Mizdakhan is the largest, oldest and most beautiful of the countless necropolises of the Great Steppe, according to legend, which began with the tomb of the first man – either the Zoroastrian Gayomard, or the Adam familiar to us all. Here ladders are placed on the graves, one of the coffins spontaneously grew up to 25 meters long, barren women roll down from the top of the mound, the ground is covered with pyramids of 7 bricks, and on the edge of the necropolis the World Clock counts down to the End of the World.
By public transport it takes less than an hour to get from Nukus to Mizdakhan, though with two transfers, but still less than an hour – first to the Old Town (where nothing resembling the Old Town, at least of Stalinist times, can be seen), then – to Khojeyli, a large (104,000 inhabitants) satellite town, whose name means Pilgrimage. Mizdakhan is literally the edge of the earth, 5 kilometers away from it is the insurmountable border of Turkmenistan (and 15 kilometers away is the ancient Kunya Urgench).
Such necropolises with mausoleums on ordinary graves. – this is a peculiarity of nomads who lived in wandering and only posthumously received a capital house and a piece of land, which will not be abandoned. Karakalpak necropolises turned out to be the most lush in the Turkic steppes.
…It is very difficult to find any reliable information about Mizdakhan – all its real history is drowned in legends. The area of the necropolis is measured in tens of hectares, the age – thousands of years, its name itself is consonant with the name Mazda (or rather, Ahura-Mazda – the supreme light god in Zoroastrianism), and resting under the mound Jumart – with the name of the Zoroastrian first man Gayomart. In principle, Khorezm – one of several (according to different hypotheses, of course) primordia of Zoroastrianism, so why not?
To the right of Mizdakhan, the clay towers of Gyaur-kala – the Fortress of the Infidels – can be seen in the distance. This name itself is not uncommon in Khorezm, and apparently goes back to those settlements, which legends identify with the pre-Muslim era. The largest Fortress of Infidels belongs to Merv, the oldest city of Central Asia in the depths of Turkmenistan, but there is a legend about Mizdakkhan ruins that it was the city of Mazda described in the “Avesta”.
In fact, the city of Mizdakhan has been known since the 2nd century B.C. It formed a “double system” with Old Urgench, having risen and withered earlier, and there was indeed a certain large shrine of Zoroastrian times, where pilgrims from all over Khorezm were drawn to. The Arabs, having conquered this region in 712, destroyed local chronicles and in general all texts in Khorezmian, which they could reach, but a holy place is never empty: the change of religion changed in Mizdakhan only the names of the heroes of legends, but the veneration of the ancient shrine, now Muslim, remained.
The last heyday of the city fell on the era of the Golden Horde, and Mizdakhan was devastated either by Tamerlane in 1388, or by time and nature in the 17th century, when the capital moved from neighboring Urgench to Khiva – in fact, it happened not from the whim of the khan, but because the Amu Darya changed its course, and the north of Khorezm remained away from the roads and began to be covered with sand.
Well, and the Fortress of the Infidels, the ruins of the Horde city made the rumor already in the centuries not so long ago – the memory that the worship of the local shrine began long before the Muslims, could not be erased for a thousand years.
Pay attention – from some graves rise ladders, which here are called “tabyt“. On others they simply lie down. Such a tradition is not found in many other places, but its symbolism is well understood.
Burial in those parts is done in this way: The deceased is washed and wrapped with his head in a white cloth (the color of mourning). Then he is wrapped in several kinds of fabrics (often carpets), the fabrics are embroidered with quotations from the Koran: after the funeral it is taken to the house, with the first star it is spread out, and with sunrise it is burnt or handed over to the mosque. The deceased is put on a tabyt and taken to the cemetery. The grave is dug about two meters deep with a small, L-shaped recess towards Mecca. The deceased wrapped only in white cloth is laid in the niche, his head is turned towards Mecca. The graves are not buried. Logs are laid across the graves, a plank of reeds is placed on top, and all this is covered with earth. Mounds are formed, on top of which a tabyt is placed. In local beliefs, the tabyt, turning into a horse, helps the deceased to move through the other world. So in some places these are not ladders, but rather stretchers.
Throughout the necropolis there are countless mausoleums, the age of which can be easily mistaken for several centuries, besides, the decline of Khorezm has an effect – millennia-old buildings were built stronger and can look better than century-old ones.
Pyramids are made of fallen debris, always seven stones each. There are many interperetations and legends about this number, but the original one is probably forgotten, it’s just the way it is.
At the entrance to the hill from the side of the main gate is the Mazlumkhan-sulu mausoleum, which is very much loved by art historians: not only is it completely original in Khorezm architecture, but it is also thoroughly buried in the ground, looking up only with its roof and domes. Science claims that it was built at the turn of the 13th-14th centuries, under the Golden Horde, and was originally either a palace, after the death of the owner buried in the ground up to the roof and turned into a mausoleum, or at its core – originally an underground pre-Muslim temple, rebuilt in later centuries. Whatever the case, the construction is Central Asian, but it has no direct analogs.
