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| Great Kyz Kala, Merv, Turkmenistan: Monumental ribbed mud-brick köshk on the ancient Silk Road |
From the Darvaza Gas Crater, our Turkmenistan route turned back toward Ashgabat, then west to Old Nisa and east toward Mary and Ancient Merv (MAP). This part follows the old Silk Road through Parthian ruins, Kopet Dag border country, the M37 corridor, operating sections of the new Ashgabat–Turkmenabat motorway and the brick bones of a city that once made medieval mapmakers feel useful.
If you missed the previous leg, catch up on the fire, fury and practical heat management at the Darvaza Gas Crater in Episode 3. For the complete five-episode route, our Turkmenistan Silk Road summary ties the country together before we dive into Nisa, Mary and Merv.
Turkmenistan Part 4 — Post Summary
This leg connects Parthian Old Nisa with modern Mary and the layered ruins of Ancient Merv. Along the way, the Kopet Dag frontier gives way to the M37 corridor, operating sections of the new Turkmen motorway, the Karakum Canal, Seljuk monuments, ribbed köshks, Islamic shrines, and one courtyard camel with strong opinions about management.
| What's Covered | |
| 🧭 | Route at a Glance — Ashgabat, Old Nisa, Mary, Ancient Merv and return to Mary |
| 🏺 | Nisa: Where the Parthians Dreamed — Parthian royal citadel and Kopet Dag frontier |
| 🛣️ | Old Nisa to Mary: M37 and the Turkmen Autobahn — road systems, 2025 motorway status and Mary |
| 🏛️ | Merv: Four Millennia in One Oasis — UNESCO succession of oasis cities |
| 🕌 | Inside Ancient Merv: Sultan Sanjar, Kyz Kala and Askhab — Seljuk and Timurid monuments, köshks and sardoba |
| 🐪 | A Taste of Turkmen Life — family courtyard, camel and Mary return |
From Ashgabat, we drove west to Old Nisa at the foot of the Kopet Dag, then turned east toward Mary on the M37 corridor and sections of the Ashgabat–Turkmenabat high-speed motorway before continuing to Ancient Merv. The road stitched together Parthian ruins, a modern cross-country highway, the Karakum Canal and one of the great oasis cities of the Silk Road. Central Asia does enjoy putting two thousand years of history beside a fresh lane marker and acting as if this is normal.
Route at a Glance
- Ashgabat to Old Nisa: Parthian royal citadel, UNESCO context and views toward the Kopet Dag Mountains.
- Old Nisa to Mary: M37, the operating Turkmen motorway sections, Kopet Dag frontier country and the long eastbound run.
- Mary to Ancient Merv: Türkmeniň ak öýi, the Karakum Canal and the approach to the UNESCO oasis cities.
- Inside Ancient Merv: Sultan Sanjar Mausoleum, Great and Little Kyz Kala, the Askhab complex, its sardoba and the hilltop panorama.
- Back to Mary: a Turkmen family courtyard, camel time and a hotel painting that kept the ruins following us indoors.
Nisa: Where the Parthians Dreamed
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| Ancient Parthian city of Old Nisa |
We left Ashgabat’s marble fantasy for much dustier Old Nisa, or Konye-Nisa, west of the capital beneath the Kopet Dag. With New Nisa, it forms the Parthian Fortresses of Nisa, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The mountains also mark the Turkmenistan-Iran frontier.
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| Ancient Parthian city of Old Nisa |
Nisa became a major Parthian royal center from around the third century BCE. The Parthian state later stretched from Mesopotamia and Anatolia deep into Iran and Central Asia. Its mounted archers made the “Parthian shot” famous: firing backward while apparently retreating. Rome was not amused.
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| Ancient Parthian city of Old Nisa |
Turkmen and international excavations, including long-running Italian work, have recovered ivory rhytons, wine records in Parthian script derived from Aramaic, Hellenistic-style sculpture and architectural fragments. Long-running Turkmen-Italian archaeological projects also documented and studied Old Nisa. Together, the finds show Central Asian, Iranian and Mediterranean influences meeting at Nisa.
