Astana the economy rests on grain and industry. The northern regions grow much of Kazakhstan's wheat, harvested across enormous fields in late summer. Pavlodar Region has aluminium and oil refining, and Ekibastuz, to its south-west, is a coal town built around vast open-pit mines that feed power stations across the country. Kostanay Region mines iron ore around Rudny and Lisakovsk.

Life follows the climate. Winters are spent between heated flats, offices and Astana's malls, including the covered world of Khan Shatyr, and summers on the river embankments, at dachas or at the Burabay lakes. The smaller cities have been losing people for decades as young residents leave for Astana, Almaty or Russia, and many villages founded in the Virgin Lands era are shrinking.

Northern cooking combines Kazakh herders' food with the kitchens of the Slavic and German settlers. Beside beshbarmak and horsemeat sausages, tables carry Russian pelmeni, borscht, pickled vegetables and dark bread, and the grain belt means good local flour, baking and pastries. Kurt, small balls of dried, salted sour-milk curd, is sold at every market and on every train platform, and irimshik, a sweet dried cottage cheese, is a village staple.

The lakes and rivers supply fish from the Burabay lakes and from the Irtysh around Pavlodar, often smoked or fried. Autumn brings sogym, the slaughter of a horse or cow for winter meat, when families make kazy, shuzhuk and the other cured horsemeat products that carry them through the cold months.

Tea with milk is drunk at every meal, often with baursak, fried dough puffs, and jam. Kymyz is sold in summer at roadside yurts along the Astana–Burabay highway and at the lake resorts, where sanatoriums once prescribed it as a cure, and shubat, fermented camel's milk, appears in Astana's markets.

Astana's showpiece architecture is the main draw. The Bayterek tower, with a viewing floor inside its golden sphere, stands on the ceremonial axis that runs from the presidential Ak Orda palace to Khan Shatyr, Norman Foster's giant transparent tent. Foster's glass-topped pyramid, the Palace of Peace and Reconciliation, rises on the opposite bank, beside the Kazakh Eli monument, and the Hazret Sultan Mosque, the Astana Opera and the sphere of the Nur Alem pavilion, built for the 2017 Expo, complete the set. The ALZhIR memorial museum lies in the village of Akmol, south-west of the city.

North of the capital, the Burabay lakes and pine hills are the region's favourite retreat, in a national park of granite outcrops, birch and pine forest and clear lakes. The rock of Okzhetpes and the Zhumbaktas stone in Lake Burabay are its best-known sights, with Mount Kokshe above the water and Lake Shchuchye nearby. Kokshetau, the capital of Akmola Region, lies to the west.

To the south-west of Astana the Korgalzhyn reserve protects Lake Tengiz, with Naurzum in Kostanay Region forming the other half of the UNESCO-listed Saryarka steppe and lakes site. Kostanay itself has a compact older centre and a riverside park on the Tobol. Petropavl, on the Esil in the far north, keeps wooden and brick merchant houses and the Botai archaeological site in its region. Pavlodar has a long Irtysh embankment and the Mashhur Zhusup Mosque, and Bayanaul National Park's weathered granite hills and lakes lie to its south-west.