During the expeditionary work, excavations were carried out at a collapsed gumbaz — Niyazbek in Chon-Kemin, where the Russian traveler M. I. Venyukov once stayed.
The ruins of one of these gumbazes were cleared and excavated in the flooding zone of the Toktogul Reservoir in 1973 by V. D. Goryachev. This is the so-called Chirak-Bulak, located on the second floodplain terrace of the left bank of the Naryn River. According to the informant Asake Turapa (born 1918), the gumbaz was built by a certain Kyrgyz khan for himself and his kin. Here he was buried. By the time of the excavations, the gumbaz represented a melted quadrilateral, oriented approximately to the cardinal directions. The height of the preserved mounds with remnants of the masonry crest did not exceed 1.5 m, and the width was 3-4 m. A cross-section of the corner melt showed that the gumbaz was flanked at the corners by four columns, the masonry of which was only partially preserved at the base. The diameter at the base was 1.5 m. Obviously, like the walls, they tapered towards the top. Judging by the analogy with the preserved Kyrgyz gumbazes of the 17th-19th centuries, the columns rose above the walls.
During the excavations, it was found that the mausoleum was constructed from small rounded clay blocks (guvalyak), measuring 12-20 cm x 15-25 cm, laid without mortar. This method of wall construction was widely used in the vernacular residential architecture of Central Asia. There was no foundation — the walls were erected on the surface of the ground, as evidenced by a layer of ash found directly beneath the base of one of the columns. The northeastern wall had a thickness of 1.5 m at the base and tapered slightly towards the top. The northwestern wall had a width of 95 cm at the base and 80 cm at the crest. At the entrance, located on the northern side, the wall formed a step on the inside, but no traces of doors were recorded.
