Kazakhstan document photos online

When Kazakhstan launched its own money in November 1993, the freshly printed banknotes were so secret that four IL-76 cargo planes flew them in from London on roughly 18 covert flights in a single week. The currency was the tenge, a name borrowed from the medieval Turkic silver coins 'tanga' that once jingled across the Silk Road. From a country that has no coastline yet keeps a navy on the Caspian Sea, and whose southern steppe launched the first satellite and the first human into space, the tenge is just one chapter in a national identity that Kazakhstan is still actively rewriting, right down to the alphabet on its passports.

• Passport power In the 2025 Henley Passport Index the Kazakhstani passport ranked 65th, giving its holders visa-free or simplified access to 77 destinations worldwide.
• Passport design The cerulean-blue Kazakhstani biometric passport, issued since 5 January 2009, prints its data page in only Kazakh and English and stays valid for ten years.
• Citizenship Kazakhstan does not recognize dual citizenship: anyone who takes a foreign passport automatically loses Kazakh nationality and must surrender their Kazakh passport and ID within 30 days.
• Identity reform Kazakhstan is converting the Kazakh language from Cyrillic to a Latin alphabet, a reform now scheduled to reach official documents and passports by 2031.
• Currency origin The tenge, introduced in 1993 at a rate of one tenge to 500 Soviet rubles, takes its name from the medieval Turkic coins 'tanga' and 'denge' that also gave Russian its word for money.
• Banknote prize Kazakhstan's National Bank patented a colour-shifting security ink called SPARK, and its 10,000-tenge note was crowned best new banknote of the 2011 issue by the International Bank Note Society.
• Space cradle The world's first satellite, Sputnik 1, and the first human in orbit, Yuri Gagarin, both launched from Baikonur in Kazakhstan, still the planet's oldest and largest operational spaceport.
• Geography Kazakhstan is the world's largest landlocked country and ninth largest overall, yet it maintains a naval force on the enclosed Caspian Sea.
• Shifting capital The capital has changed names five times, most recently flipping from Astana to Nur-Sultan in 2019 and back to Astana in 2022.