Melons, cotton and the Aral Sea

“The melons of Khwarizm have no equal in any country of the world, East or West, except it may be the melons of Bukhara.....Their rind is green and the flesh red, of extreme sweetness and firm texture. A remarkable thing is that they are cut into strips, dried in the sun, and packed in reed baskets....they are exported from Khwarizm to the remotest parts of India and China and of all dried fruits there are none which excel them in sweetness.”

It was unanimously decided as we daily munched our way through water melon and a yellow-fleshed variety that truly the melons here were the best in the world.

Konye-Urgench and The King's Foolish Mistake

“After journeying through this desert we have arrived at Khwarizm which is the largest, most beautiful and most important city of the Turks. It has fine bazaars and broad streets, a great number of buildings... the city is in the dominions of the Sultan Uzbek who is represented in it by the great Emir called Qutludumur. It was he who built the college and the dependencies annexed to it. As for the Mosque, it was built by his wife, the pious Khatun Turabak.”

Konye-Urgench (what Ibn B calls Khwarizm) is today a ruin. There are no bazaars and no streets. There are no crowds and very few buildings. There is no cathedral Mosque - only the stump of a minaret remains - and no college, standing or otherwise. The once thriving city has returned to the earth and at first glance is now little more than scattered mounds of caked mud. Genghis Khan destroyed the city (and many others) because of a short-sighted decision by one of the Khorezmshah kings, Mohammed II, who ruled from Urgench. Ibn Battuta relates the story and it is worth the re-telling in his words, since the story is historical fact.

A day at the Races, Tolkuchka Bazaar and the Evil Eye

Our guide, Bava, told us that in honor of a local holiday - the Holiday of the Turkmen Bakhshi - there was horse racing at the Hippodrome and would we like to go. We would miss the livestock sale at Tolkuchka Bazaar but it might be interesting. It was unique. Local lads and lasses were decked out in national costume, children were painting illustrations of the Ruhnama, (the month of September in Turkmenistan is called Ruhnama), young boys performed martial arts, (a very noticeable thing throughout Central Asia is the number of young men who have their right hand and wrist bandaged up, martial arts, wrestling and boxing being very popular sports here), while portraits of the president watching over his flock studded the grounds of the Hippodrome including the racetrack, and the colorful Turkmen flag fluttered around the perimeter.
The Turkmen flag; a green background representing the color of Islam, (green is the color of paradise), the white crescent moon and five stars of Islam as well as five gul patterns representing the five provinces of the country.

Modern City in an Ancient land

Asgabat, Ashkhabad, Ashgabad; there are many ways to spell the name of this city, the capital of Turkmenistan. Transliteration is never a straightforward task but one reason it is particularly onerous here perhaps, is that in less than 80 years Turkmenistan has gone from using Arabic script for its language, Turkmen - a Turkic tongue - to Latin, Cyrillic and now back to Latin. Although the site of the capital is ancient - neolithic settlements have been discovered in the foothills of the Kopet Dag range around the capital and Ashgabad itself was probably founded around the 3rd century BC - it was only after the Russians arrived in 1881 that the city began to take the form it has today. But in 1948 Ashgabad was virtually leveled by an earthquake and as Turkmenistan was then officially the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic not only did the outside world not hear much about it, but the re-building was of the decidedly drab until the advent of independence, oil and president for life Sapurmarat Niyazov, also known as Turkmenbashy, or Father of the Turkmen.