UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee has inscribed the Rock Mosques and Associated Sacred Sites of Mangystau in Kazakhstan on its World Heritage List, marking the country’s first new addition to the list in more than two decades, The Astana Times reported on July 25.
The decision was adopted during the 48th session of the World Heritage Committee, held in Busan, South Korea, and covers five underground mosques carved into the rock of the Mangystau Peninsula, on Kazakhstan’s Caspian Sea coast: Beket Ata, Shopan Ata, Qaraman Ata, Shaqpaq Ata and Sultan Epe. The complexes were built between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries and combine prayer halls, historic necropolises, pilgrimage routes and sacred wells shaped by Sufi spiritual traditions and the culture of the region’s nomadic communities.
The inscription becomes Kazakhstan’s seventh World Heritage property, joining the Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi, the petroglyphs of Tanbaly, the Saryarka steppe and lakes landscape, the Kazakh section of the Silk Roads Chang’an-Tianshan corridor, the transboundary Western Tien-Shan site, and the Cold Winter Deserts of Turan, shared with Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
Erlan Karin, first deputy head of the Kazakh presidential administration and chairperson of the National Commission of Kazakhstan for UNESCO, said the effort followed instructions from president Kassym-Jomart Tokayev at the 2024 National Kurultai meeting in Atyrau. “The rock mosques of Mangystau were not only places of prayer and worship but also centres of education and learning,” Karin said, according to SaqTimes. “These rocks preserve the historical memory of our people and the teachings of our ancestors.”
Beket Ata, the best known of the five sites, remains one of the region’s most visited pilgrimage destinations, linked to the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Sufi figure of the same name. All five complexes are protected under Kazakhstan’s national register of historical and cultural monuments, with an integrated management plan covering conservation from 2027 to 2032.