Astana. It has been the capital since 1997, when the government moved from Almaty, and it has carried five different names in a century, including Nur-Sultan, which it was called from 2019 to 2022.
Kazakhstan's capital is the reason a dataset has to record when it last checked a name.
| From | Name |
|---|---|
| 1830s | Akmolinsk, a Russian fort and then a town |
| 1961 | Tselinograd, for the Virgin Lands campaign |
| 1992 | Akmola, after independence |
| 1998 | Astana, Kazakh for "capital" |
| 2019 | Nur-Sultan, for the departing president Nursultan Nazarbayev |
| 2022 | Astana again |
Six names, five changes, and two of them in the last decade. The 2022 reversal followed the unrest of January that year and the removal of Nazarbayev's remaining honours.
Parliament voted to move the capital from Almaty in 1994 and the move took effect on 10 December 1997. The reasons given were that Almaty was hemmed in by mountains with no room to grow, that it sat in a seismic zone, and that it was in the far south-east corner of a very large country. The reason usually added by others is that the north, with its large Russian-speaking population, was better held with the government in it.
Almaty is still the largest city, with about two million people, and remains the commercial and financial centre. It was the capital of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic and of independent Kazakhstan until 1997, under the name Alma-Ata for most of that period.
A place that changes its name keeps its identity. This site keys every place to its GeoNames identifier rather than to its name, and records the date each entry was last verified, so a rename is a new label on the same record rather than a new place. How we know explains the rest.
The places above come from GeoNames, reconciled against Wikidata. Last checked 21 September 2026. How we know · Suggest a correction