No Change for Turkmenistan
Anabel Loyd has spent much of her adult life travelling in search of the lost, forgotten or obscure. She has been a regular columnist for the Indian Telegraph for many years and has a particular interest in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Indian history.
I have spent much of the past four years, literarily speaking, in 19th century Turkestan, pursuing the false dervish, Arminius Vambéry, on his mid-century travels through Central Asia. It all began with a pre-COVID 19 visit to the region myself, ancient history now like anything else that was ‘BC19’, but life in modern Turkmenistan has not changed for the better in the interim in spite of a descendance of the presidency from father to son Berdymukhammedov. A brief moment of hope with the change of president has fizzled to nothing as Berdymukhammedov senior’s influence has been combined with, rather than given way to his son’s equal tyranny, and any protest by a poor and demoralised population against its government has been met with the same or greater repression than before. The revenues of the country, mainly from natural gas, pour into the pockets of the ruling family and a small coterie of their allies. This wealth has been used both to silence an almost enslaved population (diminished by migration almost certainly to well below published figures) and to create the mirages of fantastical wealth that are the capital Ashgabat and the tourist resort of Avaza, adjacent to the port of Turkmenbashi on the Caspian shore.
Walking through Ashgabat is like being in a dream, or a nightmare, miles of massive white and gold buildings, schools for gifted children, universities, sports grounds, an Olympic stadium no less, and no one, barely a soul on a street, barring an occasional gardener tidying the ever tidy municipal lawns. It is like being in an architect’s model, toytown or Legoland, in vast size and almost nothing moving. We wandered unnoticed in the four, five or six floor wedding pavilion with space for thousands, probably tens of thousands, in and out of plastic garlanded and gilded wedding halls ready for the impossibility of enough guests ever to fill them. I asked the government-imposed guide/driver/mainly minder. No, he said, this is ‘holiday time’. It is busy at the right times of year. The city is reportedly made of marble imported from Vietnam, Italy possibly for the grandest buildings, but in fact many, if not all these immaculate, empty edifices are faced with ceramogranite, as described in a promotional magazine from the Turkmen embassy in London. It shows too, if you look closely, at the crumbling concrete and chipped tiles close to the ground. Perhaps if the catastrophic 1948 earthquake were repeated, the whole city would crumble to dust, it is hard to imagine there would be many fatalities behind the mirrored glass of all that shiny white emptiness.
In fact, 70% or possibly more of the population, depending on its real numbers, live in impoverished villages in the countryside from whence public sector workers, including teachers, hospital staff and school children, are forced every year into the fields to pick cotton in appalling conditions. This too is the harvest that continues to devastate Central Asian ecology. Touch your finger to the ground throughout the growing deserts of the region and lick it, the earth is salt. I saw few enough children in Turkmenistan, ‘summer holidays’ again. It is a big country but I doubt they were all in the twenty or forty advertised tourist hotels, or lounging by the Caspian, in that other white morgue, Avaza.
Away from Ashgabat life does emerge to an extent. The ancient city of Merv is long gone but the spectacular mud ruins of one of the oldest inhabited ancient cities in the world, dating back to the 5th century or earlier, still cover a huge area in the Merv oasis. Colin Thubron described the “hugeness of the city’s dereliction” 15 miles from end to end, as a “shock of desolation” and the guide books suggest that more than a little imagination is required to find any sense of what Merv, Queen of the World, must have been like. The majestic ruins of this major religious and trade centre on the Silk Road are nevertheless enormously atmospheric. They are the remains of not one ancient city but five, built, destroyed and built again, always spreading west on this perfect site where all roads led for centuries until the Mongol hordes sacked the city in 1221. Nothing that came later, lasted or measured up to the lost pre-Mongol past but in the modern city, Mary rather than Merv, life goes on, a real place with a proper community, far different from the dystopian film set of silent Ashgabat.