Column bases and ceremonial rooms make that cultural mixture visible. Buildings such as the Square House belonged to the royal complex, but neat Doric-or-Ionic labels would overstate what survives. Most of Old Nisa is mud brick, plaster and foundations — enough geometry to show that nobody was improvising.
The Parthian court left unusually personal paperwork behind. Ostraca from Nisa record wine deliveries and storage, while carved ivory rhytons show the luxury objects used in elite ceremonies. Those finds turn the site from anonymous mud walls into a place with inventories, drinking vessels and administrators keeping track of what went where. Empire, as usual, required paperwork.
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| Old Nisa Surviving Parthian architectural remains, including the column sequence and mud-brick structures of the royal citadel. | ||
Among the fortifications and storage rooms, we tried to picture the royal compound from what actually survives. Nisa declined as political centers shifted and damage accumulated. From a distance it looks simple; up close, it gets complicated. Ruins are sneaky that way.
Old Nisa to Mary: M37 and the Turkmen Autobahn
After Old Nisa, we turned east with the Kopet Dag near the southern horizon and Iran beyond it. Checkpoints, shepherds with their flocks, small settlements and Turkmen flags broke up the dry country. The checkpoints were thankfully more curious than obstructive. Empty-looking is not the same as empty, especially when several sheep are using the shoulder.
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| Kopet Dag Mountains along the Turkmenistan-Iran frontier |
The road names need untangling. The M37 is a Turkmen east-west highway that overlaps international corridors. The European E60 runs from Brest, France, to Irkeshtam, Kyrgyzstan; AH5 is a separate Asian Highway route. They share Turkmen stretches but are not identical roads. The M37 also connects major Turkmen Silk Road cities from Türkmenbasy toward the Uzbek border.
The newer Ashgabat–Turkmenabat motorway is separate again. In 2025, Ashgabat–Tejen and Tejen–Mary were open; Mary–Turkmenabat was still under construction. The project was advancing east in stages, so our Mary run mixed newly opened high-speed motorway with older road sections carrying established east-west traffic.
For a significant stretch, the new motorway was immaculate against the desert. Off the new route, rough pavement and potholes returned quickly. The contrast was immediate: fresh asphalt on one side of the route plan, bathtub-sized reminders of older pavement on the other.
We rolled into modern Mary — roughly “Mar-ee,” not like the lady next door — as our base for Merv. Then a giant white yurt-shaped building appeared beside the road.
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| Türkmeniň ak öýi in Mary, the permanent white-yurt building locals called the White House |
The building is Türkmeniň ak öýi, the Turkmen White Yurt, a monumental permanent version of portable yurt architecture. Locals we met called it the “White House.” Used for major events and ceremonies, it turns a nomadic form into civic architecture on a scale that would be awkward to pack onto camels.
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| Karakum Canal crossing near Mary, Turkmenistan |
East of Mary we crossed the Karakum Canal, or Karakum Channel. More than 1,300 kilometers long, it carries Amu Darya water west for irrigation and urban supply. Farther east near Zahmet, the highway crosses it again toward Turkmenabat. We did not stop in Mary yet; Merv came first.
The canal is an engineering project on a continental scale, but from a vehicle it first registers as color: a hard stripe of blue-green water through tan country. Its Amu Darya supply supports farms and cities far from the river itself. That makes the crossing more than a photogenic bridge. It is part of the water system that keeps modern Turkmenistan functioning.
Merv: Four Millennia in One Oasis
Merv makes that line feel like a maintenance manual. Settlement here reaches back roughly four millennia, and older sources called Merv the “Queen of the World.” As water, rulers and defenses changed, new cities grew beside older ones.
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| Entering Ancient Merv City walls near the Askhab complex, the archaeological park entrance and surviving urban ruins spread across the oasis. | ||
The State Historical and Cultural Park “Ancient Merv” is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its major zones include Erk Kala, Gyaur Kala and Sultan Kala, preserving Achaemenid, Hellenistic, Sasanian and Islamic phases. On the ground, those tidy era labels quickly dissolve into neighboring walls from different cities.
