Astana is the rare capital where the museums are younger than most visitors. Between Central Asia's largest museum, a 1,250-seat opera house and a handful of stubborn independent galleries, the city is arguing about what Kazakh art should look like.
Central Asia's largest museum: 74,000 m² over seven blocks, from Saka Golden Man armour and Berel burial finds to a hall of steppe ethnography. Tue–Sun 10:00–18:30, closed Mondays; English audio guide at the ground-floor desk.
A private gallery that has backed contemporary Kazakh painting, graphics and installation since the 2010s, with shows rotating roughly every six weeks. Small, quiet, and the staff will walk you through every wall if you ask in Russian or English.
Astana's longest-running independent art centre, founded by artist Leila Makhat, known for its international symposia that bring painters from across Eurasia to work in the city for a fortnight and leave the results behind.
The 80m glass globe from Expo 2017 is the world's largest spherical building, now a museum of future energy across eight floors. The surrounding EXPO campus is the most concentrated block of experimental architecture in Kazakhstan.
Housed in the old presidential residence on the right bank, this is as much a period piece as a museum: preserved 1990s offices, state gifts from every continent, and the working rooms from which the capital move was ordered.
Behind the white lattice façade sits a 1:500 scale model of the entire city, showing every building planned to 2030 — the clearest explanation anywhere of how Astana was designed rather than grown. Also hosts state assemblies.
Founded in 2012 with a repertoire that alternates classical Petipa with new Kazakh work built on national dance vocabulary. Daytime tours take in the rehearsal halls and the geometric ornament of the auditorium ceiling.
A 1,250-seat house opened in 2013, built with Italian acousticians and a stage machinery system on the scale of La Scala. The season runs September to June with Verdi and Puccini alongside Kazakh works like Abai and Birzhan-Sara.
A wooden house from 1846 in the old town where the poet and Alash-era statesman lived before his execution in 1938. Manuscripts, his personal library, and a frank account of the purge that took most of Kazakhstan's writing class.
The city's oldest working market, where Kazakh, Uzbek, Uyghur and Russian traders share aisles. Kurt cheese balls, horsemeat kazy sausage, dried apricots by the sack, and a whole hall of tebeteikas and embroidered chapan coats.
An open-air 1.7-hectare map of Kazakhstan in miniature, with scale models of every region's landmarks — Turkestan's mausoleum, Baikonur's launch pads, Almaty's mountains — laid out at the geographic positions they occupy.
The national drama company, performing in Kazakh since 1991 — Auezov and Mukhtar Shakhanov alongside translated Chekhov and Shakespeare. The house band plays dombra and kobyz live rather than using recorded score.