What remains of Balasagun

Balasagun was the capital of the Karakhanid state, a Turkic dynasty that adopted Islam in the tenth century and dominated Central Asia for the best part of two hundred years. The northern branch of the Silk Road ran through the city, which made it rich: coins were minted here, caravanserais worked here, and mosques stood alongside Christian and Buddhist communities.

It was in Balasagun, in 1069, that Yusuf Balasaguni wrote the Kutadgu Bilig — “Wisdom of Royal Glory” — the first major literary work in a Turkic language. It is a treatise in verse on what a ruler ought to be: roughly what Machiavelli would take on four centuries later, written instead as a poem thirteen thousand lines long.

The Mongols arrived in 1218. Unlike many cities, Balasagun surrendered without a fight and was renamed Gobalyk, “good city”, for its trouble. It did not save it. Trade routes shifted, the irrigation system decayed, the river changed course. By the fourteenth century the city was empty, and the centuries since have been spent under the plough.

Only the minaret of the congregational mosque survived, because it was too massive to be worth taking apart for bricks. It originally stood around forty-five metres tall. A fifteenth-century earthquake took the top third, leaving the twenty-five metres you see today.

A narrow spiral staircase runs up the inside in complete darkness; the caretaker hands you a torch. The climb takes three minutes and is quieter than anything else on the site. From the top you can see the whole valley to the range.

Beside the tower is a field of balbals — stone figures that Turkic nomads set over burials between the sixth and tenth centuries. They were brought here from across the valley to save them from the tractors, and they stand in rows with quite different faces: some almost portraits, some sketched with two lines. Each holds a vessel in its right hand.

The small museum holds ceramics, coins, jewellery and grave markers from the site — including stones cut with Nestorian crosses and Syriac inscriptions. A Christian community lived comfortably in a Muslim capital. On the Silk Road that was not an exception; it was the norm.

If you are expecting Samarkand, no. There is one tower, a field of stones and a small museum. But if you stand there understanding that this is the entire physical remainder of a state that lasted two centuries and produced a work of literature still read today, the visit becomes something else.

We include it in a day tour with the Kegety waterfall, which balances the history with a gorge and running water. It works all year.