Turkey | Istanbul | Caravanserais | Shambhala

Update: If you are unfortunate enough to be in New York City you can swing by the American Museum of Natural History for their new Silk Road Exhibition, which features several of the places listed below, including Xian and Turpan.

From the Sultanahmed Koftesi I walked up Divan Yolu and turned right at Constantine’s Column onto Vezirhani Street. This neighborhood, which includes the Grand Bazaar, is the repository of many old hans, or caravanerserais, which offered lodging and warehousing to foreign merchants and traders, some of whom plied the Silk Road. Istanbul was of course the western terminus of at least two of the overland branches of the Silk Road. Burak Sansal summarizes these:

The caravan routes transporting silk, china, paper, spices and precious stones from one continent to the other followed several itineraries in Asia before arriving in Anatolia, which served as a bridge linking it to Europe via the Thrace region. These caravan routes later acquired the name of silk roads and Anatolia constituted the crossroad of these routes. The major cities lying on the Silk Road Anatolia were, in the north: Trabzon, Gümüshane, Erzurum, Sivas, Tokat, Amasya, Kastamonu, Adapazari, Izmit, Istanbul and Edirne; and in the south: Mardin, Diyarbakir, Adiyaman, Malatya, Kahramanmaras, Kayseri, Nevsehir, Konya, Isparta, Antalya and Denizli. Another frequently used itinerary is known to be the one between Erzurum, Malatya, Kayseri, Kirsehir, Ankara, Bilecik, Bursa, Iznik, Izmit and Istanbul.

The Vezir Han, one of the more venerable of the caravanserais in the Grand Bazaar area, is located not far from the corner of Vezirhani Street and Divan Yolu. The entrance does not seem to be marked, but this might well be the portal leading to the inner courtyard. The han itself was built sometime in the fourteenth century, and thus may have caught the tail end of the trading boom that accompanying the Pax Mongolica established by Chingis Khan and his successors, most of whom favored free trade. In his Guidebook to the Silk Road, written just before the Black Plague of 1348–50, Balducci Pegolotti wrote that you could travel from Khanbalik (Beijing) to the Black Sea in 300 days. “The road you travel . . . to Cathay (China) is perfectly safe, whether by day or by night, according to what the merchants say who have used it,” he wrote.

Just down the street, a gateway on the left leads to the Nuruosmaniye Mosque and the Grand Bazaar. The mosque is now undergoing renovation and was not open on the day I was there.

Nuruosmaniye Mosque, started in 1748 by Mahmut I and completed in 1755 by Osman III: the first large mosque to incorporate the Baroque style then popular in Europe.

The passageway past the Nuruosmaniye Mosque leads to the famous and indeed notorious Grand Bazaar, one of the world’s oldest and largest markets, founded in 1461, with more than 58 covered streets and over 1,200 shops. I will be returning here before I leave Istanbul, but for the moment I am hot on the trail of caravanserais.

One of the main entrances to the Grand Bazaar

Alongside the Grand Bazaar are ancient shopping arcades which may well date back to Silk Road times.

Old stone building near the Grand Bazaar

Just down the street is the Mahmud Pasha Mosque, one of the oldest private mosques in Istanbul. It was built in 1463 by Mahmud Pasha, the Grand Vizier of Sultan Mehmed II, who had conquered Constantinople in 1453, turning it into Istanbul. He eventually fell out with Mehmed and was executed in 1474. His tomb, directly behind the mosque, is said to be decorated with some of the oldest existing Iznik Tiles in Istanbul, which must offer him some consolation. Unfortunately, on the day I was there the tomb was locked.

Mahmut Pasha Mosque

From the Mosque Mahmut Pasha Yokusu (Hill) the street drops down to the Spice Market and the shore of the Golden Horn.

Street dropping down from Mahmut Pasha Yokusu

This street is lined with various hans, including the Kurkchu Han, said to be the oldest caravanserai in Istanbul. This han specialized in people involved in the fur trade. It is now fronted by nondescript sheds, but the gateway, although covered with thick paint and topped by a new sign, is said to be the original. Behind the gateway can be seen the ancient stone walls of the old caravanserai.