Mary is the centre of the cotton growing area but outside the town there is other, less damaging agriculture; camels, sheep, cattle, horses, and the pigs which have not always been a favoured Turkmen livestock. Writing in 1903, the British traveller, Annette Meakin, described “Turkoman” Mohammedanism as very lax but the “Turkoman” of those days nevertheless had a horror of pigs and believed that a man who touched one could not enter heaven without an interval of a proper number of years. Today, the country, traditionally Sunni Muslim, is a secular state with recent memories of Soviet control. Religion and state are formally separated although the President, all the recent presidents, do not hesitate to use religion to bolster their own directives, or, in the case of the first President for Life, Saparmat Niyazov, to build the enormous Kipchak mosque in Ashgabat, dedicated to his family who were killed in the 1948 earthquake. Niyazov abolished the death penalty and officially granted his people human rights. His government was said to be one of the worst global violators of those rights and, under his rule, his country had the lowest life expectancy in Central Asia. Among other bizarre directives, he banned dogs in Ashgabat, outlawed ballet, opera and circuses, re-named bread after his mother, Gurbansoltan, and the months of the year after Turkmen ‘heroes’, including her.
In the Zelyony market in Mary, with its cheerful and talkative female traders, the plenty of the Turkmenistan countryside was on show, not so much it is true beyond the packeted and tinned imports from here and there, but the marvellous great wheels of bread, were symbols on their own of a bounty not to be found in the sterile capital. The market hardly bustled in the afternoon in spite of relatively heavy traffic outside but there was life and then laughter as we tried the complicated arrangement of the tall headdresses still worn by Turkmen women. The Russian gingerbread style church in Mary, with its topaz blue and red tiled interior crammed with icons is still in use but gold and white government buildings, more empty schools, libraries, hospitals and halls, have also spread from the capital – new fakery on a town that seems more like normality than most of the Turkmenistan to be reached by a foreign traveller.
Religion, state, secularity, corruption, madness and total power. Beyond the reality of Merv, the most populated site in Turkmenistan when I was there was ancient Konye Urgench, almost on the Uzbek border and a World Heritage site dating back, it is thought, to the 5th century. The original town declined after it was conquered by Timur in the late 14th century and abandoned when the Amu Darya changed course suddenly. The remains of the old town have long disappeared into the ground but the monuments that remain are glorious, the most easily spotted in the distance the Kutlug Timur minaret with its ornate brickwork and the Turabek-Khanum mausoleum, the burial place of Kutlug Timur’s queen. Inside, one of the wonders of the region, is a tile covered dome, created using techniques and glazes, including yellow, unknown elsewhere before Timur himself began to build.
This row of monuments spread across the once city is alive, half the population of the country might be here, a happy pilgrimage of the religious or the curious day outers traversing the dusty monuments and catered for by a small group of stalls near the Turabek-Khanum mausoleum. There are other hidden monuments, a necropolis of forty saints in one hill that may in time shrug off its dusty shroud and see the light of day again if the deadening hand of the country’s rulers stays away in its ceramogranite fortress. And if there are still people to come here at all beyond the occasional curious foreigner picking tiny shards of colour from the ground, the almost dust shed from these magnificent buildings for hundreds of years. Too small to have any value or use, these motes of bright glaze are mirrors of the past to be preserved and treasured but Turkestan, as Arminius Vambéry saw in his day, and far into the mists of the past, has always been a region of slavery, hard lives, ready death and destruction, as well as the vast beauty of monuments built by cruel conquerors and rulers. Recent and present rulers are not an improvement and their shoddy architecture is unlikely to survive long enough to become some beautiful mitigation for their existence.
The opinions expressed are those of the contributor, not of the RSAA.
Read more about Arminius Vambéry from Anabel Loyd –
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The Dervish Bowl: The Many Lives of Arminius Vambéry
Vambéry wrote his own story many times over. And it was these often highly embroidered accounts of journeys through Persia and Central Asia that saw him acclaimed in Victorian England as an intrepid explorer and daring adventurer. Against the backdrop of the ‘Great Game’, in which Russia and Britain jostled for territory, influence, and control of the borders and gateways to India and its wealth, Vambréy played the roles of hero and double-dealer, of fascinated witness and Imperial charlatan.
The Dervish Bowl is the story of these competing narratives, a compelling investigation of the ever-changing persona Vambréy created for himself, and of the man who emerges from his private correspondence and the accounts of both his friends and his enemies, many of whom were themselves major players in the geopolitical adventures of the volatile nineteenth-century – a time when Britain’s ambitions for her empire were at their height, yet nothing and no one was quite as they seemed.
