Mary

Mary is a young city beside a very old one. The Murghab river, flowing north out of the Afghan mountains, spreads into an inland delta and has supported farming here since the Bronze Age, when Gonur Tepe and its neighbours flourished in what is now desert to the north. The oasis later became Margiana, a province of the Persian empire, and under Alexander's successors a walled city was founded at what became Merv, about 30 kilometres east of the modern centre.

Merv grew for more than a thousand years, each era building a new walled city beside the last: a Sasanian stronghold, the base from which Arab armies moved into Central Asia, and in the 11th and 12th centuries the eastern capital of the Seljuk empire and one of the largest cities in the world, with libraries, madrasas and an observatory associated with Omar Khayyam. Sultan Sanjar died in 1157 and was buried in the domed tomb that still stands. In 1221 the Mongols destroyed the city and killed much of its population, and though smaller towns followed on the site, it never recovered.

The modern city dates from the Russian conquest of the Merv oasis in 1884, when a garrison and administrative town were laid out west of the ruins on a grid, served by the Transcaspian Railway. In Soviet times it became a cotton centre, and from the 1960s the discovery of enormous gas fields in the surrounding desert changed the province's economy. Since independence the centre has been rebuilt with marble-faced public buildings, and in 2012 Mary was declared one of the cultural capitals of the Commonwealth of Independent States.

The Merv oasis is Teke Turkmen country, and its identity is bound up with the carpet patterns, dress and family networks of that group, which differ in detail from those of Ahal or the Amu Darya. Weaving is the household art: deep-red carpets with rows of güls, and the embroidered dresses and heavy silver jewellery worn by brides. Weddings are the great public occasions, with music, singing and long tables late into the night, and the wider family is expected to take part.

The ruins are not only an archaeological site to local people. Shrines within and around Merv draw pilgrims, who circle the tombs, pray and tie cloth to frames, and Sunday and holiday visits are as much devotional as touristic. The city's mosque and the smaller neighbourhood ones fill on Fridays, and religious practice is generally quiet and family-based.

Provincial life is formal in public and warm in private. Public ceremony — parades, anniversaries, decorated squares — follows the national pattern, and the city was given prominence as a cultural capital of the Commonwealth of Independent States in 2012. Hospitality is emphatic: tea is offered immediately and refusing food is awkward; elders are greeted and served first. Turkmen dominates daily speech, with Russian still heard among older and urban residents, and the oasis keeps a strong sense of being the country's agricultural heartland.

About 167,000 people live in Mary, the country's fourth-largest city and the capital of a province of well over a million. The city is flat and low-rise: Soviet apartment blocks and single-storey brick houses on the old grid, marble-faced offices around the central squares, and allotments and poplars along the irrigation channels. Most households shop at the bazaar in the early morning and travel by shared taxi or bus.

Two industries shape the province. The desert holds the Galkynyş field, the world's second-largest gas field, and the older Shatlyk field found in 1968, and gas processing, pipelines and the power station at the edge of the city provide skilled and rotational work. The oasis itself grows cotton, wheat, melons and vegetables on canal and river water, with state quotas and an autumn harvest that pulls in labour from across the region.

Days start early, particularly in summer, when outdoor work and errands are done before the heat and the streets empty in the afternoon. Water is the persistent worry: the Murghab's flow is shared with Afghanistan upstream, irrigation has left salt in the soil, and supply to households can be intermittent. Food prices and the gap between the official and informal value of the manat press on budgets, the internet is slow and heavily filtered, and many families have members working in Ashgabat or abroad.

The Mary table is the Turkmen one, built on bread, mutton, rice and tea. Chorek, the round loaf baked against the wall of a clay tandoor, is on every table and treated with respect. Palow — rice cooked slowly with mutton, carrot and onion in a heavy pot — is the dish of guests, weddings and holidays. Dograma, regarded as the national dish, tears chorek into a bowl with boiled mutton and raw onion and is moistened with broth, and is associated with feasts and religious occasions. Chorba, a mutton and vegetable soup, is everyday food.

Bazaar and street food is shared with the wider region: somsa baked in the tandoor, gutap fried in thin half-moons with meat, pumpkin or greens, manty steamed in stacks, lagman noodles in broth, and shashlik grilled over charcoal wherever there is a crowd. Gatyk, a thick sour yoghurt, and suzma, its drained form, cool summer meals, and chal, fermented camel's milk, comes in from the desert in the hot months.

Fruit is what the province is known for. Turkmen melons from the Murghab oasis were famous across the Soviet Union and have their own national day in August; watermelons, grapes, apricots, pomegranates and tomatoes fill the market through the season, and much of the crop is dried for winter. Green tea, poured from small pots into bowls, is drunk all day and offered to every visitor, with black tea more common in the cold months.