Turkestan and the Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi

Khoja Ahmed Yasawi was born in Ispidjab, today's Sayram, in 1093 and spent most of his life in Yasi, where he died in 1166. He led a regional school of Sufism, made the town an important centre of learning and became one of the most revered figures of the Turkic-speaking world; his small original tomb became a place of pilgrimage. In 1389 Timur ordered a far larger mausoleum to replace it, bringing in Persian craftsmen led by Khwaja Hosein Shirazi. Work stopped when Timur died in 1405, leaving the entrance portal and parts of the interior incomplete, which today shows clearly how the building was constructed.

In the 16th century the town, by then called Turkestan, became the capital of the Kazakh Khanate, and many khans and nobles, among them Ablai Khan and Esim Khan, were buried near the shrine. The Russian Empire took the town in 1864. In the Soviet era the mausoleum was restored but closed to worshippers; restoration campaigns ran from 1945, the last from 1993 to 2000. It was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2003, and is cared for by the Azret-Sultan State Historical and Cultural Reserve Museum.

The mausoleum remains a living place of pilgrimage for Kazakh Muslims, and Turkestan has been called the second Mecca of Central Asia; its old name, Hazrat-e Turkestan, refers to Yasawi himself. As the capital of the Kazakh Khanate, the town is also closely bound up with Kazakh national identity, and in 2018 it became the administrative centre of the Turkistan Region.