Palace of Peace and Reconciliation, Astana, Kazakhstan

Address: Tauelsizdik Ave 57, Astana 010000, Kazakhstan

Entrance cost: 600Tinge

Opening hours: 10am - 6pm, Monday - Sunday

This is listed as one of the best places to visit while in Astana, but we struggled to find information on what exactly a ‘Palace of Peace and Reconciliation’ is…

This 77m high glass pyramid was designed by English architect Norman Foster, and was opened in September 2006. When you walk into the building you will pay an entrance fee of 600Tinge, and be lead to a waiting area, where a lady dressed in red and white will pick you up for a tour of the building.

She will begin with a history of how the building was designed, and explain many facts from memory. Showing you the original drawings during the planning stages and photographs of the construction period. She will also explain some incredible facts about the foundations of the building, and that it was designed to be able to expand during hot weather and contract during the cold winter months.

Next she will lead you to the theatre hall. This incredible room hosts regular performances - you can ask your guide about when and how to buy tickets for these events. The ceiling has a small dome in the shape of the sun, with natural light from the atrium above filtering through the coloured glass, giving the theatre a soft, warm glow.

After the theatre, she will lead you to the elevators, that don’t move up and down as regular elevators do, but they move horizontally upwards towards the tip of the pyramid.

You will then find yourself in a 7-story-high atrium, standing on top of the dome that brings light to the theatre below. This atrium is full of natural life and every corner has an exhibition. While we were there in June 2017, there was an exhibition on the traditional clothes of some of the 150 peoples that make up the Kazakhstan community - Tatar, Turkish, Persian, Russian… the list goes on.

Finally, she will lead you back to the elevators and up to the top of the pyramid, where you will walk up a series of stairs with rare plants from around the world. At the top of these stairs, you will come into a conference room with a circular table that sits 100 people. The middle of the table is cut out, so you can see down to the glass sun on the atrium floor, 7 stories below.

The glass at the tip of the pyramid, in this beautiful conference room, is decorated with doves, as a sign of building relations and peace in the world.

We had a really good experience here, our guide was very friendly and knowledgeable, with a good sense of humour. She answered all our questions with confidence and we really enjoyed her company. The other guides also smiled and said hello when they saw us, excited to see foreigners in their city. At the end of the tour our guide and another lady took some time to answer our questions about Kazakhstan, it’s history as an ex-Soviet Union country and how they perceived their country in comparison to the Western world.