Darvaza

The settlement began as a desert well on the caravan and herding routes across the Karakum, the name coming from a Persian word for gateway. Life here was pastoral until the Soviet period, when geologists began surveying the desert for natural gas and the road linking the capital with the northern province was pushed across the sand. The area proved to hold significant oil and natural gas deposits, and drilling camps, tracks and pipelines spread through country that had carried only camels and sheep.

The crater dates from that work. The usual account is that Soviet engineers drilling in 1971 punctured a gas cavern whose roof collapsed within days, opening a wide pit that leaked gas. The gas was flared to stop poisonous gases escaping, its volume badly underestimated, and it has burned since. Other accounts, from local geologists, put the collapse in the 1960s and the fire in the 1980s; the early records are absent, classified or inaccessible. The official Turkmen name means the Shining of the Karakum, but it is known everywhere as the Door to Hell.

The village itself did not last. In 2004 President Saparmurat Niyazov ordered the settlement at Darvaza disbanded and it was destroyed; a scatter of buildings and a roadside stop remain. The crater, meanwhile, became the country's best-known sight, and the area around it was declared a nature reserve in 2013. In 2022 President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov announced plans to extinguish it, citing effects on health, the environment and the gas industry. The pit remains open and alight, but the fire has shrunk: wells have been drilled around it to capture methane, and in 2025 the authorities said its size had been reduced three-fold, with infrared imagery in 2026 showing a further decline.

The culture here is that of the Karakum rather than of a town. The desert belongs to herding families who move sheep, goats and camels between wells and seasonal pasture of saxaul and sedge, living in flat-roofed houses or, in the older pattern, in felt yurts. Water comes from wells and cisterns, and knowledge of where it lies is passed down; hospitality is not a courtesy but a rule, since a traveller turned away from a well in this country is in danger.

Visitors meet that culture mainly through the camp. Tour crews set up tents or yurts, cook over a fire, and sit late while the crater glows; drivers and guides tell the crater's history in versions that differ from one another, and the site has become a set piece of Turkmen tourism, helped by the declaration of the surrounding area as a nature reserve in 2013. The crater also holds a place in local storytelling, as a landmark that everyone in the country knows by name.

Elsewhere on the road the customs are national: green tea poured from a small pot into bowls, bread broken by hand and never put down upside down, elders greeted first, and shoes left at the door. Camels are valuable and treated with care, and their milk is fermented into chal, the desert's own drink. Photography of gas installations and official vehicles is not welcome, and guides will say where a camera can be used.

Barely two thousand people are counted at Darvaza, most of them Teke Turkmen keeping a semi-nomadic life in the surrounding desert. The few around the road work at the tea stop and fuel point, herd animals, or are employed in the gas industry that dominates the region; the nearest sizeable settlements are hours away in either direction, and the provincial centres of Ashgabat and Daşoguz supply everything. Life for herding families in the surrounding desert follows water and pasture, with camels, sheep and goats and long distances between households.

Gas is the other economy. The Karakum holds significant oil and gas deposits, and gas dominates the country's exports; the desert is crossed by pipelines, tracks and worker camps, with lorries running north and south along the highway day and night. Work is rotational, and men often spend weeks away from families who live in oasis towns.

The rhythm of a desert day is set by heat. Activity happens in the early morning and the evening, and the middle of the day is spent in shade; in summer that gap is long. Water is trucked or drawn from wells, electricity is limited away from the road, and mobile coverage is patchy. For tour crews the season is spring and autumn, when convoys of 4x4s appear in the late afternoon, and the desert around the crater is quiet again for the rest of the year.

Food at Darvaza is camp food and road food. Tour crews carry supplies from the city and cook over a fire: shashlik, skewers of mutton grilled over embers, chorba, a mutton and vegetable soup made in a single pot, tomato and cucumber salad, and chorek, the round tandoor loaf, bought before leaving the last town. Tea is constant — green tea poured from a small pot into bowls, sometimes black with milk in the cold.

The desert's own product is chal, fermented camel's milk, sour and slightly fizzy, drunk by herding families through the hot months and sold in bottles along the road. Gatyk, a thick sour yoghurt, and dried curd balls keep without refrigeration, which matters in a country of long distances. Meat is mutton or goat, and it is usually boiled or grilled rather than fried.

The roadside chaikhanas between Ashgabat and Daşoguz serve the national repertoire to drivers: palow, rice cooked with mutton, carrot and onion; manty, large steamed dumplings; lagman noodles in broth; somsa baked against the wall of a tandoor; and gutap, fried half-moon pastries filled with meat, pumpkin or greens. In late summer melons and watermelons appear at every junction, piled on the sand, and dried fruit, nuts and bottled water are the standard purchases for the drive.