Mystical places in Kazakhstan
4 legends
By kind of place
All places
The Charyn Canyon
A canyon in Kazakhstan some hundred and fifty kilometres long, one stretch of which is called the Valley of Castles — sedimentary rock cut by wind and water into towers and walls up to three hundred metres. On its floor stands a grove of Sogdian ash that survived the Ice Age, a species found almost nowhere else. Kazakh tradition fills the canyon with spirits, and locals advise against sleeping on the floor of it — not for mystical reasons, but because the water rises without warning.
Mangystau
A region on the eastern shore of the Caspian where chalk outliers stand in the desert like the ruins of cities, and ridges of perfectly round stone spheres emerge from the ground — concretions up to three metres across. Beket-Ata is here too, an underground mosque cut into a chalk hill by a Sufi preacher in the eighteenth century; a steady stream of pilgrims comes to it, and tradition requires the night before a visit to be spent in the neighbouring valley.
The Ustyurt Plateau
A stony desert between the Caspian and the Aral, breaking to the plain in escarpments a hundred and fifty metres high. From the air the Ustyurt arrows are visible — stone-built structures up to a kilometre long, noticed only in aerial survey in the 1980s. They are read as drive-hunting traps, but who built them is disputed, and estimates of their age run into thousands of years. The place is empty enough that several ungulate species presumed extinct were found here.
Barsa-Kelmes
A former island in the Aral Sea whose Kazakh name means "go and you will not return". As the sea retreated it stopped being an island and became part of a salt desert. In Soviet times it carried stories of time slips: people who left for a day and came back weeks later, watches running behind. They ran in the magazine Tekhnika — Molodyozhi in the 1980s, which is where they spread from. No instrumental confirmation ever appeared, and the place has since become a monument to an ecological catastrophe instead.