Turkmenistan

Overview

Turkmenistan is a country in Central Asia with a population of about 5 million, and an area around half a million square km. It has a coast on the Caspian Sea, but is otherwise landlocked. Neighboring countries are Iran and Afghanistan to the South, and Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to the North. Overall it is a relatively poor desert country, although millions has been spent on the capital Ashgabat in post Soviet times and is home to extensive oil and gas reserves. The traditional life of Turkmen is as nomadic shepherds, though some have been settled in towns for centuries. The country has oil which is being developed. Geographically this is the most western of all the stans, but culturally it sure isn't. The turkmen never formed a real nation and only settled in recent history in cities - if they did at all. Most of the cities in Turkmenistan were founded by non Turkmen, but by the Russians, Iranians and even Alexander the Great. If you are not an oil man, maybe the most important reason to visit Turkmenistan would be not the sights, but the people and their age old nomad tradition of hospitatility. They can be hard to reach with stranger at first, but when they open up, anything goes. Ashgabat the capital city is probably your point of arrival. It is filled with monuments in the honour of the president Turkmenbasi. Mary has the ruins...more

History

In the area of the middle and lower Syrdariya in the eighth century. By the tenth century the Oghuz had expanded west and north of the Aral Sea and into the steppe of present-day Kazakstan absorbing not only Iranians but also Turks from the Kipchak and Karluk ethnolinguistic groups. In the eleventh century the renowned Muslim Turk scholar Mahmud al-Kashgari described the language of the Oghuz and Turkmen as distinct from that of other Turks and identified twenty-two Oghuz clans or sub-tribes some of which appear in later Turkmen genealogies and legends as the core of the early Turkmen.

Oghuz expansion by means of military campaigns went at least as far as the Volga River and Ural Mountains but the geographic limits of their dominance fluctuated in the steppe areas extending north and west from the Aral Sea. Accounts of Arab geographers and travelers portray the Oghuz ethnic group as lacking centralized authority and being governed by a number of "kings" and "chieftains." Because of their disparate nature as a polity and the vastness of their domains Oghuz tribes rarely acted in concert. Hence by the late tenth century the bonds of their confederation began to loosen. At that time a clan leader named Seljuk founded a dynasty and the empire that bore his name on the basis of those Oghuz elements that had migrated southward into present-day Turkmenistan and Iran. The Seljuk Empire was centered in Persia from which Oghuz groups spread into Azerbaijan and Anatolia.

The name Turkmen ...more