Kurkchu Han

Another khan on Mahmut Pasha Yokshu

Wandering about down this street lined with hans I could not help but wonder about the people who washed up here over the centuries and what they may have brought with them besides the material goods in which they were trading. In additional to being a trade route the Silk Road was of course also a conduit for ideas, philosophies, and religious beliefs. We have already seen how Nestorian Christianity moved eastward into China, establishing a Beachhead in Xian, the eastern terminus of the Silk Road (notwithstanding the contention of our Beloved Peony that in fact the eastern terminus was in Japan), in the eighth century if not earlier, and how a Mosque in Xian had been built in 742, a mere 120 years after the Hegira (we are of course speaking here of the 622 AD Hegira and not the twentieth-century Hippy Hegira).

The Eastward Advance of Buddhism from India into China is well-known; the dispersion of Buddhism westward less so. Did the traders and travelers who arrived here at these hans from the East bring with them the teachings of Buddha, either in written form, formal oral transmissions, or traveler’s tales? More specifically, did the Shambhala Mythologem, as first expounded in the Kalachakra Tantra and later elaborated on by many commentators, ever reach these ancient cobblestone streets?

As you know, according to legend the Kalachakra Tantra was first taught by the Buddha to Sucandra, the First King of Shambhala. Also according to legend, pilgrims to Shambhala brought an abbreviated version of the Kalachakra Tantra back to India in the tenth century or so, and from there it was disseminated into Tibet and later into Mongolia. More literal minded, beady-eyed scholars have bypassed the legendary origins of the Kalachakra Tantra altogether and contend that it was written in the tenth or eleventh century. Exactly where remains a matter of great dispute. Some scholars in the past have suggested that it was written in the Turpan Basin, on the north side of the Tarim Depression, still other in Khotan, on the south side of the Tarim Depression. Both of these cities were of course famous stops on the Silk Road. Could the Kalachakra Tantra and attendant Shambhala Mythologem have been carried the whole way westward to the terminus of the Silk Road in Istanbul?

The Tarim Basin as Shambhala. Branches of the Silk Road ran along both the north and south sides of the basin. See Enlargement of Map

Also, we know that the Kalachakra Tantra reached the court of Khubilai Khan, ruler of the Mongol Empire, in what is now Beijing in the late thirteen century. Khubilai Khan may have himself taken the Kalachakra Initiation (this is a matter of contention). We know for sure a copy of the Kalachakra Tantra was made to commemorate his death in 1294. This copy still exists and I myself had digitized copies of it distributed in Mongolia. Thus the Kalachakra Tantra and attendant Shambhala Mythologem could also have move westward on the Silk Road from Beijing.

Just how far did Buddhism itself extend its influence westward? In the 1250s Khülegü Khan (1217–1265), grandson of Chingis Khan and brother of Khubilai Khan, invaded what is now Iran and in 1256 destroyed the stronghold of the Ismaili Sect at Alamut. In 1258 He Sacked Baghdad, overthrowing the 500 year-old Islamic Abbasid Dynasty, and in the process reopening the Silk Road. Khülegü was a Buddhist, at least in his later life, but his wife Doquz Khatun and his mother, the legendary Sorghaghtani Beki, were Christians.

One of Khülegü’s successors, the Il-Khan Arghun, eventually made the city of Tabriz, in the northwest corner of what is now Iran, just west of the Caspian Sea, his capital, and here Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam were all said to flourish, at least at first. From here Buddhism might well have moved further westward. As is turned out, Tabriz may mark the the limits of Buddhist expansion to the west, at least until the late twentieth century and the Tibetan Diaspora. The Mongol Il-Khans soon converted to Islam, and what is now Iran eventually became a predominately Islamic country. Buddhism virtually disappeared from Persia, thus cutting off the lands further to the west from the wellsprings of Buddhism in the East.

But while Buddhism as an organized religion may not have traveled the whole way west on the Silk Road traders and travelers may well have brought texts and tales with them, including accounts of the legendary realm of Shambhala. There is, as we shall soon see, a persistent connection between Sufis, practitioners of a mystical brand of Islam, and Shambhala. Indeed, just before I came to Istanbul, a pandita in Ulaan Baatar informed me that a considerable percentage of the current population of Shambhala are in fact Sufis. Could Sufis have learned about Shambhala from Silk Road travelers, or had Sufis themselves plied the old trade routes and brought back to Istanbul knowledge of the legendary Kingdom? Could they then have used their knowledge to locate a Portal here in Istanbul? Of course Istanbul was in the past a hotbed of Sufism. My next stop is the old Mevlevi Tekke in Galatea, on the other side of the Golden Horn, once home to the Whirling Dervishes, one of the most famous Sufi sects.

