Turkistan

The city was known as Yasi when Khoja Ahmed Yasawi, a Turkic Sufi poet whose verse spread Islam among the nomads in their own language, lived and died here in the 12th century. His grave became a place of pilgrimage almost at once, and the town grew around it as a religious centre on the edge of the steppe, at the point where the settled world of the Syr Darya met the pastures to the north.

Two centuries later Timur ordered a monumental mausoleum built over the grave. Work began in 1389 and stopped when he died in 1405, leaving the main portal unfinished, with its scaffolding beams still protruding from the brickwork — the building's most recognisable feature. From the 16th century the town, by then called Turkistan, served as the chief city of the Kazakh khans, and many of them were buried in and around the shrine, which made the place a political as well as a religious centre.

The Khanate of Kokand held the city in the early 19th century, and Russian forces took it in 1864. Under Soviet rule it became a provincial town with a cotton and food-processing economy, the shrine treated as a monument rather than a place of worship; it was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003. In 2018, when Shymkent was made a city of national significance, Turkistan replaced it as the regional capital, and since then a new administrative district, hotels, an airport, a university campus and a large visitor quarter beside the shrine have transformed a quiet town into one of the country's busiest destinations.

Turkistan is first of all a pilgrimage city. The tradition of visiting Yasawi's shrine is old and widely held, and pilgrims come from across Kazakhstan, from Turkey and from the wider Turkic world; many first visit the tomb of Arystan Bab, his teacher, near Otrar, in the order custom prescribes. The rhythms of the city follow the religious calendar, with crowds at the two Eids and in Ramadan.

Yasawi's teaching itself is part of the local identity. His Divan-i Hikmet, a collection of wisdom poems in Turkic, is treated as a foundation of Kazakh spiritual literature, and Sufi practice, blended with older steppe reverence for ancestors, still colours the way the shrine is visited. The Kazakh-Turkish university that carries his name has made the city a centre of Turkic cultural exchange, with Turkish staff and students a visible presence.

Southern customs are strong: seniority at the table, arranged and semi-arranged matchmaking, weddings of several hundred guests, and a religious observance more open than in northern Kazakhstan. Uzbek influence is present in the architecture, cooking and trade of the district. Visitors are welcomed easily, but the shrine is treated as a sacred place rather than a monument — voices are lowered, shoes removed where indicated, and photographs taken with care.

About 170,000 people live in Turkistan, and the city has grown quickly since it became a regional capital in 2018, adding government offices, housing estates, hotels and a university quarter. The population is overwhelmingly Kazakh and Kazakh-speaking, with an Uzbek minority, and families are larger than the national average.

Work is in administration, education, construction, trade and the visitor economy that has grown around the shrine: hotels, restaurants, guides, taxi drivers and craft and souvenir sellers. The countryside around the city grows cotton, melons, vegetables and grain on irrigated land and grazes sheep, and a good deal of produce reaches the city's bazaar directly from those farms. Wages are low and many households rely on several small incomes.

The day is organised around the heat: an early start, a long slow middle of the day, and evenings outdoors in the parks and along the canal by the shrine, where families walk and children play late. Weekly life peaks at Friday prayers and at weekends, when pilgrim buses arrive. The city's strains are those of very fast growth — water supply in a dry plain, new districts outstripping services, and the question of how a working provincial town and a national showpiece fit in the same place.

Southern Kazakh cooking is close to Uzbek food, and plov is its centrepiece: rice cooked slowly with mutton, yellow carrot and onion in a heavy kazan, served for guests and celebrations and sold in plain shops by the portion. Beshbarmak, boiled meat over wide sheets of pasta in onion broth, remains the ceremonial Kazakh dish, brought out for family occasions and for honoured visitors.

The tandoor does much of the everyday work. Lepyoshka, flat round loaves stamped in the centre, and samsa, flaky pastries of minced mutton and onion, are baked against the oven wall and sold hot at the bazaar and on street corners. Lagman noodles, manty dumplings, shurpa broth and shashlyk grilled over charcoal fill the canteens, and kuyrdak, an offal and potato fry, is a traditional standby.

The irrigated farms of the Syr Darya give the region its fruit: melons and watermelons in late summer, apricots, grapes, tomatoes and rice grown downstream around Kyzylorda. Dried apricots, raisins and nuts are sold by weight in the market year round. Green tea, drunk plain from small bowls, is more common here than in the north, and black tea with milk is served with baursak, fried dough pieces, and with jam. Shubat, fermented camel's milk, and ayran are sold in the warm months, while alcohol is far less present in daily life than in the cities of the north.