Ashgabat, Kunya-Urgench & the Karakum

The Ahal oasis along the northern foot of the Kopet Dag is one of the oldest farmed landscapes in Central Asia: Bronze Age settlements such as Anau and Namazga Tepe flourished here thousands of years before the Silk Road. In the third century BC the Parthians, a people from the steppe, made the foothills their early heartland, and Nisa, just west of modern Ashgabat, became one of their royal centres, with palaces, temples and a treasury whose ivory drinking horns are now among the best-known Parthian finds.

The north belonged to a different world. Kunya-Urgench, on an old channel of the Amu Darya, was the capital of Khwarazm, whose shahs built an empire across Central Asia and Iran around 1200 before provoking Genghis Khan; the Mongols sacked the city in 1221. It recovered under the Golden Horde, was destroyed again by Timur in the 1380s, and was largely abandoned after the river shifted its course, when the rulers of Khwarazm moved to Khiva.

In the 19th century the Teke Turkmen of Ahal resisted the Russian advance until 1881, when General Skobelev stormed the fortress of Geok Tepe and killed thousands of defenders and civilians. Ashgabat grew from a Russian garrison founded that year, became the Soviet republic's capital, and was flattened by the earthquake of 1948, which killed a large share of its people. After 1991 it was rebuilt again in white marble as the showcase of independent Turkmenistan.

Ahal is the homeland of the Ahal Teke Turkmen, and gives its name to the Akhal-Teke horse, bred in the oasis for speed and endurance over desert distances; the breed is honoured with its own holiday in late April, and horse racing at the Ashgabat hippodrome is a national passion. Teke carpets, with their rows of deep-red güls, are the best known of the Turkmen weaves and fill the national carpet museum in the capital.

Geok Tepe carries heavy meaning: the 1881 battle is remembered as a national tragedy, commemorated by a large mosque and memorial beside the old fortress. Gypjak, Saparmurat Niyazov's home village near Ashgabat, holds the vast mosque he built, with his mausoleum, and state ceremony, portraits and choreographed celebrations shape public life in the capital more than anywhere else.

Daşoguz and the north are part of historic Khwarazm and look towards Khiva as much as to Ashgabat. Many people there are ethnic Uzbeks, and the region shares the Khorezmian taste for song, dance and pilgrimage: the mausolea of Kunya-Urgench include the tomb of Najm ad-Din Kubra, founder of the Kubrawiya Sufi order.

Ashgabat, home to about a million people, is the centre of government, business and education, a city of ministries, apartment towers and parks kept immaculate by armies of cleaners. Life is orderly and closely watched: rules on car colours, dress and public behaviour change by decree, and the modern avenues are often empty while crowds gather in the bazaars, above all the sprawling Altyn Asyr market on the edge of the city. Near the capital the government has built Arkadag, a new planned city opened in 2023.

The Ahal oasis beyond grows wheat, cotton, grapes and melons on canal water from the Karakum Canal, which carries Amu Darya water across the south of the country; the desert itself is thinly peopled, with herders' settlements and gas fields. Daşoguz, the northern provincial capital, is a low-rise cotton town in irrigated land near the Uzbek border, and the villages around it depend on the river and the harvest. Water and salt in the soil are persistent problems in the north, which lies within the wider Aral Sea basin.

Days start early to beat the heat, family and weddings dominate social life, and the internet is slow and heavily filtered.

Ahal eats the classic Turkmen table: palow for guests and holidays, dograma of torn bread, meat and onion in broth, and chorba soup. Round chorek bread from clay tandoor ovens appears at every meal, and in the bazaars stalls sell somsa, meat-filled tandoor pastries, and gutap, thin half-moon pastries filled with meat, pumpkin or greens and fried.

In the Karakum, chal — fermented camel's milk, sour and slightly fizzy — is the herders' drink, and on Darvaza trips guides grill skewered mutton over open fires beside the tents. In the Daşoguz region tea is sometimes drunk with milk, Kazakh-style, to soften the salty local water, and melons, a source of national pride, are celebrated with a national day in August.

Green tea, poured from small pots into bowls, is drunk all day, and grapes from the Kopet Dag foothills are eaten fresh and dried.

Ashgabat is best seen as a monument to itself: the white-marble avenues and ministries, the Independence Monument and the Neutrality Monument, the gilded statues, the Alem cultural centre's enclosed Ferris wheel and the national museum and carpet museum, which hold the country's best collections. The Altyn Asyr bazaar is the liveliest place in town. A short drive west, the eroded mud-brick walls of Nisa rise over the plain, and to the north-west the Geok Tepe fortress and the Gypjak mosque recall two very different chapters of Turkmen history.

Further along the Kopet Dag foothills lies Kow Ata, a warm underground lake in a cave reached by a long stairway, where bathers float in mineral water. North of the capital the road crosses the Karakum's dunes and scrub to the Darvaza gas crater near the old settlement of Derweze, a burning pit best seen at dusk and after dark, with other craters nearby.

In the far north, Kunya-Urgench is a scattered field of ruins across the cemetery-dotted plain: the Kutlug Timur minaret, about 60 metres tall; the conical-roofed mausolea of Tekesh and Il-Arslan; the tiled dome of the Turabek Khanum mausoleum; and the mausoleum of Najm ad-Din Kubra.