The new capital of Kazakhstan does not lack for exotic buildings, some of them best described by irreverent local nicknames: the banana (a bright yellow office tower), seven barrels (a cluster of apartment towers), the cigarette lighter (the Ministry of Transport and Communications). But one such structure, a national monument called the Baiterek, does not lend itself to nicknames, for the simple reason that it looks like nothing else. Not on this planet, anyway.
Baiterek, which means "tall poplar tree" in Kazakh, is a 318-foot tower buttressed by an exoskeleton of white-painted steel. At the top is a gold-tinted glass sphere. According to the epigraph at its base, the monument represents the Kazakh myth of Samruk, a sacred bird that every year lays a golden egg—the sun—in the crown of an enormous tree of life. Its designer? None other than Nursultan Nazarbayev, the steelworker turned strongman who has run the country since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. He is said to have roughed out the original concept on a paper napkin.
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