Turkmenistan
A desert nation of vast gas reserves and a famously sealed society
Turkmenistan is among the most isolated and secretive countries on Earth, a desert republic where the Karakum sands cover four-fifths of the territory and where one of the planet's largest reserves of natural gas underwrites an opaque, personality-cult state. Its marble-clad capital, Ashgabat, gleams with gold-domed monuments and holds records for its density of white marble buildings, while the Darvaza gas crater, a fiery pit burning for decades in the desert, has become its most famous, if accidental, landmark. Few foreigners ever see it.
The Karakum, or Black Sand, desert sprawls across the center and is one of the largest sand deserts in Asia. The Kopet Dag mountains line the southern border with Iran, and the highest point, Ayrybaba, rises to 3,139 meters in the southeast. The Amu Darya skirts the eastern edge, and the Soviet-built Karakum Canal, one of the longest irrigation canals in the world, draws from it to water cotton fields, contributing to the desiccation of the Aral Sea. The Caspian shore in the west holds further oil and gas. The climate is severely arid and hot.
The Turkmen were nomadic horse and carpet-weaving tribes, famed for the Akhal-Teke horse, before Russian conquest in the late nineteenth century. As a Soviet republic and then an independent state from 1991, the country fell under the rule of Saparmurat Niyazov, who styled himself Turkmenbashi and authored a quasi-scriptural book, the Ruhnama. His successors have maintained tight control and a foreign policy of declared neutrality. The economy rests almost entirely on gas exports, chiefly to China, while the celebrated Turkmen carpet and the desert breed of horse remain potent national symbols.