Irene2005 / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL
apital: Astana
Population: 20.5 million+
Language: Kazakh/Russian
1 – Almaty (also above)
Almaty sits in the foothills of the Tian Shan, where the wild apple Malus sieversii, the main wild ancestor of the domestic apple, grows in the forests above the city, and it served as Kazakhstan’s capital from 1929 to 1997.
Almaty’s Panfilov Park surrounds the wooden Zenkov Cathedral, completed in 1907 and often said to be built without nails, which came through the 1911 earthquake that destroyed much of the city, while up the gorge is the high-altitude Medeu skating rink and a cable car climbs to Kok Tobe hill.
Panfilov Park is named after the rifle division raised in Almaty in 1941 that fought in the defence of Moscow, though in 1948 the Soviet chief military prosecutor concluded that the famous story of its 28 heroic guardsmen was largely invented by a journalist, a report Russia’s state archive published in 2015.
2 – Bayterek Tower – Astana
Astana became Kazakhstan’s capital in 1997, when the government moved north from Almaty to a provincial town on the steppe, and its names have run from Akmolinsk and Tselinograd to Akmola, Astana, Nur-Sultan and, in 2022, Astana again.
Astana’s Bayterek Tower, completed in 2002, carries a golden sphere about 22 metres across on a white lattice trunk, with its observation deck at 97 metres to mark 1997, and inside is a gilded print of Nazarbayev’s hand where visitors place their own and make a wish.
Bayterek Tower brings a Kazakh legend to life, in which the magic bird Samruk lays a golden egg in the tree of life while the dragon Aydakhar lurks at its roots, and Nazarbayev is said to have first sketched the design on a napkin.
3 – Taraz
Taraz is a Silk Road trading town on the Talas river near the Kyrgyz border that has officially marked 2,000 years, and in 751 an Abbasid army beat a Tang Chinese one somewhere near Taraz, a clash often seen as marking the limit of Tang expansion westward.
The best sights at Taraz are the 11th- and 12th-century mausoleums of Aisha Bibi and Babaji Khatun, under 20 kilometres west of town and faced in carved terracotta in more than 60 patterns, with the Karakhan mausoleum and a medieval bathhouse, found beneath the old central market, in town.
Legend says Aisha Bibi died of a snakebite on her way to marry Karakhan, ruler of Taraz, who built her tomb, while her maid Babaji Khatun stayed on to guard it and has her own mausoleum beside it.
4 – Baikonur Cosmodrome
Baikonur Cosmodrome, built on the Kazakh steppe from 1955, launched the first satellite, Sputnik, in 1957 and the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin, in 1961, both from the same pad, known as Gagarin’s Start.
Baikonur Cosmodrome’s landmarks include Gagarin’s Start, the rocket assembly halls and the town beside it, called Leninsk until 1995, and in 2002 a hangar roof collapse here killed eight workers and destroyed the only Buran shuttle ever to fly in space.
Baikonur Cosmodrome isn’t really at Baikonur, since most accounts say the Soviets borrowed the name of a mining town some 300 kilometres away to mislead Western analysts, and crews keep Gagarin’s habit of stopping the bus on the way to the pad so the men can urinate on a wheel.
5 – Aktau
Aktau stands on a low cliff above the Caspian in the far west of Kazakhstan, begun in the late 1950s as a closed uranium-mining settlement and named Shevchenko from 1964 to 1991 after the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, who was exiled nearby in the 1850s.
Aktau’s addresses are mostly a microdistrict, building and flat number rather than a street name, and the town is the gateway to Mangystau’s desert landscapes, from the chalk cliffs of Bozzhyra to the underground mosque of Beket-Ata.
From 1973 to 1999 Aktau’s BN-350 fast breeder reactor both powered the town and turned Caspian seawater into drinking water, a rare example of a nuclear reactor desalinating on an industrial scale.
6 – Turkistan
Turkistan in southern Kazakhstan grew up around the grave of the Sufi poet Khoja Ahmed Yasawi, who died, by tradition, in 1166, and the mausoleum Timur ordered over it from 1389 became Kazakhstan’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003.
Turkistan’s Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi measures some 63 by 46 metres, with more than 30 rooms around a central hall under an 18-metre brick dome, the largest surviving in Central Asia, and its main portal was never finished after Timur died in 1405.
In the domed hall at Turkistan stands the Tai Kazan, a bronze cauldron cast in 1399 that weighs two tonnes and holds 3,000 litres, which the Soviets moved to the Hermitage in Leningrad in 1935 and returned in 1989.
7 – Charyn Canyon and the Kolsai lakes
Charyn Canyon runs about 150 kilometres along the Charyn river some 200 kilometres east of Almaty, up to 300 metres deep in red rock, and the Kolsai lakes lie in the mountains to the south, so the two are usually visited together.
Charyn Canyon’s showpiece is the Valley of Castles, a two-kilometre corridor of eroded towers, while the three Kolsai lakes step up a spruce valley from about 1,800 to 2,800 metres, and nearby Lake Kaindy formed when a landslide in the 1911 earthquake dammed a gorge, leaving drowned spruce trunks rising out of the water.
At the bottom of Charyn Canyon grows a rare relict grove of Sogdian ash, a tree that survived the Ice Age in this sheltered valley and has been protected since 1964.
8 – Tamgaly
Tamgaly is a dry gorge in the Chu-Ili hills about 170 kilometres north-west of Almaty, holding around 5,000 petroglyphs carved from the Bronze Age to the early 20th century, and UNESCO listed it in 2004.
Tamgaly’s carvings cluster in five main groups along the gorge, among altars, settlements and burials, so what you walk through is a whole ritual landscape of warriors, animals and ceremonies rather than a gallery.
Tamgaly is known for its sun-heads, Bronze Age figures whose heads are rayed discs, of which 30 have been found and 26 survive, and nobody knows whether they show gods or priests in headdresses.
9 – Altyn-Emel
Altyn-Emel is a vast national park in the Ili valley several hours north-east of Almaty, home to the Besshatyr necropolis, 31 Saka burial mounds raised around 2,500 years ago, the largest more than 100 metres across.
Altyn-Emel’s Aktau mountains are banded white, red and green, kulan have been reintroduced to its plains, and its Singing Dune, about three kilometres long and well over 100 metres high, gives off a low drone when the dry sand slides.
Altyn-Emel’s Przewalski’s horses were long hailed as the last truly wild horse, but a 2018 study traced them back to horses herded by Kazakhstan’s own Botai people some 5,500 years ago.
10 – The Aral Sea
The Aral Sea was the world’s fourth-largest lake until the Soviet Union began diverting its two rivers, the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya, to irrigate cotton in the 1960s, and it lost about 90% of its volume and broke into separate basins.
The Aral Sea’s old main port of Aralsk lies far from the water, with the remains of a ship graveyard at Zhalanash nearby, and the dried-out seabed has become the Aralkum desert, whose dust storms carry salt and pesticides.
Kazakhstan’s 13-kilometre Kokaral dam, finished in 2005, raised the northern Aral Sea by three metres in about seven months, far faster than engineers had expected, and salinity fell by almost three-quarters as around two dozen fish species returned.