Aisha Bibi
Interesting facts
- According to one legend, 16-year-old Aisha was bitten by a snake that had crept into her clothes while she bathed in the Assa River, an hour from her beloved.
- Another version of the legend says the ruler had a mullah marry them as she lay dying, then called out three times that she had become 'bibi', a wife.
- The historian Bayan Tujakbayeva links the story to a recorded death in 1034 of a Talas ruler’s daughter travelling to join her fiancé, the heir of Ghazna.
- Wedding parties in Taraz still re-enact the legend, travelling from the Karakhan Mausoleum in the city to Aisha Bibi to ask the lovers for a blessing.
- Women from the Taraz oasis have long come to the tomb to pray for children and a happy family.
- Its ornament relies on light and shadow rather than colour, a pre-Mongol approach that also softens the glare of strong sun on the walls.
- The rounded corner columns imitate the wooden columns of pre-Islamic Sogdian buildings, each girdled by a band of calligraphy at its narrowest point.
- The inscriptions praise beauty and love; one surviving couplet speaks simply of autumn, clouds and the beauty of the earth.
- The neighbouring tomb of Babaji Khatun takes its name from a phrase usually translated as 'wise queen'.
- The mausoleum stands on a ridge about 18 kilometres west of Taraz, looking out over the oasis from the west.
Why it is worth it
Few buildings in Central Asia are as delicate as the small mausoleum of Aisha Bibi. Its walls are faced with carved terracotta tiles, forming a lace of floral and geometric ornament and stylised calligraphy in some sixty different patterns. Built in the eleventh or twelfth century, it stands in the village that bears its name in southern Kazakhstan, on the old Silk Road route that passed through the city of Taraz, and it is one of the finest surviving monuments of the Karakhanid era.
Architecturally, the mausoleum belongs to a tradition that goes back to the Samanid Mausoleum in Bukhara: a compact brick tomb in which decoration is not applied to the structure but woven into the brickwork itself. The bricks, both original and those used in restoration, were made from clay from Sauran, and the play of light across the deep relief of the tiles changes through the day. The Kazakh scholar and traveller Shoqan Walikhanov painted the monument in 1856, and the Russian orientalist Vasily Bartold recorded its ruins in 1893. In Soviet times, around 1960, the remains were enclosed in a protective glass shell; in 2002 Kazakhstan began a new restoration and laid out the surrounding grounds as a memorial park.
The mausoleum is wrapped in legend. Local tradition holds that Aisha Bibi was the daughter of a Sufi poet and the beloved of a Karakhanid ruler of Taraz, and that she died before they could marry; the grieving ruler then raised this tomb in her memory. About ten metres away stands a second mausoleum, that of Babaji Khatun, whom the same stories link to Aisha Bibi. Across the road lies a small limestone cave regarded as sacred.
Getting there
The mausoleum is in the village of Aisha Bibi in Zhambyl Region, Kazakhstan, about 15 km west of the centre of Taraz. The nearest airport is Taraz International Airport (DMB), about 8 km away in a straight line.
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From the encyclopaedia
The Aisha-Bibi is an 11th or 12th-century mausoleum for a noble woman located in the village of Aisha Bibi, 18 km (11 mi) west of Taraz, Kazakhstan on the Silk Road. It is locally famous as a monument to love and faithfulness.
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