Merv's urban sequence is what makes the site strange to read from ground level. Erk Kala began as the earliest fortified core; Gyaur Kala expanded around it in the ancient period; Sultan Kala became the great medieval city farther west. The oasis did not merely rebuild the same blocks. It repeatedly moved its center, leaving older walls standing beside newer ambitions.
At its twelfth-century Seljuk peak, Merv was one of the largest cities in the world and a center of trade and learning. Eurasian routes carried textiles, horses, metals, paper, spices and ideas through the oasis. Jewish, Zoroastrian, Christian and Muslim communities all appear in its long record. Its scale rivaled Rome, Baghdad and Constantinople (Istanbul); its libraries also keep Borges relevant.
At the Seljuk peak, Merv contained palaces, markets, mosques, workshops, bathhouses and libraries within a heavily irrigated oasis. That urban system depended on water as much as trade. Once canals and political authority were disrupted, the city could not simply rebuild itself by stacking fresh bricks on the old ones. The desert always keeps a vote.
In 1221, forces led by Tolui, a son of Genghis Khan, brother of Ögedei and father of Kublai, captured Merv and carried out a catastrophic massacre. Medieval chroniclers gave enormous death tolls, sometimes hundreds of thousands or more, but modern historians treat those figures cautiously. The destruction was real: urban fabric, irrigation and political power were badly damaged.
Merv did not vanish overnight. People remained in the oasis for centuries and later rulers reused parts of it, but its former Seljuk dominance never returned. Today it reads as a stack of cities, each leaving walls, shrines, roads and waterworks for the next period.
Inside Ancient Merv: Sultan Sanjar, Kyz Kala and Askhab
Sultan Sanjar Mausoleum
Our first major monument was the Mausoleum of Sultan Ahmad Sanjar, the twelfth-century ruler of the eastern Seljuk state from Merv. Its brick cube once carried a high double dome with a turquoise-tiled outer surface. That outer dome no longer survives intact.
Sanjar made Merv his political center for decades, and the mausoleum was designed as a dominant landmark. The turquoise-tiled outer dome would have made it even more conspicuous across the oasis. Its loss explains why the surviving brick profile looks plainer today than medieval descriptions and restoration studies suggest. The scale remains enormous even without the original outer shell and color.
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| Sultan Sanjar Mausoleum Exterior, composite and interior views of the Seljuk monument whose original high double dome was covered with turquoise tiles. | |||
Inside, the temperature dropped. Brick ribs, arches and geometric transitions draw the eye upward, while Sanjar’s tomb marker is comparatively plain below. The ruler is quiet; the architecture does the talking.
The mausoleum remained a major Merv landmark after the city’s political center faded. Cool air, quiet brickwork and the simple tomb made the interior feel spare rather than empty. History had already supplied plenty.
The Great Kyz Kala
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| Great Kyz Kala First views of the monumental ribbed mud-brick köshk, one of Ancient Merv’s most recognizable surviving structures. | |||
Great Kyz Kala looks fortified behind huge corrugated mud-brick ribs, but it is not an established caravanserai. Archaeologists classify it as a monumental köshk, probably an elite or palatial complex. Its exact function remains debated.
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| Great Kyz Kala, Merv |
The vertical ribs articulated the massive earthen walls, giving the building its unmistakable silhouette. Inside were suites of rooms above a substantial platform. Great Kyz Kala belonged to Merv’s settled elite world, not a generic caravan stage set.
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| Great Kyz Kala Later views of the same corrugated earthen monument, whose exact historic function remains debated by archaeologists. | ||
The ridged walls looked as if giant hands had pressed them into shape. Mud brick is usually called humble; here the repeated vertical ribs made the whole building look anything but humble.
The Little Kyz Kala
The Little Kyz Kala, or Lesser Kyz Kala, is the smaller neighboring köshk with the same ribbed language but far less surviving fabric. Its owner or exact use is uncertain, so we left that job to archaeology.
Little Kyz Kala made the erosion easier to see. The same ribbed design survives, but whole sections have gone, leaving only fragments where a substantial building once stood.
