The Balhan Mountains – Great and Small – are often called “mountain islands” due to their isolation, they look like that from a bird’s eye view: two huge stone “stumps”, overgrown with mountain juniper that came on a boundless plain from nowhere. These mountain formations are surrounded from all quarters by the desert – sandy, clayey and saline, therefore they contrast with the surrounding environment, which makes these places unique, and need conserving.
There you can find natural grottoes, Jebel and Damdam-Cheshme, and the Kurtli-Bil gorge that people visited even in the Middle and Late Stone Age, which is scientific evidence of the earliest human settlement in Central Asia. The Iron Age natural monument is the Garavuldepe cult complex on the top of Arlan, the oldest temple of the “sun and sacred fire” (7th-2nd century BC). Traces of the medieval fortress Duneshkala (10th-16th centuries) between Jebel and Oglanly have been preserved. There, two karst caves with the Lower Cretaceous carbonate deposits – Tuz-Mergen and Lyama-Burun –were also discovered. The walls of the latter are laid up with marble onyx.
