Kyrgyz literally means ‘we are forty’ and Kyrgyzstan is where the famous warrior Manas united 40 clans against the Uyghurs. By the Kazakh border on the Silk Route, and in the shade of the Saryaygyr mountains is the Kakyra Valley, where great burial mounds can be seen dotting the tall grass. Their embankments are of mud and stone. The biggest pile among them is San Tash, about four metres high and 56 metres in diameter. It dominates the centre of the valley and is named after a mountain pass nearby. San Tash means ‘the counting stones.’ But there are more than 40 of them.
Though the legend of why 250 piles of oval stones came up in the remote reaches of the Eurasian Steppe has vanished into the mists of history, the story of San Tash is one of war and epiphany. In 1405, Tamerlane—Timur as he is known in India—the Turkish-Mongol founder of the Timurid Empire and the Timurid dynasty, was passing through the valley on his way to fight the forces of Ming China. He encountered an old man sitting by the wayside.
The old man requested Tamerlane to order each one of his soldiers to collect a stone from the shores of lake Issyk Kul and place it in the valley’s centre. The end result was a large pile of stones—or a small one, depending on the way you look at it, to size up the conqueror’s army. While returning victoriously by the same route, Tamerlane encountered the same old man waiting for him. This time the old man asked Tamerlane to ask his soldiers to pick up a stone each as they passed the pile. It was only when the last soldier took his stone that Tamerlane realised how many of his men had fallen in battle.
He ordered his soldiers to return the stones to the pile as a reminder to his fallen men. If not history then archeology proves that the story is nothing but a charming, sad legend. The 250 burial mounds of Kakyra Valley are of the Sake Tribe, which lived there between 6 BC and 1st century BC. The Tamerlane story probably takes its origin from local legends that say that leaders of the Sake Tribe would pile up stones to count the numbers of soldiers in an opposing army. Nothing seems to have changed. The rolling green hills that intersect the valley through which runs a slim path could have been familiar to Tamerlane.