48 Fun Facts About Kazakhstan

What is the capital of Kazakhstan?

Astana simply means "capital" in Kazakh: the steppe town of Akmola took the name in 1998, months after the government moved in, and Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa won the contest to plan it.

Which city was Kazakhstan's capital until 1997 and remains its largest?

Almaty, known as Verny under the tsars, was all but destroyed by earthquakes in 1887 and again in 1911 and was rebuilt each time on the same spot below the mountains.

The shanyrak at the centre of Kazakhstan's national emblem is which part of a yurt?

The roof ring was the one part that outlasted the rest: a yurt might be repaired and rebuilt many times, but its wooden crown passed from father to son, which is why it stands for family and home on the emblem.

Kazakhstan, the world's largest landlocked country, keeps a navy on which sea?

The Caspian Sea has no outlet to the ocean, so the world's ninth-largest country still counts as landlocked despite its long shore there; the small fleet is based at the port of Aktau.

Kazakhstan and which other country are the only landlocked states usually counted as spanning two continents?

Azerbaijan has a few districts north of the Greater Caucasus watershed, just as Kazakhstan's far west lies beyond the Ural River, and both lines are the usual boundary between Europe and Asia.

Khan Tengri, Kazakhstan's highest peak, stands on the Kyrgyz and Chinese borders in which mountain range?

The Tian Shan peak is 6,995 m of rock, but its ice cap lifts it to 7,010 m, so climbers count it as the world's most northerly 7,000-metre summit.

Which popular garden flower grows wild on Kazakhstan's steppes and mountains, part of its original home?

The tulip reached Dutch gardens by way of Persia and Ottoman Turkey, but its wild ancestors still bloom each spring across Central Asia, Kazakhstan included.

Which lake in Kazakhstan has fresh water in its western half and salt water in its eastern half?

Lake Balkhash is nearly cut in two by a peninsula: the Ili River pours into the shallow west and keeps it fresh, while the deeper east, joined only by a narrow strait, stays salty.

Which sea on Kazakhstan's border mostly dried up after Soviet canals diverted its rivers?

The Aral Sea is not quite lost: a dam Kazakhstan finished in 2005 trapped river water in the small northern basin, where the level rose and the fishing came back.

Which animal were the Botai people of northern Kazakhstan herding 5,500 years ago, the earliest evidence of its kind?

The horse was kept in corrals at Botai, yet ancient DNA showed in 2018 that those herds were the ancestors of Przewalski's horse, long thought truly wild, and not of today's domestic breeds.

The Saka of ancient Kazakhstan were close kin of which famous nomads of the western steppe?

The Scythians' eastern cousins left the "Golden Man", a young warrior buried at Issyk in some 4,000 gold ornaments, who has become one of the emblems of independent Kazakhstan.

Which empire subjugated the territory of Kazakhstan in the 13th century?

The Mongols came for revenge: in 1218 the governor of Otrar, in what is now southern Kazakhstan, seized a trade caravan sent by Genghis Khan and had its merchants put to death.

The Kazakh Khanate was founded after the 15th-century break-up of which state?

The Golden Horde's eastern steppe had passed to the Uzbek khan Abu'l-Khayr when two sultans, Kerei and Janibek, led their followers away from him and founded the Kazakh Khanate in the mid-15th century.

In 1937 the Soviet government deported which entire ethnic group from its Far East to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan?

Koreans, nearly 172,000 of them, were put on trains because Moscow feared they would spy for Japan; it was the first time the Soviet Union deported a whole nationality.

In the 1950s Khrushchev's Virgin Lands campaign ploughed up the grasslands of northern Kazakhstan to grow which crop?

Wheat harvests boomed at first, then the over-ploughed soil began to blow away in dust storms; even so, the campaign left northern Kazakhstan one of the world's big grain belts.

Which Soviet policy led to Kazakhstan's famine of 1930-33?

Collectivization took the animals nomads lived on and forced them onto farms the land could not support; so many died or fled abroad that Kazakhs became a minority in their own republic for decades.

Under which Soviet leader's constitution did Kazakhstan become a full union republic?

Joseph Stalin's 1936 constitution completed a sixteen-year climb: Soviet Kazakhstan had begun in 1920 as part of Russia, with its first capital at Orenburg, a city that now lies on the Russian side of the border.

The USSR's first nuclear bomb test in 1949 took place at a site near which Kazakh town?

Semipalatinsk, since renamed Semey, lived beside four decades of blasts until a protest movement that drew thousands of local people helped force the test site to close in 1991.

Kazakhstan's 1989 anti-nuclear movement took half its name from which US state, home of America's own test site?

Nevada went into the name as a gesture of solidarity with American campaigners; led by the poet Olzhas Suleimenov, the movement helped close the Soviet test site in 1991, after 456 explosions.

Yuri Gagarin's Vostok 1 was launched in April 1961 from which site in Kazakhstan?

Baikonur is a borrowed name: the launch pads stand at Tyuratam, and the mining town of Baikonur lies a few hundred kilometres away, a mismatch said to have been meant to mislead Western observers.

Which Soviet space shuttle made its only flight, uncrewed, from Kazakhstan in 1988?

Buran circled the Earth twice and then landed itself under automatic control, something NASA's shuttle was never designed to do, yet the orbiter never flew again.

Where did Kazakhstan stand in the order of Soviet republics declaring independence in 1991?

Last of the fifteen republics: Kazakhstan declared independence on 16 December 1991, and the Soviet Union it had just left was dissolved only ten days later.

Who was Kazakhstan's first president, in power from independence until 2019?

Nursultan Nazarbayev, who started out as a steelworker, kept the title Elbasy, "Leader of the Nation", when he stepped down, and lost it only after the unrest of January 2022.

