Turkmenistan Overland Part 1 | Ashgabat to Turkmenbashi via the Trans-Caspian Railway

Our Ashgabat - Turkmenbashi overnight sleeper train at Ashgabat Railway Station

We had a little bit of experience in Central Asia when we visited Mongolia at its eastern end previously. When we started talking about the other end of Central Asia, i.e. Turkmenistan, they said this was a mysterious, closed-off and untouched country. They weren't wrong. But they forgot to add: "utterly magical."

After 10 days traveling through Turkmenistan (MAP), we came away with a country that could move from white-marble avenues to Timurid ruins, desert roads and the Caspian Sea with very little warning. This is Part 1 of our five-part Turkmenistan journey, and the first blog leg of our 2025 Silk Road/world-overland expedition. We begin in Ashgabat and finish at dawn in Turkmenbashi after an overnight train across the Karakum.

Turkmenistan Overland Part 1 — Post Summary

This first episode begins in Ashgabat and ends in Turkmenbashi on the Caspian Sea after an overnight Trans-Caspian Railway sleeper. Along the way we visit the capital’s record-holding architecture, museums and bazaars, eat a traditional Turkmen meal, stop at the Seyit Jemaleddin ruins in Anau and Turkmenbashi Ruhy Mosque in Gypjak, meet Alabai dogs, climb toward the TV Tower and see Ashgabat after dark.

What's Covered
✈️	Ashgabat International Airport — falcon-shaped terminal and early-morning arrival
🏛️	Ashgabat: The Marble Capital — White City, Olympic Complex, monuments and government district
🧶	Carpet Museum of Ashgabat — Turkmen weaving heritage and the record-holding carpet
🛒	Gulistan Bazaar — Russian Bazaar market atmosphere and traditional clothing
🎨	Artbazar Showroom — contemporary Turkmen art, crafts and traditional dress
🏪	Altyn Asyr Bazaar — Ashgabat’s large eastern market and livestock zone
🍢	Traditional Turkmen Kabob House — floor seating and a Central Asian meal
🕌	Seyit Jemaleddin Mosque — Timurid ruins at Anau and the 1948 earthquake scar
🕌	Turkmenbashi Ruhy Mosque — Gypjak mosque and mausoleum complex
🐕	Turkmen Alabai Dogs — local dog facility and a breed closely tied to Turkmen identity
📡	Ashgabat TV Tower — Kopet Dag foothills and the world’s largest architectural star
🌃	Ashgabat at Night — illuminated boulevards, towers and city panoramas
🚂	Turkmen Railways — overnight sleeper from Ashgabat across the Karakum to Turkmenbashi
⚓	Turkmenbashi — Caspian Sea port, Gates of Central Asia and next-leg handoff

Our Turkmenistan route began before dawn in Ashgabat, after the overnight flight, visa formalities and a badly needed stop at Hotel Mizan. From there we worked through the capital and nearby Anau and Gypjak before boarding the overnight train west across the Karakum to Turkmenbashi on the Caspian Sea.

Route: Ashgabat → Anau → Gypjak → Ashgabat Railway Station → Turkmenbashi
Distance: approximately 570 km from Ashgabat to Turkmenbashi by rail
Transport: guided vehicle around Ashgabat, Anau and Gypjak; Türkmendemirýollary overnight sleeper train
Part of: our five-part Turkmenistan journey

Route at a Glance

1. Ashgabat International Airport — falcon-shaped terminal and early-morning arrival
2. Ashgabat: The Marble Capital — White City, Olympic Complex, monuments, museums and government district
3. Carpet Museum of Ashgabat — Turkmen weaving and the record-holding handwoven carpet
4. Gulistan Bazaar — Russian Bazaar market and traditional clothing
5. Artbazar Showroom — contemporary Turkmen art and crafts
6. Altyn Asyr Bazaar — large eastern market and livestock area
7. Traditional Turkmen Kabob House — floor seating and a Central Asian meal
8. Seyit Jemaleddin Mosque, Anau — fifteenth-century Timurid ruins
9. Turkmenbashi Ruhy Mosque, Gypjak — mosque and mausoleum complex
10. Turkmen Alabai Dogs — local dog facility and Turkmen guardian breed
11. Ashgabat TV Tower — 211-meter tower and record-holding architectural star
12. Ashgabat at Night — illuminated boulevards and Kopet Dag views
13. Ashgabat Railway Station → overnight Trans-Caspian sleeper → Turkmenbashi
14. Turkmenbashi — Caspian Sea port, Gates of Central Asia and Part 2 handoff

Ashgabat International Airport (Asgabat halkara howa menzil)

Ashgabat International Airport (Asgabat halkara howa menzil) announces itself with the restraint of a falcon the size of an airport, which is to say none at all. The terminal’s bird-shaped form, white surfaces and huge interior spaces made our early-morning arrival feel less like immigration and more like checking into a science-fiction set with a very healthy marble budget.

