If you’ve marvelled at Mussolini’s awful Palazzo della Civiltà in Rome, you ain’t seen nothin’!
Modern Ashgabat is block after block of similar blinding white marble. Monstrosities with the Greco-Roman pillars and triumphal arches, together with Persian domes, favoured by President-for-Life Niyazov, the first post-Soviet dictator. A marble horse head towers 40m over the national football stadium. Incidentally, Niyazov also renamed the days of the week after members of his family.
Public monuments such as the Independence, Ruhnama (a massive marble book celebrating Niyazov’s effort of the same title) and various Presidential monuments are, well, seriously monumental.
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Roundabouts at the intersections of the 6 and 8 lane highways running through the middle of town are similarly intemperately adorned.
Mosques too are monumental. They gleam blindingly in the sun with, in addition to white marble, enormous golden domes.
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This city is designed and built to project power, State and Mosque, not for beauty or amenity.
It conjures what Berlin would have become had Speer been given the opportunity to realise his and Hitler’s Germania project. Perhaps, somewhere down the track, Ashgabat will be protected as the world’s premier example of Fascist architecture, like Soviet brutalism has been.
I hear very little laughter on the streets. Unlike other developing countries, children aren’t running wild playing football and getting up to mischief.
While there are large open green spaces in the city they are for show and unused by the public.
At night the city lights up in brutal neon like Las Vegas. But there are no bars or nightclubs. No nightlife whatsoever in fact. A curfew is in place from 11pm.
Point of order, my reaction is not reducible to a simple matter of differences in sensibilities regarding individualism; not a revulsion to abnegation and self-renunciation per se. I revel in the experience of my insignificance beneath the stars at night. In the awe that is inspired in the presence of mountains, oceans, forests and deserts. In the dissolving of oneself in sex and love.I am not so inclined or inspired by the devices of powerful men, by the artless artifices, and religious and ideological creeds, through which they project their authority. Par contre, that sort of thing rouses passionate rebellion in me, a visceral yearning for freedom.
Turkmenistan is currently ruled by a ‘National Leader’, former President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, a position created and to which he was appointed, by his son and current President Serdar Berdimuhamedow.
Read into that what you will.
The crater at Darvarsa, pictured, was created when a Russian rig hit gas and exploded back in the 70s. It was thought that it would be best to light the escaping gas to burn it off. It’s still burning and quite a sight. Especially at night.
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Endemic critters include the Turkomene horse, a tall and handsome progenitor of the English thoroughbred, and the Tazy, a big boofy livestock guardian dog breed.
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Turkmenistan is using a fraction of its vast human, cultural and natural capital.
The obvious quick win is the emancipation of women.
Additionally, some of the funds Pharaoh - um, I mean the National Leader - has set aside for his mausoleum could better be spent paving the country’s appalling arterial roads, possibly the greatest no-brainer national productivity improvement investment in the history of macro-economics.
A little lightening-the-fuck-up would also do wonders.
In the meantime, this is still a land to visit.
Here in Central Asia is the intersection of Persian, Scythian, Hellenic, Parthian, Arab, and Mongol empires. Where Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Timur Tamerlane and many others road through on horseback at the head of their armies.
Layer upon layer of civilisation lies in the desert sands. Ancient artefacts of culture, art, writing and science are being identified and recovered at the ancient cities of Nisa and Merv. Some of humanity’s most precious archeological jewels are still waiting to be discovered.
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