Silk Road Merv once ranked among the world’s largest cities
Turkmenistan, a landlocked Central Asian Turkic state, borders Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Iran, and the Caspian Sea, with Ashgabat as capital. Oasis city Merv was among the world’s largest and a great Islamic and Silk Road stop before Russian annexation and 1991 independence.
More than 80 percent of the country, which at 488,100 square kilometres is slightly smaller than Spain, lies under the Karakum Desert. Just over 7 million people live here, the fewest of any Central Asian republic, and the ground holds the world's fifth-largest natural gas reserves. The Kopet Dag range along the southwest rises to 2,912 metres and is prone to strong earthquakes; the 1948 quake largely levelled Ashgabat.
Turkmen may derive from Turk plus a Sogdian suffix meaning almost Turk, while the chronicler Ibn Kathir linked it to faith, recalling the conversion of 200,000 households in 971. Indo-Iranians lived here first, and recorded history begins with Achaemenid rule. Oghuz tribes arrived from Mongolia in the eighth century and formed the core of the Turkmen people, serving under the Seljuks until Turkmen and other tribes overthrew that empire in the twelfth century. Mongol conquest then scattered them south, and the fiercely independent tribes were feared for their role in the regional slave trade.
Teke Turkmens beat back a Russian army in 1879, but the Battle of Geok Tepe in 1881 crushed the last major resistance and brought annexation. Turkmen fighters joined the Basmachi revolt against Soviet power in the 1920s, and the Turkmen SSR was created in 1925. Independence followed a referendum in 1991.
Saparmurat Niyazov, styled Türkmenbaşy, ruled as president for life with a sweeping personality cult; in 2005 he shut every hospital outside Ashgabat and every rural library. After his death in 2006 Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow took over, and in 2022 his son Serdar won an election observers deemed neither free nor fair, sharing power with his father.
Source: Turkmenistan
