Ayaz Kala

Ayaz Kala is a group of three ancient fortresses on the edge of the Kyzylkum desert, in Karakalpakstan, in north-western Uzbekistan. The oldest stands on the top of a steep hill, its mud-brick walls and towers still sharp against the sky; the others lie below it, one on a lower rise and one on the plain. The region is known as Ellik Kala, “fifty fortresses”, for the many ruined strongholds that dot the desert east of the Amu Darya.

They belong to ancient Khwarazm, the land of the lower Oxus, whose people spoke an Eastern Iranian language. Chorasmia, as the Greeks called it, appears among the lands of the Achaemenid empire in the inscriptions of Darius the Great, and in later centuries it was an independent kingdom with its own kings and coins. Archaeologists generally date the hilltop fortress to the fourth to third centuries BCE, with the other two built and rebuilt in the first centuries CE and into the early medieval period. The fortresses guarded the edge of the irrigated oasis against the desert and its nomads.

Much of what is known about them comes from the Khorezm Archaeological and Ethnographic Expedition led by the Soviet archaeologist Sergey Tolstov, which surveyed the region from the late 1930s, using aerial photography to map the ruins in the desert. A local legend names the fortress after Ayaz, a slave who, given his freedom, built a castle here. Today visitors climb the hill at sunset to look over the walls and a salt lake to the dunes beyond, and some stay overnight in yurts at the foot of the fortress.