Kyrgyzstan | Tash Rabat Caravanserai

Woke up this morning thinking about the Tash Rabat Carvanserai which I had visited seven or eight years ago. I had been dreaming of Lady Ga Ga throughout most of the night, and I guess the inevitable Connection Between Lady Ga Ga and Caravanserais triggered my memories of Tash Rabat. Located in Kyrgyzstan, between the small city of Naryn, on the upper reaches of the Naryn River, one of the sources of the fabled Syr Darya River (the ancient Jaxartes), and Kashgar, in Xinjiang, this is one of best preserved caravan hostels on the entire eastern section of the Silk Road. I stopped overnight here while traveling from Bishkek, the current capital of Kyrgyzstan, to Kashgar. Of course you can no longer stay in the caravanserai itself, but the local Kyrgyz maintain a small wooden guesthouse nearby and there are also several gers available for rent. I stayed in a ger.

Tash Rabat Caravanserai

Although it is a standard sight-seeing stop for most travelers from Bishkek to Kashgar via the Torugart Pass, with many of them staying overnight, very little is known about the history of the caravanseria itself. The local Kyrgyz claim to know nothing, except that it was a standard stop on the old Silk Road. Other sources maintain that the caravanseria was originally a Nestorian Christian monastery or church dating back to the 10th century. The interior layout is indeed in the form of a cross, with a large doomed room at the intersection of the arms and the vertical column. Since there was a Nestorian Bishopric in Kashgar in the 12th century it is not outside the realm of possibility that the Nestorian Christians established an outpost here. (Incidentally, see The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died (also Kindle Edition) for an utterly fascinating account of Christianity in Asia during the first Millennium. Many people forget that for its first one thousand years Christianity was essentially an Asian religion. Only later did it become identified with the “West”. )

Still other sources maintain that the building was once a Buddhist temple or monastery. Others dismiss both these assertions and claim that the caravanserai was purpose-built in the 14th century. Anyhow, the building measures roughly about 110 feet deep by 100 feet wide, with a wall 18 feet high at the entrance and tapering down to four or five feet at the back. Off the main corridor are numerous rooms, some measuring only 8 by 8 feet, which were apparently used by the more humble travelers. This corridor leads to a large room which served as the lobby, kitchen, and dining room combined. This room is capped by a dome which extends sixty or more feet above the floor. It looks as if there may have been frescos or paintings around the top edge of the dome, but these are now largely obliterated. It was eerily silent here under the dome even during the day when there was a lot of ruckus outside—drunken Kyrgyz brawling with each other, dog fights, etc. Off to the side of this central area were several large bedrooms apparently meant for more affluent travelers.

At one point while I was there full-sized bus arrived with at least forty veiled women on board. I did not see any men except for the two drivers. They went together into the main room under the dome and after all other visitors, including myself, were shooed out, they apparently engaged in prayers or a ceremony of some sort. After or hour or so they came out of the building and immediately boarded the bus and left. The local Kyrgyzs allowed that they were Sufis, but other than that would say nothing about what they were doing there.

A elderly Russian man who claimed he lived about twenty miles down road from the caravanserai and just happened to be passing by could shed no more light on the Sufis, but he did say there was a local legend which maintained that the caravanserai was built over the entrance to a cave which extended for dozen of miles south, with an opening on the other side of the Chinese border. He claimed that in the nineteenth century daring smugglers used the caves to smuggle gold and other compact items into China. Whether there is any truth to this legend I cannot say.

Looking up the valley from Tash Rabat. The old Silk Road went up this valley.

Nowadays the road heads west and then swings around some spurs of the Tian Shan Mountains before reaching the Torugart Pass to the south. In the old days the caravan route went straight up the valley from the caravanserai and over the Tash Rabat Pass through the Tian Shan. This was the last pass before the 12,310-foot Torugart Pass leading to Kashgar and Xinjiang. I hired a horse from the local Kyrgyz and rode up the valley to the 13,018-foot Tash Rabat Pass for a look around. The north side of the pass is quite steep and would have been a trial for heavily-laden horses or camels. I really wanted to ride on to the Torugart Pass, but this of course was impossible. The next day I continued on by jeep to the Chinese border at Torugart Pass and on to the storied Silk Road City of Kashgar.