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| Little Kyz Kala Two views of the smaller neighboring ribbed köshk at Ancient Merv. | |
Only a small fraction of its rooms remains. Great Kyz Kala is the dramatic sibling; Little Kyz Kala is slowly disappearing at the edge of the family photograph.
Askhab Mausoleums
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| Askhab Mausoleums The twin shrine complex and Timurid iwans traditionally associated with companions of the Prophet Muhammad. | |||
Next came the Askhab Mausoleums, or Iki Askhab Türbesi. Local and religious tradition links the site to companions of the Prophet Muhammad, Buraida ibn al-Husayb and Al-Hakam ibn Amr al-Ghifari. Prominent decorated iwans are Timurid, while later mausoleums and prayer spaces continued its devotional life.
We saw the reverence visitors brought. Locally, we were told that seven visits here were spiritually equivalent to a Hajj. We record that as a devotional belief we heard at Merv, not Islamic doctrine. “People here say” and “the universe has issued a receipt” are different categories.
The Askhab Sardoba
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| Covered sardoba water cistern at the Askhab complex, Ancient Merv |
Beside the Askhab complex stands a domed structure that can resemble small lodging at first glance. It is a sardoba, a covered water cistern. On dry pilgrimage and caravan routes, water mattered more than another room. We were told cemetery visitors sometimes washed their hands and feet in it. Mystery solved by plumbing.
Panorama from the Hill
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| Viewpoint on a hill in ancient Merv |
We climbed a hill to the east of the twin mausoleums and Merv finally made sense. To the west lay remains associated with the Beni Makhan Mosque, thought to be the earliest mosque in Merv.
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| Panorama across Ancient Merv from the hill |
Farther out was Erk Kala, whose settlement predates the Roman Empire, then Sultan Kala, the Seljuk center, the Mausoleum of Yusuf Hamadani, a revered Sufi saint, and the shrine of Muhammad Ibn Zayd. From above, the oasis looked like a map whose layers disagreed about where the city belonged.
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| Panorama view of Ancient Merv from the hill |
We stood there for a while. Human ambition was spread across the desert in brick, canals and very poor shade. A single “Merv” pin on a map suddenly looked ridiculous.
A Taste of Turkmen Life
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| Great Kyz Kala and Little Kyz Kala viewed from the courtyard of a local family residence, Merv |
As we descended, we met a Turkmen family living beside the ruins. Their front-yard view was Great Kyz Kala and Little Kyz Kala side by side. Real-estate agents have described worse views with more enthusiasm.
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| Courtyard of a Turkmen family home near Ancient Merv |
They welcomed us warmly. Through broken Russian, gestures and smiles, they described nomadic family roots and a settled life still carrying older customs: epic songs, weddings lasting days and rich, filling food suited to dry-country work.
They also gave us Merv folklore: underground passages between monuments, books glowing with sacred knowledge and ghosts whispering around the ruins. We kept those as stories told by the family, not archaeology. The courtyard camel appeared comfortable with this arrangement.
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| Ship of the Karakum Desert: riding a Turkmen camel |
The day ended with a ride on that camel. We have ridden camels in quite a few places, so the rise-and-lurch routine was familiar. This one was good-natured and gave us one last piece of desert transport before Mary.
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| A painting of the Askhab Mausoleums at our hotel in Mary |
At our Mary hotel, even the wall art refused to let Merv go: a painting of the Askhab Mausoleums hung inside. After Parthian Nisa, modern roads and Seljuk Merv, the shrines had followed us indoors.
By the time we returned to Mary, Nisa had shown the Parthian edge of empire and Merv the city-machine built around water, trade, faith, power and clay. The camel confirmed that every civilization still needs a supervising committee. Turkmenistan became the opening country chapter in our 2025 Silk Road/world-overland series.
Next, we head east to Amul, modern Turkmenabat, then follow the Amu Darya (Oxus River) and Dayahatyn Caravanserai. The old trade road keeps going, and so do we.
- The Vagabond Couple
