Tash Rabat
Interesting facts
- The building is almost square, roughly 35.7 by 33.7 metres, and is set into the mountainside so that its west wall barely rises above the slope.
- Only the east front has an entrance, a gate under a tall arched portal; the other three outer walls have no doors or windows at all.
- Unlike most caravanserais, Tash Rabat has no open courtyard for unloading pack animals, one of the arguments for its origin as a monastery.
- Fragments of stylised plant ornament still survive on the inner surface of the central dome.
- A cemetery spreads along the ridge around the building, where Dungans who came from Kashgar in the late 19th century buried their dead.
- No Nestorian tombstones have been found in the surrounding cemetery, unlike the medieval Christian burial grounds of the Chüy Valley.
- According to legend, a father and son built it, but the son ran off after a caravan led by a beautiful girl before the dome’s last stone was set.
Why it is worth it
Tash Rabat — "stone lodging" — is a stone building tucked into a remote mountain valley of the Tian Shan of Kyrgyzstan, at an altitude usually given as around 3,200 metres, close to the border with China. It stands beside a winding stream of the same name, a tributary of the Kara-Koyun, in high country north of Lake Chatyr-Kul and the Torugart Pass.
Inside, the plan is far more intricate than the plain exterior suggests. Around thirty-one rooms open off a central domed hall and its corridors; each is a small square cell roofed with its own dome, the transition from square walls to round dome made with squinches, and light falling through an opening at the crown. The whole structure is built of rubble stone bedded in clay, with gypsum mortar sealing the joints. In one of the farthest rooms a deep shaft in the floor resembles a well.
Its origins remain a matter of debate. The usual account dates the present building to the 15th century and sees it as a caravanserai on a branch of the Silk Road that crossed the Tian Shan — a place where merchants travelling towards the Fergana Valley could shelter and where a stout wall offered protection from raiders. Earlier scholars suspected an older religious foundation underneath. In 1888 the Russian physician and traveller Nikolai Zeland proposed that it began as an East Syrian (Nestorian) or Buddhist monastery. Soviet-era research by the Kyrgyz Academy of Sciences in the late 1970s and early 1980s argued for a 10th-century Nestorian monastery, although no Christian objects were found. A Buddhist origin has also been put forward, and the building has been studied as a Sufi lodge, a khanqah. Local tradition offers its own versions of the founding: one credits a khan who wished to protect trading caravans from robbers, another a rich man whose construction was never finished.
Getting there
Tash Rabat lies in the At-Bashy District of Naryn Province, east of the main highway that runs south from Naryn towards the Torugart Pass. The town of Naryn is about 90 km away in a straight line. The nearest airport, Kashgar (KHG) in China, is about 155 km away but on the far side of the Torugart border crossing; within Kyrgyzstan the nearest is Issyk-Kul International Airport (IKU), about 228 km away, and the usual approach is by road via Naryn from Bishkek.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Tash Rabat is a well-preserved 10th- or 15th-century stone caravanserai in At-Bashy District, Naryn Province, Kyrgyzstan, located at an altitude of 3,200 metres (10,500 ft).
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