Even after 20 years, Kazakhs remain cold on Astana’s status as nation’s capital
Despite a pantheon of lavish, futuristic architecture, many people who were forced to move to Astana for work or family reasons find the city an uncomfortable fit
For Dina, a hairless Sphinx living in a newly opened cat cafe in Kazakhstan’s capital Astana, this winter was a difficult one to bear.
Temperatures in the steppe city of more than one million people reached minus 40 degrees Celsius as Central Asia experienced its coldest winter in a decade, testing heating systems across the region.
During this time Dina took to sitting near the radiators of the Miki Piki cafe, which opened in 2017 and houses cats of more than a dozen different breeds.
“You have to be ever so careful with them,” said cafe owner Aigul Kurmanaliyeva of the hairless Canadian Sphynx breed. “They often need to wear clothes outside. They are very prone to illness.”
Human residents of Astana, the world’s second-coldest capital city behind Mongolia’s Ulan Bator, can empathise.
The way the city is planned means that citizens principally live in isolation, travelling by car from home to work and back again
Astana, the government’s showpiece project on the Ishim river in northern Kazakhstan, took over as the country’s capital 20 years ago. But many of its residents compare Astana unfavourably with the former capital Almaty, a city of 1.5 million people that lies 1,000km further south and where temperatures are notably warmer.