Sacred map of Kazakhstan: the 100 listed sites and how to use them

The sacred map of Kazakhstan is a published national list of 100 rows in five blocks, covering mountains, ancient towns, mausoleums, memorials and historic sites. It is a useful way to find places a general guidebook may skip. We matched each row against search data: 60 rows have a measurement, and Charyn Canyon leads with 9,900 searches a month.

How to read it: these are the ten rows with the highest demand, leaving out search terms with a second meaning. The figures come from Russian-language searches inside Kazakhstan, so they show local interest and say nothing about visitor numbers. The top five rows take 44.2% of all measured demand.

What is on the sacred map of Kazakhstan

The list is a Kazakh state project, published by the Kazinform news agency on 10 November 2017. The word “sacred” is used broadly here. Alongside mosques and saints’ tombs it includes a canyon, a crater, archaeological sites and memorials to historical events, so it is not a list of religious sites alone.

How to read it: the median uses measured rows without ambiguous search terms. Block 5 has so few measurements that its median means very little. Many rows combine several monuments, such as the Mangystau necropolises, and our measurement refers to the main site in that row.

How to use the list when planning a trip

Treat the list as a set of ideas, because it gives no information on roads, opening hours or access. For a visitor with limited time and no Russian, this order works:

1. Pick a base city, then look for rows near it.
2. Start with rows that link to a page in this guide, which covers the route, the season and what we could not confirm. 39 of the 100 rows have one.
3. Compare them with our page on sacred places in Kazakhstan and the mausoleums of Kazakhstan.
4. Many of these are active places of worship and burial grounds, so ask about dress and photography when you arrive.
5. For a row without a page, ask a local guide before you commit a day to it. We have not checked those roads.

To see the same kind of search data for other places, open the ranking of 200 places. One row also connects to our table of the Gulag in Kazakhstan.

The 60 measured sites

The table lists measured rows by monthly searches, in English names that we transliterated or translated ourselves. Spellings on local signs may differ. Most searchers wrote these names in Russian, and the exact query for each row is in the CSV file, released under CC BY 4.0 with all 100 rows as published.

How to read it: † marks a search term with a second meaning, such as Ordabasy, which is also a football club. Those rows sit at the end and stay out of the calculations. The last column gives the block and row number in the source, so you can find the original entry. Demand is uneven: 16 of 55 rows reach 1,000 searches a month and 17 stay under 100. The median is 480.

Method and limits

We parsed the Kazinform list without edits and manually chose one main Russian search term for each row. Demand comes from Ubersuggest, exported on 28 October 2026 for places in our list of 200 and on 6 November 2026 for the rest. A script does the counts.

These are figures about searches and not about trips. Foreign interest barely registers: sacred places kazakhstan, sacred sites kazakhstan and sacred kazakhstan each returned zero searches worldwide. A zero for an exact phrase also does not prove nobody looks for a site, as we tested only one wording.