Inside, the polished floors, chandeliers and gold accents keep the theme going. We had arrived after an overnight Turkish Airlines flight, so the place was impressive at exactly the hour when our brains were least qualified to process it.

Dropping a passport on that floor looked risky. It might have kept sliding until someone at the next border found it.

The Falcon-shaped Ashgabat International Airport

Ashgabat: The Marble Capital

Ashgabat is widely known as the White City, and the nickname is not doing much heavy lifting. Guinness World Records recognizes the capital for the highest density of white marble-clad buildings: 543 buildings carrying more than 4.5 million square meters of white marble within a 22-square-kilometer area.

The Olympic Complex, Independence Monument area, government district, museums and memorials occupy a large share of this section because that is how the city presented itself to us: monumental, carefully staged and often a little surreal.

Ashgabat

We had landed around 2:00 AM, finished the visa formalities and emerged from the airport around 4:00 AM, bleary-eyed but delighted to have reached Turkmenistan. The nearly empty early-morning roads made the city feel suspended between airport lights and sunrise, which was a dramatic way of saying that we were extremely tired. By the time we reached the hotel, our enthusiasm was still intact, but our ability to form useful sentences had gone on strike.

Mizan Hotel

Our guide, Guljeren from Trawelco, collected us and took us to Hotel Mizan for the sort of nap that is less sleep than emergency maintenance. A few hours later, the same city that had been a blur of lamps and white facades began to resolve into boulevards, monuments and very deliberate symmetry. The nap did not make us wiser, but it restored enough eyesight to appreciate what Ashgabat was about to throw at us.

Ashgabat

Once we were awake, the broad avenues, formal parks and white facades began in earnest. Our driver even stopped before entering central Ashgabat to wipe down the car. The city had clearly declared war on dust, and dust was losing on points. The wide lanes and sparse traffic also left very little visual clutter around the monuments, so each building arrived with the subtlety of someone walking into a room carrying their own spotlight.

Heavy Traffic in Ashgabat: 11 AM on a weekday at Zemin Monument roundabout

The roundabout photograph also captures something that kept recurring: Ashgabat uses ordinary road junctions as stages for fountains, sculpture and national symbols. Traffic engineering had apparently been given an arts budget. Along Archabil Highway, the road itself became part of the staging, with long sightlines, deep setbacks and huge open spaces keeping the next piece of architecture visible well before we reached it. Even getting from A to B could feel suspiciously like passing through a state-designed establishing shot.

Archabil Hwy, Ashgabat

Zemin Monument

The Zemin Monument sits on a major Ashgabat traffic circle, where a large gilded composition rises above the road and surrounding fountains. From the car it read as another piece of Ashgabat’s monumental streetscape, large enough to turn a normal junction into a destination.

Ashgabat uses traffic circles and long boulevards as stages for monumental architecture. Even an ordinary turn could come with fountains, arches and enough polished stone to make a municipal roundabout feel underdressed.

View of Ashgabat from Monument Of Neutrality

Ashgabat Olympic Complex

The Ashgabat Olympic Complex was built for the 2017 Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games. The district brings the 45,000-seat stadium, arenas, velodrome, aquatics center, tennis facilities, athlete accommodation and other sports buildings together in one vast white-and-gold precinct.

The 2017 event was the fifth Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games, an Olympic Council of Asia competition rather than the Olympic Games run by the International Olympic Committee. OCA’s Riyadh 2026 AIMAG page belongs to the same competition series, a useful distinction in a district where the word “Olympic” appears with the enthusiasm of a word that has found excellent real estate.

Fountains, broad paved spaces, white facades and gold accents run between the venues. Seen from the road, the complex feels less like one stadium with a few neighbors and more like a purpose-built sports quarter. The scale also explains why a small internal rail system appears among the arenas: getting around the sports complex can itself become a sporting event.

