Ak Orda Presidential Palace

When Kazakhstan moved its capital from Almaty to a windswept provincial town in 1997, the city had roughly 300,000 residents and temperatures that plunged to -51°C (-60°F). Four years later, construction began on the Ak Orda Presidential Palace, which rose from the steppe in just three years, built by Mabetex, the Swiss firm once embroiled in the Kremlin renovation scandal. The palace’s name translates to ‘White Horde,’ a nod to the medieval Turkic khanate, while the city itself changed names five times in six decades, most recently reverting to Astana in 2022 after a brief stint as Nur-Sultan.

Mabetex had a talent for turning around presidential real estate at a speed that made auditors nervous long before Astana was ever a punchline. The same outfit had reportedly redone thirty thousand square meters of the Kremlin in eleven months flat back in 1996, a job so quick and so lucrative that Swiss and Italian prosecutors later spent years asking exactly whose pockets got lined along the way. None of that scrutiny seems to have slowed the firm down in Kazakhstan, where it went on to build not just the palace but the opera house, an airport terminal, and a small city’s worth of ministries. The town underneath it all, meanwhile, has spent six decades unable to settle on a name, which makes it the rare capital whose presidential palace has now outlasted several of its own addresses.