Which capital city has changed its name most often recently?

Astana, which has been Akmolinsk, Tselinograd, Akmola, Astana, Nur-Sultan and Astana again - four names since 1997 alone. Astana simply means capital in Kazakh, which is what you call a city when you have run out of ideas and need one immediately.

The capital was moved there from Almaty in 1997, and the reasons given were seismic risk and lack of room to expand. The unstated ones were more interesting: Almaty sits near the Chinese border in the south, while the north held a large ethnic Russian population and a separatist risk, and planting the capital there settled the question of whose country it was.

It was then built essentially from nothing on the steppe, in a place with winter temperatures below minus 40, by a roster of international architects working to a plan by Kisho Kurokawa. The result is a skyline of enormous symbolic buildings - a pyramid of peace, a tower with a golden orb, a tent-shaped shopping centre - which reads as either a national project or an autocrat's hobby depending on who is describing it. The Nur-Sultan phase, named for the president who ordered all of it, lasted three years before he fell from favour.