Olympic Complex The Olympic Complex and stadium exterior, with the horse-head structure already appearing above the stadium.

Ashgabat Olympic Stadium

The Ashgabat Olympic Stadium was the centerpiece of the 2017 Games complex and has about 45,000 seats. From outside, the stadium’s pale facade, broad roofline and the enormous horse-head structure above it do most of the talking.

We saw the stadium from several sides as we moved through the complex. The long white facade, gold details and reflecting pools keep it visually tied to the rest of Ashgabat, while the horse above the roof makes any attempt at architectural understatement entirely theoretical.

Olympic Stadium Views from both sides of the stadium and the record-holding Akhal-Teke horse-head structure above it.

The Record-Holding Akhal-Teke Horse-Head Sculpture

The structure above the stadium is a Guinness World Record holder: the world’s largest horse-head sculpture. Guinness measured it at 40.05 meters high, 37.69 meters long and 40.24 meters wide.

It represents the Akhal-Teke, the horse breed woven deeply into Turkmen national imagery. A 40-meter horse head above a stadium was already making the point quite efficiently.

Olympic Complex Metro Rail

The Olympic Complex also has an elevated internal rail system linking parts of the sports district. We saw its station and tracks crossing Ataturk Street, another piece of infrastructure folded into a complex already large enough to require transport inside the transport destination.

Olympic Complex Rail The station, elevated line and its crossing over Ataturk Street inside the Olympic district.

Olympic Aquatics Center / Olympic Swimming Pool

The aquatics center was another major venue of the 2017 Games complex. It includes a 50-meter competition pool, secondary pools and diving platforms inside the large purpose-built sports building.

Its white-and-glass exterior and curved roofline carry the same visual vocabulary as the surrounding venues. In a city surrounded by dry country, an enormous indoor swimming complex is already enough of a contrast without giving the filtration system a mythology of its own.

Olympic Sports Facilities Aquatics, tennis, sports administration, velodrome, martial-arts venue and Olympic Hotel inside the 2017 Games complex.

Olympic Tennis Center

The tennis center adds a large group of courts and a main arena to the Olympic district. White arches and glass tie it visually to the surrounding 2017 Games complex.

State Committee of Turkmenistan for Physical Culture and Sports

The State Committee for Physical Culture and Sports building sits among the stadiums and training facilities of the Olympic Complex. It is another white-marble administrative building in a district where sport, government and architecture are rarely separated by much distance.

Ashgabat Velodrome

The Ashgabat Velodrome is the complex’s dedicated track-cycling arena. Its elliptical form and steeply banked track fit neatly into a district designed around the 2017 Games.

Martial Arts Sports Building

The BASA-BAS SÖWES SUNGATY SPORT BINASY is the martial-arts venue within the Olympic Complex, built for combat sports during the 2017 Games. Judo, wrestling and boxing were among the sports associated with the venue.

From outside it follows the white-marble-and-glass language of the larger district. We saw it as part of the same enormous sports quarter, with a facade that keeps the complex’s white-and-gold design language going.

Olympic Hotel

The Olympic Hotel stands inside the Olympic Village near the major competition venues and was built to serve the sports complex and its events. From the road, its white facade and location made it read as another part of the same purpose-built sports district.

Ministry of Defense

The Ministry of Defense building on Garashsyzlyk Avenue is one of the large white-marble government buildings we passed in Ashgabat. Its guarded setting and monumental exterior fit the scale of the surrounding state district.

Ministry of Defense, Ashgabat

Independence Monument

Ashgabat’s Independence Monument rises 118 meters above a base shaped like a traditional yurt. Five large arches refer to the country’s principal tribal groupings, while carpet-like decorative patterns carry Turkmen motifs into the architecture. A gilded crescent and five stars crown the upper structure.

Statues of historical Turkmen figures surround the complex, making this one of the city’s clearest examples of national symbolism translated into very large architecture. The yurt form at the base was the detail that made the monument easier to read from ground level; the 118-meter height handled the rest without assistance.

Independence Monument Area Independence Monument, surrounding historical figures, Magtymguly Pyragy and Saparmurat Niyazov.

Magtymguly Pyragy

Magtymguly Pyragy, the 18th-century Turkmen poet and thinker, occupies a central place in Turkmen cultural memory. His poetry is associated with Turkmen unity, morality, cultural values and a strong spiritual current, which helps explain why his image and name recur so often around the country.

