I'm planning a trip through southern Kazakhstan and keep seeing Turkistan mentioned in guidebooks.
To be honest, I'm not particularly interested in religious pilgrimage sites. I enjoy history and architecture, but I'm wondering whether Turkistan offers enough to justify travelling there, or whether I'd be better off spending another day in Almaty or heading straight to Shymkent.
I asked exactly the same question before my trip. The mistake I made was thinking of Turkistan purely as "a city with a famous mausoleum." It isn't. The Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi is certainly the centrepiece, and it's magnificent. The scale alone surprised me far more than the photographs had suggested. But what impressed me just as much was the atmosphere around it. Unlike many UNESCO sites, the people around us weren't only tourists. Families had travelled from all over Kazakhstan, children were playing in the squares, elderly couples were quietly sitting in the shade and groups of pilgrims were arriving throughout the day. It felt like a place that still mattered, rather than a monument preserved only for visitors.
We ended up spending almost the entire afternoon walking around the surrounding complex, visiting the museum, stopping for tea and simply watching life unfold. I expected to spend two hours there. We stayed nearly six.
Interesting. We actually went with fairly low expectations. By the end of the day I realised I'd hardly taken any photographs inside the mausoleum. Most of my pictures were of people. That probably says more about the place than any review I could write.