Taraz

A caravan city on the grass sea; two thousand years of trade.

One of the oldest cities in Kazakhstan, Taraz has stood on the Silk Road for two millennia—a 'city of merchants' on the Talas River where caravans from China, Persia, and the steppe converged. Empires and nomad confederations passed across this grassland, but the market endured, and the mausoleums of Aisha Bibi and Karakhan still keep watch over the plain.

Here the landscape opens into the immense Kazakh steppe, the grass-sea that carried the overland trade between settled Asia and the nomadic world. Taraz is a reminder that the Silk Road was never only its famous oases; it was also these windswept trading towns where the steppe and the sown met and bargained.

On the sea of grass, the old market still stands.