It is the World Clock, and the legend of it is simple and stunningly beautiful. As it has already been said, Mizdakkhan was considered by the rumor to be the grave of the first man, whether it was Giaour Gayomart or Adam, to Muslims as much as to Christians. So, according to legend, the World Clock is his mausoleum, and since it was built, every year one brick falls out of its walls, thus counting down to the End of the World. It’s less than halfway collapsed so far, so we still have a few thousand years to go.
Gayomart, if it is true his cult, was the son of Ahura-Mazda (Ormuzda) either from his daughter-goddess of the earth Spandarmat, or emerged from the sweat and tears of the deity in the struggle with the “devil” Angra-Mainyu (Ahriman). From modern humans the first man was quite distant, huge, shining like the sun and equal in all three dimensions. He, according to legend, killed Arezur and saddled Ahriman, but in the end he was devoured by him, and either from the spilled blood or from the hidden seed of Gayomart sprouted a rhubarb bush, from the flowers of which came the first people of the “modern type”, male and female. And when the End of the World comes, Gayomart will rise first of the dead, and half of the sunlight will go to him and half to all other people. That is, he will rise from those ruins when the last brick falls.
The World Clock is also called the mausoleum of Erezhep-Khalifa, or more correctly Rajab-Khalifa – according to legend, he was a Muslim preacher of the time of the formation of Islam, and the building itself served as a madrasa during his lifetime, and posthumously became a mausoleum. Rajab is the seventh month of the Arabian calendar, and Rajab-Khalifa had seven pupils, such Khorezmian apostles – hence seven-stone pyramids. Well and cynical archeologists in due time excavated the mausoleum, and found under it not the equal Gayomart, not Adam and not even the old sheikh, but a clueless woman who died in the 15th century. The mausoleum itself dates back to the 8th century, and it is probably the oldest building in Central Asia (another contender is the Hazor Mosque near Navoi).
You should walk here very carefully, because it is a very bad sign to collapse someone else’s pyramid. And to take something with you is guaranteed to bring a curse on your head.
Closer to the center of the necropolis is another mysterious place – the mausoleum of Shamun-Nabi with seven domes.
Shamun-Nabi is a character perhaps even more mysterious than Rajab Khalifa, but most legends agree that he is the chief in the Mizdakkhan gathering of saints. It is said that he was a preacher who came here long before the first Muslims, but even then he heralded the coming true faith. Shamun is clearly consonant with the name Simon, and perhaps it is something like the legends about the sermons of St. Andrew in Kiev? After all apostles after the ascension of Christ went all over the world and legends find their traces up to the Arctic Circle and the Pacific Ocean. Among the apostles was Simon the Canon, and Peter, the guardian of the gates of paradise, the full name of Simon Peter, and in pre-Muslim Central Asia was strong Nestorianism. There are many legends about Shamun-Nabi in general, and the only thing they have in common is that he preached here even before the adoption of Islam. Thus, in one of the legends he was a warrior-preacher, and he challenged King Giaur (Infidel) to a duel – he agreed out of pride, but in the heat of the fight he threw round grains under Shamun’s feet, the hero rolled on them and fell on his knees, but before Giaur could behead the hero, Shamun’s dog smelled the trouble, dug an underground passage and tore up the villain. Shamun, however, could not bear the shame of kneeling in front of Giaur and cut off his legs, which he would regain only at God’s judgment. The mausoleum, however, has a pir (patron) pole, dilapidated in Khorezm and devoid of a flag.
According to legend, Shamun-Nabi continues to grow after death – not a rare image in Uzbekistan, for example, St. Daniel in Samarkand so grew to 18 meters, and Sultan-baba in his mausoleum near the current station Beruni – up to 33 meters, well, and the sarcophagus of Shamun-Nabi is now 25 meters long. In favor of the fact that he really grows, indirectly evidenced by the age of the mausoleum – it was built in the 18th century, and the previous one in its place – in the 16th. The sarcophagus, as archaeologists have established, is empty, so in any case it is not a physical body that is growing. The strangest hypothesis I’ve heard claims that the huge sarcophagus was originally filled with dinosaur bones found at the bottom of the dried up Amu Darya riverbed in the late 16th century – that turn of the river into the Aral Sea, either from the Caspian or from Sarykamysh, exsanguinated Old Urgench and forced the khan to move to Khiva, and the version that the Shamun-Nabi mausoleum is somehow connected with that catastrophe is found without dinosaur bones. The sarcophagus resembles a table set long ago with flatbread petrified from time and grief.