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Ashgabat

Ashgabat is a city of marble, monumentality, and deliberate reinvention—a capital built on oil wealth and architectural ambition in the heart of Central Asia. Wide avenues lined with neoclassical government buildings and pristine white stone create an almost surreal sense of order and scale. It's a place where Soviet heritage meets authoritarian grandeur, where you'll find some of the world's most unusual urban design and a palpable sense of remove from the everyday world.

CountryTurkmenistan
RegionAhal
LanguageTK
CurrencyTMT
Where it is
Turkmenistan · Ahal

Roughly where Ashgabat sits.

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From the magazine

What we wrote about Ashgabat

The map tells you where. These pieces tell you when to go, whether the place is for you, and what nobody mentions.

Read the Ashgabat guideAlmost nothing in this city predates 1948.
01When to go1
Seventy-one degrees separate its hottest and coldest records.

Ashgabat has recorded 47.2 degrees in June and 24.1 below zero in January. In between fit 221 millimetres of rain a year, ninety days with precipitation, and a summer in which August delivers two millimetres. This is a climate that does not forgive the wrong month, and the wrong month is more than half the year.

8 min
02Made for you1
For the traveller who comes for what was here before the marble.

Eighteen kilometres from the centre of Ashgabat stands a mound of eroded mudbrick that was a third-century BC Parthian fortress and that UNESCO inscribed in 2007. There are no standing columns and no mosaics: there are earth walls, a plain, and the Kopet Dag behind. This trip is for someone who finds that better than a restored monument.

9 min
03Worth knowing1
Three hundred and seventy-eight kilometres of desert in three days, without water.

In 1935, a group of Turkmen riders covered the 4,000 kilometres between Ashgabat and Moscow in 84 days. Inside that figure is another that explains what the Akhal-Teke horse is made of: 378 kilometres of desert crossed in three days without water. The breed takes its name from the oases around this city.

8 min
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