Here in Ashgabat, his monument sits among the capital’s larger national symbols. After seeing his name repeatedly on the road, the poet had started to feel less like one historical figure and more like a traveling companion who had been given better statues.

Saparmurat Niyazov Aniti

A gilded statue of Saparmurat Niyazov stands near the Independence Monument. The fountain and formal setting fit Ashgabat’s broader habit of turning political memory into monumental public space.

Ruhnama Monument

The giant book-shaped Ruhnama Monument refers to the Ruhnama, written under President Saparmurat Niyazov. During the Niyazov era the book was pushed deeply into public life and education; knowledge of it became part of schooling and official examinations.

That state promotion faded after Niyazov died in 2006, but the monument remained. It is, very literally, a huge stone book in a park, which makes the subject matter difficult to misidentify even before reading the title.

From the monument we could also see the dome and spire of the Altin Asir shopping center across Central Park. The pairing was pure Ashgabat: ideology in monumental stone on one side, shopping on the other, and immaculate landscaping between them.

Ruhnama and Central Park Ruhnama Monument, a view across Central Park and the monument entrance.

Neutrality Arch (Monument of Neutrality)

The Monument of Neutrality, or Bitaraplyk Arkasy, is the 95-meter tripod-like structure topped by a gilded figure of Saparmurat Niyazov. It commemorates Turkmenistan’s formally declared status of permanent neutrality.

The original central-city monument was dismantled and rebuilt in another part of Ashgabat in 2010; the Niyazov figure had famously rotated to face the sun in its earlier installation. Scaffolding covered much of it when we visited, so the photographs record the monument during repairs rather than the postcard version.

Neutrality Arch The Monument of Neutrality and the gilded Niyazov figure that once rotated to face the sun.

Ylym (Science) Monument

The Ylym, or Science, Monument uses an atom-like form beside Ashgabat’s Academy of Sciences. A central sphere and orbital rings make the scientific theme unusually literal, while nearby scholar figures continue the same message at ground level.

The structure is illuminated after dark like many of Ashgabat’s monuments. An atom turned into a city landmark is the sort of thing that saves everyone the bother of asking what the monument is about.

Ylym (Science) Monument, Academy of Sciences

Turkmen State Medical University

Turkmen State Medical University occupies another large white-marble institutional building in Ashgabat. It is the city’s principal medical university and sits within the same carefully planned government-and-education district. Seen between the science monument and the ministry buildings, the university helped blur the usual border between campus, civic center and ceremonial avenue. We were no longer stopping for one isolated landmark at a time; the whole corridor had started behaving like a single oversized architectural set.

Government District — Medical and Ministries Medical and government buildings along Ashgabat’s formal Archabil Highway district.

Ministry of Health and Medical Industry

Next to the medical university is the Ministry of Health and Medical Industry. Another large building appears farther along the same street, but we could not identify it confidently from the road.

Ministry of Energy of Turkmenistan

The Ministry of Energy building is one of the government offices we passed along Ashgabat’s broad formal avenues. Its white facade and gold accents fit the visual language of the surrounding state district.

Maslahat Kösgi Palace

Maslahat Kösgi stands along Archabil Highway among Ashgabat’s major government buildings. From the road, it forms part of a striking run of white facades, domes and formal grounds that made this stretch feel less like a normal office district and more like a state architecture catalog.

Ministry of Agriculture

The Ministry of Agriculture is headquartered along the same Archabil Highway government corridor, another identifiable state building in the long run of ministries we passed.

Ministry of Finance and Economy

The Ministry of Finance and Economy stands beside the other large state buildings on Archabil Highway. Its location and monumental exterior were obvious from the road; claims about unseen budget work and political messaging were not needed.

Ministry of Education of Turkmenistan

The Ministry of Education building is one of the district’s more distinctive structures, with a curved facade that reads visually like an open book.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Turkmenistan

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is easy to identify from the large globe incorporated into the building. It sits among the government complexes along Archabil Highway and is one of the least ambiguous pieces of architectural labeling we saw all day.

Prosperity Monument

The Prosperity Monument is another formal Ashgabat monument built around Turkmen decorative motifs and a globe-and-dove composition, set within the capital’s broad ceremonial streets.

