Ashgabat

Ashgabat is a young city on very old ground. The Ahal oasis along the Kopet Dag had been farmed since the Bronze Age, and the Parthian royal centre of Nisa stood a few kilometres west, but the modern city dates only from 1881, when Russian forces stormed the Teke fortress at Geok Tepe and founded a garrison beside the Turkmen village of Ashgabat. The Transcaspian Railway reached it in 1885, and the settlement grew into a tidy colonial town of low brick houses, tree-lined streets and Armenian, Persian and Russian traders.

Under Soviet rule it became the capital of the Turkmen SSR, gaining ministries, theatres, a university and cotton-processing industry. On the night of 5–6 October 1948 an earthquake of great violence destroyed almost the entire city and killed a very large share of its people; the disaster is commemorated annually and shaped everything built afterwards. The rebuilt Soviet city was low-rise and shaded, laid out on the old grid along Magtymguly Avenue.

Independence in 1991 brought a third city. Saparmurat Niyazov, who ruled as Türkmenbaşy until his death in 2006, financed a reconstruction in white marble from gas revenues: ministries, apartment blocks, hotels, monuments and fountains, faced in imported white marble and set along enormously wide avenues. Building continued under his successors, along with the clearance of older districts, and the city has collected records for its density of marble buildings and its number of fountain pools. In 2023 the government opened a separate new city, Arkadag, in the foothills nearby.

Ashgabat is the stage on which the state presents itself. Public ceremony — parades, mass performances, anniversaries and the decoration of avenues — is a central part of city life, and the monuments are built to be seen rather than entered. Portraits and slogans are part of the streetscape, and residents navigate a set of rules on dress, behaviour and the appearance of buildings and vehicles that change by decree.

Beneath that, the culture is Turkmen and family-centred. Weddings are the great social occasions, held on a large scale with music, singing and long tables; brides wear heavy silver jewellery and red-embroidered dress. Carpets are the national art, the Teke gül woven into the state flag, and the carpet museum holds the finest collections; a national carpet day falls in May. The Akhal-Teke horse, bred in the Ahal oasis for desert endurance, is honoured with its own holiday in late April, with racing at the city hippodrome.

Music runs from the bagşy, the singer-storyteller accompanied by the two-string dutar, to Russian-era classical institutions such as the opera and philharmonic traditions the Soviet city established. Russian is still heard widely among older and urban residents, though Turkmen in its Latin alphabet dominates public life. Hospitality is emphatic: tea is offered immediately, refusing food is awkward, and elders are greeted first.

About a million people live in Ashgabat, roughly a seventh of the country's population, and the city dominates national government, business and education. Most residents live in apartment blocks — Soviet ones in the older districts, marble-clad ones in the newer — and the districts of Bagtyýarlyk, Berkararlyk, Köpetdag and Büzmeýin divide the city administratively. Work is heavily concentrated in the state: ministries, state enterprises, the gas sector's head offices, education and health.

The rhythm of the day begins early, particularly in summer, when outdoor work and shopping happen before the heat and the streets empty in the middle of the afternoon. The monumental avenues are often quiet, while the bazaars are crowded; Altyn Asyr on the northern edge is the busiest place in the region. Municipal cleaning and planting are constant, and the fountains and lawns are kept running in a desert climate by heavy irrigation.

Everyday difficulties are real. Food prices and the supply of subsidised staples have been strained in recent years, the manat's official rate differs sharply from what dollars fetch informally, and the internet is slow and heavily filtered, with many international services unavailable. Cars are required to be kept clean, and for years light-coloured vehicles have been favoured in the capital. Families rely on relatives, and many households have members working abroad.

Turkmen cooking in Ashgabat is built on bread, meat and tea. Chorek, the round loaf baked against the wall of a clay tandoor, appears at every meal and is treated with respect — never placed upside down. Palow, rice cooked with mutton, carrot and onion in a heavy pot, is the dish of guests and holidays. Dograma, one of the best-known Turkmen dishes, tears chorek into a bowl with boiled mutton and raw onion and is moistened with broth; it is associated with feasts and religious occasions. Chorba, a mutton and vegetable soup, is everyday food.

The bazaars supply the rest. Somsa, meat-and-onion pastries baked in the tandoor, and gutap, thin fried half-moons filled with meat, pumpkin or greens, are sold from stalls and eaten in the hand. Manty, large steamed dumplings, and lagman, hand-pulled noodles in broth, are shared with the wider region. Gatyk, a thick sour yoghurt, cools summer meals, and chal, fermented camel's milk from the desert, is sold in season.

Melons are a point of national pride, with their own August holiday; Ahal grapes, apricots, pomegranates and walnuts fill the market stalls in autumn. Green tea, poured from small pots into bowls, is drunk through the day and offered to every visitor, while black tea with milk turns up more often in winter. Alcohol is sold but its availability is restricted from time to time, and drinking is low-key in public.