Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi

The mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi in Turkistan is the building where Timurid architecture began. Timur ordered it in 1389 to replace the small twelfth-century tomb of Yasawi, a Sufi master and poet born in 1093 who spent most of his life in the town, then called Yasi, and died there in 1166. Yasawi's teaching and his verse in a Turkic language helped carry Islam across the steppe, and his grave had long been a place of pilgrimage. Timur's builders were still at work when he died in 1405, and the mausoleum has stood unfinished ever since. UNESCO made it Kazakhstan's first World Heritage Site in 2003.

The scale is enormous for its time: a rectangular block about 46 by 63 metres and nearly 39 metres high. Timur brought craftsmen from conquered cities, tile-cutters from Shiraz and masons and plasterers from Isfahan, under a master builder from Iran; tradition holds that Timur himself took part in the design. The entrance portal was never faced, and its raw brickwork shows exactly how the building was put together. Elsewhere the walls are sheathed in glazed tiles laid in geometric patterns and in Qur'anic inscriptions, and the dome over the tomb chamber is covered in ribbed green tiles with gold patterns.

Inside, the main hall, the Kazandyk, is roofed by an 18-metre brick dome, the largest surviving brick dome in Central Asia. At its centre stands a huge bronze cauldron used for religious purposes. Yasawi's tomb lies on the main axis at the far end, beneath a double dome, an inner shell 17 metres high and an outer one of 28, with muqarnas stalactite vaulting inside. More than 35 other rooms surround the hall, among them a mosque that still shows fragments of pale blue painted ornament, a library and a refectory. The ideas tested here, the radial plan, the double dome, the tile techniques, spread to Samarkand, Herat and eventually to the Mughal tombs of India.

The mausoleum is also a pilgrimage site of real weight for Kazakhs. Turkistan became the capital of the Kazakh Khanate in the sixteenth century, and khans and nobles, among them Ablai Khan, were buried around the shrine. In the Soviet period it was closed to worshippers, and local caretakers are said to have let pilgrims in secretly at night; today the flow of visitors is constant. Dress modestly and remember that for many people this is a place of prayer.

Getting there

The mausoleum stands in the northeastern part of Turkistan, about a kilometre from the modern centre. Hazrat Sultan International Airport (HSA), opened in 2020, is about 23 km away. Turkistan is also on the railway, but the train from Almaty takes close to 20 hours.