Astana
— — a capital built on an open plain.
Not only on a wall.
“A capital raised from a small steppe town in 1997, when the government moved north from Almaty. The Ishim River bends through the centre, and the new ministries, the Bayterek tower, and Foster's pyramid stand on the left bank where there was almost nothing thirty years ago. Winters drop below minus thirty. The summer light runs late.
Astana, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Astana sits on the Ishim River in the steppe of north-central Kazakhstan, at an elevation of roughly 347 metres. President Nursultan Nazarbayev moved the capital here from Almaty in 1997, and the city has grown from about 280,000 people then to more than 1.4 million today. The name changed from Akmola to Astana in 1998, briefly to Nur-Sultan in 2019, and back to Astana in 2022. It is the second-coldest capital in the world after Ulaanbaatar.
The left bank of the Ishim carries a planned government district laid out in the early 2000s. The Bayterek tower, finished in 2002, rises 97 metres and refers in its height to the year the capital moved. Norman Foster designed both the Khan Shatyr entertainment centre, a 150-metre transparent tent completed in 2010, and the Palace of Peace and Reconciliation, a 62-metre pyramid finished in 2006. The Hazrat Sultan Mosque, opened in 2012, holds up to ten thousand worshippers and is the largest in Central Asia.
The steppe climate runs to extremes. January averages around minus fifteen and regularly drops past minus thirty, with wind that crosses an open plain for hundreds of kilometres before it reaches the city. July averages near twenty-one and can climb past thirty-five. The best months are late May through early September, when the long northern light holds past nine in the evening and the parks along the Ishim turn green. Spring and autumn are short and windy.