Who succeeded Kazakhstan's first president in 2019?

Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, a Mandarin-speaking former diplomat, proposed renaming the capital after his predecessor on his first day in office, then signed the change back in 2022.

Nauryz, one of Kazakhstan's biggest holidays, marks which moment of the year?

The spring equinox is new year in the old calendar of the region, so families greet it with nauryz-kozhe, a soup of seven ingredients eaten to bring a prosperous year.

What is the currency of Kazakhstan?

The tenge replaced the Soviet rouble in November 1993, and the first notes had to be printed in Britain, because Kazakhstan had no banknote works of its own until 1995.

What bird soars beneath the sun on Kazakhstan's turquoise flag?

A steppe eagle was chosen because eagles flew on the banners of Kazakh tribes for centuries as a sign of freedom and power; on the flag it glides beneath a sun whose rays are shaped like grain.

Which long-necked, two-stringed lute is the national instrument of Kazakhstan?

The dombra matters so much that Kazakhstan gave it a national day each July, when thousands play at once, and UNESCO lists its wordless solo pieces, called kuy, as intangible heritage.

Kazakhstan's national drink kumys is made from what?

Fermented mare's milk comes out fizzy and faintly alcoholic because a mare's milk holds more sugar than a cow's, giving the yeasts more to work on.

The name of the Central Asian dish beshbarmak literally means what?

Five fingers, because the dish of meat laid over flat noodles in broth was traditionally eaten with the hand rather than with cutlery.

Kazakh is part of which language family?

Turkic speech spread over the region after the Turkic Khaganate arose in the sixth century, replacing the Iranian languages of earlier nomads; Kazakh belongs to its Kipchak branch, with Kyrgyz and Karakalpak.

A 2017 decree ordered the Kazakh language to move from Cyrillic to which alphabet?

Latin letters would be a return, not a first: Kazakh was written in a Latin alphabet from 1929 until Cyrillic replaced it in 1940, and before that in Arabic script.

What is the largest religion in Kazakhstan?

Islam reached the southern towns with Arab armies in the eighth century, helped by their defeat of a Chinese force at the Talas River in 751, and took centuries more to spread across the nomads' grasslands.

Which conqueror ordered the great Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi built in the late 14th century?

Timur, known in the West as Tamerlane, raised it over the grave of a revered poet and mystic; work stopped when he died in 1405, which is why parts of the building still stand unfinished.

Khan Shatyr, a giant transparent tent in the capital, was designed by which British architect?

Norman Foster hung what is billed as the world's largest tent from a single mast and gave it a see-through skin, so that its indoor beach stays warm while the winter outside falls to minus 35°C.

Kazakhstan has Central Asia's largest economy, built mainly on which industry?

Oil and gas took off after 1993, when Chevron signed a 40-year deal to develop the giant Tengiz field in the west of the country, taking a half share in the venture.

Kazakhstan has been the world's largest producer of which metal since 2009?

Uranium from Kazakhstan made up about 40% of world mine output in 2025, and most of it is never dug: the ore is dissolved underground and pumped to the surface as a solution.

Which Kazakh boxer held the WBA, WBC, IBF and IBO middleweight titles?

Gennady Golovkin, known as GGG, was talked into boxing as a boy by his two older brothers, both of whom died while serving in the army in the early 1990s.

Which Moscow-born tennis player gave Kazakhstan its first Grand Slam singles title at Wimbledon in 2022?

Elena Rybakina had switched from Russia in 2018 for the funding Kazakhstan's federation offered, so she lifted the trophy in the very year Wimbledon had barred Russian players.

Barys, the top ice-hockey club from Kazakhstan's capital, has played since 2008–09 in which league?

The KHL was founded in 2008 to span several ex-Soviet countries, and Barys jumped into it after a single season in Russia's second tier, becoming its one club from Kazakhstan.

Medeu, a mountain arena above Kazakhstan's largest city, saw 47 world records fall in under twenty years in which winter sport?

Speed skating times tumbled there, helped by the thin air 1,691 m up; the rink was the showpiece of the city's bid for the 2022 Winter Olympics, lost to Beijing by four votes.

The ice-hockey club Barys is named after the Kazakh word for which big cat?

The snow leopard is a national emblem: in the 1990s the president promised that Kazakhstan would become a "Central Asian snow leopard" by 2030, his answer to East Asia's tiger economies.

The Kazakh government later used the 2006 mockumentary Borat for what?

Tourism campaigns, in the end: after years of official anger at the film, the national tourist board took Borat's own catchphrase in 2020 as its slogan, "Kazakhstan. Very nice!"

A disputed theory says the name of Kazakhstan's largest city derives from the Kazakh word for which fruit?

Apple trees really do come from here: genetic studies trace the orchard apple back to Malus sieversii, the wild species that still grows in the mountains above the city.

Charyn Canyon in south-eastern Kazakhstan is carved out of what rock?

Red sandstone weathered into the towers of its "Valley of Castles"; nearby along the river survives a grove of Sogdian ash, said to be a remnant of forests from the end of the Ice Age.

Which southern city became Kazakhstan's third 'city of republican significance' in June 2018?

Shymkent earned the status by passing a million residents that spring, which took it out of its region and put it directly under the national government.

What is the title of the major work of 19th-century Kazakh poet Abai Qunanbaiuly?

The Book of Words urges his fellow Kazakhs towards schooling and upright living, the same cause that led Abai to translate Pushkin, Lermontov and Krylov into Kazakh.

Kazakhstan became the 162nd member of which organisation in 2015?

The WTO received Kazakhstan's application in January 1996, when the trade body was barely a year old, yet did not admit it until November 2015.