View south from 13,018-foot Tash Rabat Pass

Mongolia | Gov-Altai Aimag | Shar Khuls Oasis

The next morning we round the easternmost spurs of Zaraa Khairkhanii Nuruu and by ten o’clock we could make out to the southeast the Shar Khulsnii Nuruu. Shar Khuls oasis is somewhere on the northern side of these mountains. I had been to Shar Khuls before, but I had approached the oasis from Amarbuyant Khiid directly from the north. Tsogoo and Sükhee had also been there before, but not by this direct camel route, and now they were not sure where the oasis was. Carelessly I had not bothered to bring the GPS coordinates for Shar Khuls since I did not anticipate any problems finding it. Now we sit on a high ridge and study the Shar Khulnii Nuruu for an hour before making out an opening in the mountains about ten miles away which Tsogoo concludes must be Shar Khuls Oasis. We ride on and an hour later can just make out through binoculars dark patches of vegetation which must be trees. These would be the first trees we have seen since leaving Bayan Toroi 115 miles to the north.

Thus our experience was very similar to that of the Roerich Expedition which arrived at Shar Khuls on May 5, 1927. George Roerich noted in his Trails to Inmost Asia:

“Towards four o’clock in the afternoon . . . we noticed several dark spots at the foot of the mountains and at the entrance into a narrow gorge hidden behind a long spur. Someone in the caravan column cried out ‘Trees!’ We could not believe our eyes, for most of us were firmly convinced that at best, we would see only miserable juniper shrubs. But there in the distance were actual trees, desert poplars (Populus euphratica) that grew along the banks of the river. How refreshing it felt to enter the coolness of the forested gorge, and camp on the green meadows.”

The Roerichs—painter, mystic and hard-core Aghartian-Shambhalist Nicholas Roerich; his wife Elena, who had translated The Secret Doctrine of Madame Blavatsky into Russian; his Harvard educated son and Tibetan translator George; and various factotums—had left India in March of 1925 for what would be a three-year sojourn through Inner Asia. As I noted in an earlier post, “Nicholas Roerich claimed he was looking for inspiration for his paintings, and his son George was supposedly engaged in various ethnological and linguistic researches. From the three books churned out by Nicholas Roerich about the expedition it is pretty clear however that they were actually looking for the kingdom of Shambhala.” It was Madame Blavatsky who in The Secret Doctrine had posited the idea that Shambhala might be found somewhere in the Gobi Desert. (Apparently the Roerichs were not aware of Khamariin Khiid in Dornogov Aimag, now considered by many to be a Portal to Shambhala.) From India they had traveled north into the Tarim Basin in what is now Xinjiang Province, China, visiting the Rawak Stupa near Khotan, and then traveled north to Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. After a brief detour to Moscow where they had attempted to entangle the Soviet Secret Police in a plot to establish an actual state modeled on the Kingdom of Shambhala in Central Asia they proceeded first to the Russian Altai Mountains and then to Mongolia, arriving in Ulaan Baatar in September of 1926. Here Nicholas Roerich presented one of his paintings entitled “The Ruler to Shambhala”—this may or may not be painting now known as the Red Warrior in the Zanabazar Fine Arts Museum in Ulaan Baatar—to the Mongolian government. They left Ulaan Baatar by motorized vehicle on April 13, 1927 and arrived at Amarbuyant Monastery in Bayankhongor Aimag a week or so later. Here they hired camels and continued south on their sojourn through Mongolia, China, and Tibet, eventually ending up in Sikkim, India.

A few years earlier I had followed their route from Amarbuyant Khiid to Shar Khuls by Camel, a distance of 105 miles which took six days to cover by camel. This was also the route taken by the 13th Dalai Lama in 1904, when he fled to Mongolia to escape the Younghusband Expedition which had earlier invaded Tibet. The 13th Dalai had himself camped at Shar Khuls Oasis and stayed at Amarbuyant Khiid for ten days.

