Ahmad Yasavi died at Yasi in 1166 and was buried there. The town, now Turkistan in southern Kazakhstan, sat where the settled world of Transoxiana met the steppe, and the grave became a place of visiting almost at once.
In the 1390s Timur ordered a mausoleum built over it. What went up is among the largest structures of its kind anywhere: a domed complex with a great hall, a mosque, a library, wells and an enormous bronze cauldron for distributing water to visitors. It was left unfinished when Timur died in 1405 and never completed, and the scaffolding sockets are still visible on the front. Building it was a political act as much as a pious one, since Timur was asserting a claim over the steppe and its saints, and it worked. The site is the principal pilgrimage place of Kazakhstan and stands on the World Heritage list.
The order named after him spread through the Turkic world and fed into later movements. The Bektashi tradition of Anatolia and the Balkans traces part of its descent through Yasavi channels, and the wandering dervishes of the Turkish and Central Asian countryside were often described as Yasavi. Under Soviet rule the shrine was closed to worship and treated as a monument. It reopened after 1991, and Ahmad Yasavi now functions in Kazakhstan as a national figure as well as a religious one, which is a further layer on a life about which very little is independently documented.