As inhospitable as the roughly 64,000-square-mile desert may seem, it has attracted scores of people over the years arriving to see Beket-Ata and the four other sacred complexes scattered across its expanse: Shopan-Ata, Karaman-Ata, Shakpak-Ata and Sultan-Epe. Traveling between the five holy sites, the distinction between architecture and geology evaporates into the desert heat: Walls, ceilings, and floors are all variations of the rock from which the mosques were excavated. For pilgrims, the journey to these sacred sites is an act of devotion, where people come to honor revered Sufi masters, pray for blessings, and seek spiritual guidance in times of difficulty.
The mosques are hundreds of years old, collectively dating between the 12th and 18th centuries, but they’re new to the UNESCO World Heritage List as of this summer. The “Rock Mosques and Associated Sacred Sites of Mangystau” were added to the esteemed collection of landmarks in July.
Each mosque is associated with a different spiritual master within Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam. The five Sufi masters’ influence shaped the region’s religious landscape, and then the landscape itself, as all of the mosques—crafted in a rock-cut style that grew out of nomadic building traditions—seem to grow directly from the desert terrain; they’re carved into caves, tucked along the contours of cliffs and hillsides, and tunneled below the ground.
After three weeks travelling through Kazakhstan’s cities, mountains, and pine forests, I spent my final week in Mangystau, a landscape so different from anything I’d seen so far in the country that it felt like a whole world unto itself. Having recently visited Astana’s Grand Mosque, with its blue domes, soaring minarets, and gleaming expanses of marble, I wondered whether Mangystau’s rock-cut shrines might fall flat by comparison. For me, however, their lack of splashy grandeur is precisely what made them so compelling.
