Old Town (Nur-Sultan) Travel Guide - Free

The area now understood as Old Town developed from the settlement of Akmol, whose position on the Ishim River made it a regional point of exchange and administration. Russian imperial authorities established the Akmolinsk district in the nineteenth century, and the settlement grew around the river crossing, trading activity and military-administrative institutions. The historic centre was never a grand planned old city on the scale of Central Asian capitals, but its right-bank setting preserves the basic geography from which the modern capital expanded: a settlement facing the river, with commerce and civic functions concentrated around its older streets.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Akmolinsk functioned as a small regional centre connected to surrounding steppe settlements and agricultural trade. Low-rise buildings, religious institutions, homes and commercial premises gradually formed an urban core close to the Ishim. The Church of Saints Constantine and Helen belongs to this early period of local development and remains one of the most recognisable reminders that the present capital began as a provincial settlement rather than a purpose-built national centre. Much of the original fabric has since been altered or lost, making surviving older structures especially important.

The city became Tselinograd in 1961, reflecting its central role in the Soviet Virgin Lands campaign, and the right-bank centre was reshaped by Soviet planning, public institutions, apartment construction and widened avenues. This period gave Old Town much of its present visual mixture of mature greenery, broad roads, detached houses and utilitarian civic architecture. The settlement’s economy and population changed as specialists, workers and administrators arrived from across the Soviet Union, while the older trading-town identity was absorbed into a larger regional capital.

After Kazakhstan’s capital moved from Almaty to Akmola in 1997, the city was renamed Astana in 1998 and later Nur-Sultan between 2019 and 2022. Most of the internationally recognised monumental development occurred on the southern left bank, while the older right bank remained the location of established neighbourhoods, theatres, municipal services and everyday commerce. This division created a distinctive relationship between the two sides of the Ishim: the new capital’s state architecture rose across the water, while Old Town retained the layered streetscape of Akmolinsk, Tselinograd and contemporary Astana.