Prosperity Monument, Ashgabat

The Ministry of Motor Transport

The transport ministry building belongs to the Archabil Highway government district. Later in our Turkmenistan journey we would drive the Turkmen Autobahn, but here the story is simply the ministry’s place in Ashgabat’s long run of state architecture. Its position also kept the sequence moving from symbolic monuments back to working institutions, even if the buildings remained dressed for a state banquet. By this point we had accepted that routine administration in Ashgabat apparently required a dress code.

Government District — Transport and Parliament Transport, industry, customs and parliamentary buildings along the government corridor.

Ministry of Industry and Construction Production

The Ministry of Industry and Construction Production is another white-marble state building along Ashgabat’s broad avenues. Its strong symmetry made it easy to photograph and difficult to mistake for a neighborhood dentist.

Headquarters of State Customs Service of Turkmenistan 

The State Customs Service headquarters continues the same monumental architectural style. As an overland-traveling couple, we have developed a professional interest in customs buildings. Usually it is healthiest when that interest remains architectural.

Mejlisler Markezi (Parliament) 

Mejlisler Markezi stands opposite the Alem Entertainment Center and forms part of the same government district as Maslahat Kösgi. The building is associated with Turkmenistan’s parliamentary and conference functions.

Alem Entertainment Center

The 95-meter Alem Entertainment Center gave us one of Ashgabat’s stranger record-book experiences: a Ferris wheel enclosed inside a huge glass-and-steel structure. Guinness measured the wheel itself at 47.60 meters high; the enclosing circular structure is larger, which is where the old 57-meter confusion came from.

Walking into the building and then into the giant circular enclosure felt less like entering an ordinary amusement center than boarding something with a flight plan. The wheel turns inside the structure rather than out in the weather, which is the whole reason the record is so wonderfully specific.

We rode in one of the enclosed cabins and looked out over the white city toward the Kopet Dag. Across the way stood Mejlisler Markezi, so the view managed to combine an amusement ride and a government complex in a single frame. Ashgabat can multitask.

As the cabin moved higher, the scale of the surrounding government district became easier to read. From street level the buildings arrive one at a time; from the wheel, they resolve into the carefully planned city composition we had been driving through all day.

Alem Entertainment Center The enclosed Ferris wheel, entrance, view toward Mejlisler Markezi and city views from the ride.

Museum of Fine Arts of Turkmenistan (Türkmenistanyn Sekillendiris sungaty muzeýi)

The Museum of Fine Arts of Turkmenistan occupies one of Ashgabat’s large white public buildings. Its official collection spans ancient and applied art of Turkmenistan, early and modern Turkmen visual art, and separate holdings of Russian, Oriental and West European art.

For us, this stop also changed the scale of the city. From the museum area we photographed broad panoramas across the white-marble capital, where the individual monuments and ministry buildings finally began to read as parts of one planned city rather than an endless queue of very ambitious neighbors.

Museum of Fine Arts of Turkmenistan

The current purpose-built Fine Arts Museum opened to visitors on February 17, 2005, giving the collection a dedicated modern home in the capital. That date places the building firmly inside Ashgabat’s post-independence construction era rather than the older Soviet city that existed before it. Outside, the museum’s broad frontage gave way to a much bigger subject: the city itself, spread across the view instead of arriving one monumental facade at a time.

Ashgabat: Panoramic View of the white marble city from Museum of Fine Arts of Turkmenistan

The first panorama made the government district look almost diagrammatic, with white facades separated by long strips of road, lawn and open space. Shifting the viewpoint changed the alignment enough to show that the city is less a single wall of marble than a series of formal axes. From street level those gaps feel enormous; from this viewpoint they became the geometry holding the buildings together, which was considerably easier on the neck.

Ashgabat: Another panoramic view from Museum of Fine Arts of Turkmenistan

National Museum of Turkmenistan (Türkmenistanyn Döwlet medeniýet merkezinin Döwlet muzeýi)

The State Museum of the State Cultural Centre stands on Archabil Avenue in another monumental white building. Its collections cover Turkmenistan’s history and culture, including archaeological and ethnographic material that places the modern capital beside much older Central Asian civilizations.

The museum’s broad formal facade, forecourt and nearby flagpole keep it visually tied to the Archabil Avenue government district. From outside, the scale is unmistakable; the building has no obvious interest in being mistaken for a modest local museum.

