Turkmenistan

From the Bronze Age oases of Margiana and Parthian Nisa, through Silk Road Merv and the Turkmen tribes, to Russian conquest, Soviet cotton and a neutral, gas-rich republic.

The deserts and oases of Turkmenistan hold one of Central Asia's deepest pasts: the Bronze Age oasis civilisation of Margiana centred on Gonur Depe, the Parthian royal city of Nisa, and Merv — for centuries one of the great cities of the Silk Road and the medieval Islamic world, made a capital by the Seljuk Turks before its destruction by the Mongols in 1221. From the late medieval period the Turkmen tribes consolidated across the Karakum, until tsarist Russia conquered the region in the bloody Battle of Geok Tepe in 1881. The Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic, created in 1924, was reshaped by forced collectivisation, cotton monoculture and the Kara-Kum Canal, before declaring independence on 27 October 1991. Modern Turkmenistan — holding some of the world's largest natural-gas reserves and a UN-recognised permanent neutrality — passed from the personality-cult rule of Saparmurat Niyazov ('Türkmenbaşy') to Gurbanguly and then Serdar Berdimuhamedow.