Information
- Location
- Түркістан облысы, Turkistan city
- Period
- 1101 – 2000
- Category
- Historical and cultural monuments of republican significance
- Type
- Mosque, Underground Mosque
- Kind
- Monuments of urban planning and architecture
Sources
- Album of historical and cultural objects and places of general pilgrimage of Kazakhstan. - Astana: KazSRIC, 2018. - 496 pages.
Description
The Hilvet or underground mosque of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi is one of the cult Sufi structures. It is located 150 m from the mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi and is a semi–underground extensive building with several rooms - for prayers, for the round-the-clock stay of pilgrims and ritual rites. In an underground mosque, followers of the Yasawi school of Sufism recited forty-day zikras - prayers praising the power of Allah.
In the early 40s of the 20th c., the Hilvet was disassembled into bricks for the construction of the Turkestan creamery. The basis for the reconstruction of the building was its layout, made in 1941. Among the authentic buildings, only one part has been preserved – the gar, dating from the 12th c. Its dimensions are 1.5x1.5 m and a depth of 4 m. The walls and arch of the building are lined with square bricks. The 1.6 m high arch from the floor is lined with an archaic “balkhi” masonry system. There are small niches for lamps in the walls. The clay floor is covered with a reed mat. Gar by the spiral staircase is connected to the prayer hall, which is a semi-basement square room with a side of 5 m. The walls are brick, the ceiling is beam type “Vassy”. The middle floor beam is supported by an octagonal wooden column.
There is a small niche in the western wall – a mihrab. The entrance to the prayer hall is carried out from the common hall – a vast rectangular room. The ceiling beams are supported by numerous wooden columns. There are ventilation holes in the ceiling. The middle part of the room is covered with a fake wooden dome coated with clay mortar.
Along the walls there are low sufis for pilgrims’ rest. Columns carried a large decorative load of the interior of the underground mosque. Their carving is attributed by experts to a special “Turkestan style”. Some of these columns are currently on display at the Tashkent Museum of Art.