The northern end of Shar Khuls Oasis

Shar Khuls Oasis

We reach Shar Khuls at three in the afternoon, set up camp on the gravel bars at the northern end of the oasis, and are soon tucking into a big meal of boiled mutton and homemade noodles. The wind has died completely and in the afternoon sun it is quite warm. Compared to the last three days the conditions are downright luxurious. Nearby a spring issues forth a six-inch wide stream of water which flows for maybe one hundred feet before disappearing beneath the sands. This is the main water source for Shar Khuls. Tsogoo, Sükhee, and the girls all decide to wash their hair and get cleaned up.

Sükhee helping Tsogoo with his ablutions

Tsogoo has a nasty bruise on the side of his chest and is still convinced he broke something, probably a rib or two. I had kept him dosed down with prescription painkillers and when these ran out gave him Advil. Oddly, he claims the Advil offers more relief that the supposedly more powerful painkillers. He has Mojik prepare a huge poultice from tea (Yunnan Gold black tea, which I am only too happy to sacrifice to this cause) which he places on the bruise, holding it in place with a wool scarf wrapped around his chest. He says he still has some pain but he will be fine. He even decides he needs a haircut.

Uyanga shearing Tsogoo

Shar Khuls was once the crossroads of two important caravan routes. One ran north-south from Amarbuyant Khiid and across the Black Gobi and Maajin Shan to Anxi in current day Gansu Province. This route passed by Dambijantsan’s Fortress at Gongpochuan. The other route ran east-west from Hohhot in what is now Inner Mongolia, China, to Gucheng (now known as Qitai) on the northern side of the Tian Shan in Xinjiang, China. (I had visited Qitai back in May but could not find a trace of the caravanserai for which the town had once been famous.) Because of its important as a caravan crossroads it had not escaped the attentions of Dambijantsan. George Roerich:

“Situated not far from the Mongol border, the gorge was always a favorite haunt of robbers. Ja Lama maintained outposts here to look after the caravans coming from China, Tibet, and Mongolia. Even after Ja Lama’s death, the gorge was still visited by robber bands. Only a month before our passing a big camel caravan en route for Ku-ch’eng [Qitai] was plundered in the gorge and one of its drivers killed. Our Mongol guides advised us to be very careful and to keep watch in the night.”

Dambijantsan’s hideout while plundering the caravans using these routes might well have been at Ülzii Bilegt, our next destination.

The tooroi trees of Shar Khuls Oasis

At one time Chinese renegades and outlaws from Gansu Province in China had settled here to grew opium. George Roerich says they found the former dwellings of these opium growers at Shar Khuls, but that these Chinese had left some twenty years ago. Yet one of my informants, an eighty-two year old man named Tsedev who now lives near Shinejinst in Bayankhongor Aimag, claims that the opium growers were still there in Dambijantsan’s time. As a young man he had traveled the Amarbuyant Khiid–Anxi caravan route many times and had once lived for awhile at Gongpochuan. He claimed that Dambijantsan, who was opposed to all use of drugs and alcohol, killed the Chinese opium growers at Shar Khuls and destroyed their plants. He said that when he was a young man he saw the skeletons of Chinese killed by Dambijantsan at Shar Khuls.

82 year-old Tsedev of Shinejinst

The 13th Dalai Lama was met here at Shar Khuls by a delegation of the famous chanting monks from Amarbuyant Khiid. They accompanied him by camel for the six day trip to Amarbuyant, chanting all the way.

Later Mojik and I go to check out the Dalai Lama’s Spring, a tiny outflow in a grotto beneath a cliff of basalt. According to local lore the 13th Dalai Lama blessed this spring and prophesied that one day the water from here would serve as a great cure for local people. On my last trip local people had told me that people had in fact started coming here to drink the water in hopes of a cure for a peculiar throat ailment which seems to afflict residents of the south Gobi. Just above the spring is the 13th Dalai Lama’s Ovoo, reputedly built by the 13th Dalai Lama himself.

Mojik getting water from the spring which had been blessed by the 13th Dalai Lama

Ovoo which locals claim was built by the 13th Dalai Lama during his stay at Shar Khuls Oasis

Tsogoo taking the camels to water

Mojik contemplating a bowl of Iron Goddess of Mercy oolong tea.

The Roerichs would later say that Shar Khuls Oasis was the best camping spot they encountered on their entire trip from Ulaan Baatar through Mongolia, China, Tibet and on to Sikkim in the Himalayas. We certainly had a nice stay, but I was eager to move on to Ülzii Bilegt, Dambijantsan’s hideout in the mountains to the south.

Shar Khuls Oasis