Turkmenistan

Desert covers most of Turkmenistan. The Karakum, the ‘black sand’, spreads across the centre, its dunes pinned down by saxaul scrub. The Kopet Dag mountains rise along the southern frontier, and springs at their foot have fed oases since ancient times. Since the 1950s the Karakum Canal has carried water from the Amu Darya west across the sand to cotton fields and towns. In the west the land meets the Caspian and the salt-crusted gulf of Garabogazköl.

Merv, on the Murghab oasis, grew into one of the great cities of the Silk Road and a seat of the Seljuk sultans; Mongol armies destroyed it in 1221. The Parthians built a royal fortress at Nisa, and Kunya-Urgench, once the chief city of Khwarazm, keeps its tall brick minaret. Turkmen tribes resisted the Russian advance until the fortress of Gökdepe fell in 1881. A Soviet republic was created in 1924, an earthquake levelled Ashgabat in 1948, and independence came in 1991.

Akhal-Teke horses, slender desert runners with a metallic sheen, are a national emblem, and so are the deep red carpets whose göl medallions identify the tribe that wove them. Men wear the telpek, a towering hat of shaggy sheepskin, and bakhshi singers perform the epic of Görogly to the two-stringed dutar. Natural gas from Galkynysh and other fields is piped east to China, irrigated farms grow cotton and wheat, and Turkmenbashi refines oil on the Caspian.