Our taste in rooms runs to fairly minimal: plain light coloured walls, lots of light, modern light furniture. But every now and then we come to a hotel whose aesthetics is completely different. In Astana we had one of these: an old-fashioned Russian-style hotel. The Family loved the room, everything from the flowery wall-paper, the golden drapes, the iron-frame bed, the decorated wooden furniture, lace curtains, down to the flowers on the woollen carpet. This was not Kazakh for certain. The employees mostly spoke Russian.
I had to refresh my memory of the history of Astana. It was a small town founded in Tsarist times, but grew big during the war when industries moved to Kazakhstan from Russia. In fact the Kazakh SSR was the core of post-war recovery of the USSR. About a fifth of the population of the city are ethnic Russians. Our hotel was on the right bank of the Ishim river, just outside the core of the new planned city. When we explored the streets around our hotel we found interesting 21st century houses: brick facings on what looked like insulated walls, double glazing, canted roofs, electrically operated large decorative gates. Central Asian communities build walls very high so that you can’t see the houses. These were a different style: Russian.
Beyond this enclave of single-family homes was a block of apartment buildings. They didn’t look modern in style, with their slate-covered wavy roof lines. Nor did they look like Soviet-era apartment blocks. They left me quite puzzled. Astana’s architectural history seems to be complex.
Kazakhstan has put its oil riches to good use: free schooling for everyone, free health care, and wonderful architecture. After a nice lunch at a Georgian restaurant we pulled up at the parking outside one of the world’s largest mosques: Astana Central Mosque. The sun was right in our faces, so my first thought was that I wouldn’t be able to take a photo of the exterior. But as it turned out, the shadow of one of the 130 meter tall minarets reached our car, giving me an interesting shot of the structure.
It was a long walk across a windy plaza to the north entrance. The wooden door is more than 12 meters high, so of course there’s a smaller door set into it. This is merely 4 meters high, more than twice as tall as me. Sometimes these large things are just impressive by their size. But this door made of iroko wood looked lovely close up, with typical Kazakh ornamental carvings.
The scale of the interior is overwhelming. Again, when you stop and look, it is not just a thing made to grand proportions. There is a light and airy feeling to the interior. I stopped to take a photo of the afternoon light streaming in through one of the stained-glass windows. Given that the temperatures can go down to 40 Celsius below freezing, the mosque is air conditioned. I could feel the circulating air. We turned a corner and saw a grand corridor leading to the central prayer hall.
The hall itself lies under the main dome. With a diameter of 62 meters, it is one of the largest domes in the world. Sitting atop the mosque, it reaches a height of more than 80 meters. Entering the hall below it you have a sense of air and light. You can see part of the western wall in the photo above, with illuminated calligraphy of the many names of the god. All the calligraphy in the mosque is due to the Kazakh master Asylbek Baizakuly. Another object I found impressive was the enormous Kazakh-style carpet which covered the floor. The deep pile felt very comfortable under my feet.
This 4 meters high door can be opened up to allow an overflow of worshippers standing in the courtyard to participate in worship. Given the grand proportions of the interior, and the fact that the population of Astana is not very large, I doubt that the door needs to be opened often. The mosque had something which I’ve never seen before: a cafe and a shopping arcade inside. I sat down with an espresso, and The Family had her cappuccino, while we shared a nice pastry. We talked of shoes and ships and sealing wax. Our first day in Astana had gone well.
Astana is the northernmost capital city in Asia. Locals will proudly tell you that it is the second coldest capital city in the world, after Ulaanbaatar. That was clear from the weather we had in early May. The days were sunny, but cold and windy. Nights were far from warm. I had packed my good winter jacket and a woollen cap when I checked the weather prediction before the trip. They were needed when we walked back from dinners. But apart from such mundane troubles, Astana had stunningly odd architecture. The featured photo shows the egg shaped Kazakh National Archives with the triple towers of an apartment building called The Northern Lights.
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My favourite spot was Khan Shatyr, a lovely tent shaped structure a block away from our hotel, designed by Norman Foster. Blocks are long in Astana, so the walk took us about fifteen minutes. But the mall was airy and full of light. Astana has a population of about 1.3 million, and I wouldn’t be surprised if one in thousand were in there on the weekend.
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Astana is not an old town. It is said to have been founded in 1830, when it was called Akmolinsk. Later in the Soviet times it was used as one of the Gulags. But modern Astana, on the right bank of the Ishim river, is built to a master plan by Kisho Kurokawa, the Japanese architect. This development followed the move of Kazakhstan’s capital to this city from Almaty in 1997. That’s almost the last time it was renamed. Astana is a Kazakh word which means capital city. It is built like a grandiose capital. The blue-domed pile you see above is the presidential palace, Aq Orda. Tourists can visit, but on the day we had set aside for it, it was off limits. Blue domes are common in Kazakhstan, and we learnt that it is possibly a pre-Islamic symbol of the open sky. The column on the right is the capital of a 91 meter tall column called Kazakh Eli which celebrates the country’s freedom.
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From Khan Shatyr, which The Family immediately renamed Khan Market, we saw a strange twinned building with a bridge spanning the wide boulevard below joining the two towers. It turned out that this is the headquarters of the state oil company, KazMunayGaz. Oil is the main reason for Kazakhstan’s prosperity (the newly discovered uranium deposits have not been fully monetized yet), so it stands to reason that this should be such a visible landmark. It visually joins Khan Shatyr to the tower called Bayterek, the two symbols of Astana, and spans the axis of the city. Oh yes, tourists can visit the globe on top of Bayterek, only, it was closed for a month. So we never got to enter the building designed by the country’s founder president, Nursultan Nazarbayev.
Eventually the only monument we visited was the pyramid by Norman Foster. While trying to find a toilet I got locked behind a door which led to parts of the building still under construction. That wasted the half hour until the start of the tour. It turned out that the two of us were the only people taking a tour of the complex. The concert hall was under repairs, there were no exhibitions that we were allowed to see, the lift shuddered alarmingly and opened on to the blue tip where a musty smell told us that the air handling system was out of commission. Part of the guide’s unfriendliness was due to the fact that she didn’t speak a word of English beyond her memorized explanations. The Family said, “But she could have smiled.”
There were other interesting, and somewhat weird, structures we did not stop at. The most notable were the two golden beer cans, the Central Concert Hall, and the largest spherical building in the world, from the EXPO 2017. We drove on to a wonderful Georgian restaurant for lunch. We were the only people there. No one seems to visit Astana, but it has great restaurants and a wonderful mixed population of Kazakhs, Russians, and Germans.
Don't hold your breath 