Astana looks like it was born in 1997, but the Ishim bend holds 4,000 years of steppe history: Saka kurgans, the medieval settlement of Bozok, a Cossack stockade of 1830, Stalin's ALZHIR camp and a Soviet grain city called Tselinograd.
The 74,000 m² museum's archaeology wing holds the Golden Man of Issyk replica, Saka gold from Berel and Bronze Age Begazy-Dandybai grave goods. Open Tue–Sun 10:00–19:00 (ticket desk from 09:30); adult entry 1,500 KZT, guided tour 6,000 KZT.
The 8th–14th century town excavated in 1999 on the Buzykty lakeshore: three fortified enclosures, a mausoleum necropolis and Kipchak-era kilns that proved a Silk Road branch settlement stood here 700 years before the capital. Open ground, no fee.
Housed in the old Presidential Residence (Rezidentsiya No. 1, occupied 1997–2004), the collection includes nomadic weaponry, saddles, Kazakh khanate-era manuscripts and 3,500 diplomatic gifts. Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00, entry 500 KZT, cameras 500 KZT extra.
A 1.7 hectare scale map of the country with miniatures of Otrar, Turkestan's Khoja Ahmed Yasawi mausoleum, Tamgaly petroglyphs and Sauran — the medieval sites of the wider steppe you cannot reach in three days. Daily 10:00–20:00, 1,500 KZT.
The Akmolinsk Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland, where 18,000 women were imprisoned from 1938. A reconstructed barrack, the Arch of Sorrow, Stalin's wagon and walls listing 7,000 names sit 35 km west. Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00, 500 KZT.
Right-bank ground zero of the 1954 Virgin Lands Campaign, when 640,000 Soviet settlers turned Akmolinsk into Tselinograd. Khrushchev-era ministry blocks, the Tselinnikov monument and the 1960s Palace of Culture frame the old Soviet civic core.
The city museum traces the 1830 Cossack stockade on the Ishim, the 1863 uyezd town, the Trans-Aral railway of 1931 and the 1961 renaming to Tselinograd, with photographs of the low wooden city that stood here in 1996. Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00, 600 KZT.
The 2013 monument to Kazakh soldiers: a bronze warrior triad spanning Saka horsemen, the Panfilov Division that defended Moscow in 1941 and the modern army, with an eternal flame honouring the 600,000 Kazakhstanis killed in the Second World War.
The 1856 wooden church of the Cossack settlement, the oldest surviving building in Astana, rebuilt in stone and still ringed by single-storey Akmolinsk houses. Services daily 08:00 and 17:00; entry free, women cover heads at the door.
The station that made the city: the 1931 line linking Akmolinsk to Karaganda's coal brought the deportation trains of the 1930s and the Virgin Lands settlers of 1954. Soviet-era mosaics survive in the main hall; the platform buffet still serves samsa.
The 2014 spiral building by Foster + Partners holds the state archive of the capital move: 1994 parliamentary vote papers, the 1997 relocation decree, and rotating exhibitions on independence in December 1991. Mon–Fri 09:00–18:00, free with passport.
Yurt-makers, dombra luthiers and felt-workers demonstrate crafts that survived collectivisation, beneath the 91m Kazakh Eli column marking independence in 1991 and its reliefs of the 1986 Zheltoksan protests in Almaty.