Colette's Grand Detour

Sulayman-Too is a rocky five-peaked mountain, rising about 200m high in the center of the city of Osh. It is named after Prophet Solomon, a revered figure in the Quran who is said to have once prayed on the mountain. Local legend also said that Prophet Muhammad once visited the mountain. Muslims in Central come here on pilgrimages and regard it as a mini-Hajj.

However it was a sacred site even before Islam spread through the region in the 7th-8th centuries. Mountains were seen as powerful places, home to spirits, fertility forces and healing powers. There are many traditions at Sulayman-Too linked to this, such as sliding down the polished rocks of the mountain for good fertility, crawling through caves to cure illness and leaving cloth and ribbons on bushes to make wishes. Sulayman-Too’s link with women’s pilgrimage’s to slide down the smooth stone slopes is especially famous.

The mountain was made Kyrgyzstan’s first (and currently only) UNESCO World Heritage site in 2009. It’s status is for a combination of the tangible (the mosques, caves and museum) and the intangible (the pilgrimage, and healing practices).

A visit to the mountain takes about 1 hour 45 minutes. You’ll start with a walk up to the museum, which is actually built into a cave. There is limited information here, but you get a nice view down onto the city of Osh. You’ll then take a walk that winds around the mountain giving you views of some of the sacred caves and polished stones until you reach a second much higher viewing platform on which a 16th century mosque sits. The walk involves a fair number of steps and is exposed to the sun so be prepared with a hat and water. You should also be able to see the rocky outcrop that is believed to be ‘Solomon’s Throne’ but I’m not sure where that was! From the top you descend via a much steeper set of steps on the other side of the mountain back to the road.

I wouldn’t visit Osh specifically to see this place, but if you are here it makes an interesting morning activity as there are not many other sites to see in the city.