National Museum of Turkmenistan

Inside the State Museum, Old Nisa is represented by some of the Parthian site’s most famous finds, including carved ivory rhytons recovered from the royal complex. Those objects connected the museum directly to a Parthian capital we would visit later in Turkmenistan, turning a glass case into a preview of a future route stop. Outside, the 133-meter national flagpole provided an abrupt return to modern Ashgabat scale, because apparently the sky also needed a landmark.

Ashgabat Flagpole & city viewed from National Museum of Turkmenistan

Ashgabat Flagpole

A tall ceremonial flagpole stands in front of the museum complex, with the Turkmen flag visible above the formal grounds. In our photograph it works less as a record-book object than as a scale marker; the museum behind it is not exactly petite.

The flagpole, lawns and white public buildings continue the carefully staged look of this part of Ashgabat. Even the open space around the museum feels composed rather than accidental.

Ashgabat Flagpole

Carpet Museum of Ashgabat and Its World-Record Carpet

The Carpet Museum of Ashgabat is devoted to Turkmenistan’s carpet-weaving traditions, with historic and modern examples showing tribal patterns, symbols and techniques. Even the building leans into the subject, using forms that evoke a rolled carpet rather than pretending museums must always look like polite boxes.

Its best-known exhibit is the enormous handwoven carpet recognized by Guinness World Records. Around it, smaller pieces make the craft easier to study at human scale: repeated tribal motifs, fine changes in pattern, color and knotting, and examples of how carpets functioned as household objects as well as markers of family and group identity.

We spent time tracing symbols through the designs, including fish-like forms and other recurring Turkmen motifs, and saw unusual double-sided carpets. Once somebody shows you how to read a carpet, it stops being floor covering and starts behaving suspiciously like a document.

The largest handwoven carpet in the world at the Carpet Museum of Ashgabat

Halk Hakydasy Memorial Park ("People’s Memory")

The Halk Hakydasy Memorial Park brings several of Turkmenistan’s hardest national memories into one formal complex: the 1948 Ashgabat earthquake, Turkmen soldiers who died in World War II and the 1881 Battle of Geok Tepe.

The earthquake memorial uses a bronze bull carrying a fractured globe, while the nearby soldiers’ memorial carries the inscription, “Eternal honor and eternal glory to the heroes of the homeland!” The scale is monumental, but the subject matter makes the usual Ashgabat jokes sit this one out.

The Geok Tepe reliefs remember the Russian assault on the Teke stronghold in 1881. The Russian victory broke resistance in the Akhal oasis and gave the empire control over much of what is now Turkmenistan, a major step toward completing Russia’s conquest of the region.

Ashgabat’s marble image sits on top of a much harder memory. The 1948 earthquake devastated the city. USGS gives a death toll of 110,000 while noting that older sources often reported about 10,000, so the historical casualty record is not as tidy as a single number suggests.

Halk Hakydasy The memorial complex, earthquake memorial, fallen-soldiers monument and Geok Tepe reliefs.

The Yyldyz Hotel beyond the memorial complex sits on high ground above Ashgabat and was opened in 2013 after construction by Bouygues. Its teardrop-shaped tower rises about 107 meters, which makes it a very useful landmark when the rest of the city is busy competing for attention. From Halk Hakydasy, the hotel also creates an odd visual jump from national tragedy to luxury skyline in a single turn of the head.

View of Yildiz Hotel from Halk Hakydasy (‘People’s Memory’) Memorial Complex

Wedding Palace, Ashgabat

Ashgabat’s Wedding Palace (Saýlyk Kösgi) stands out even in a city that has made standing out a municipal hobby. Its geometric form, globe-like central feature and patterned facade combine glass, white surfaces and Turkmen decorative motifs.

It functions as a civil wedding venue, and after dark its exterior lighting makes the building especially easy to pick out from the surrounding city. We saw it from outside, where the globe-like form and patterned facade provided more than enough architecture for one wedding registry office.

Two exterior views were enough to make the point. In most cities a wedding registry office is a place you locate on a form. In Ashgabat it can be a skyline object.

Wedding Palace Two exterior views of Ashgabat’s Wedding Palace.

Gulistan Bazaar (Russian Bazaar), Ashgabat

Gulistan Bazaar, commonly called the Russian Bazaar, gave us a much more ordinary slice of Ashgabat after the monumental government district. We walked through produce and general-market stalls, with textiles and imported goods mixed into the same busy indoor market.

We walked past food stalls and market aisles, then tried traditional Turkmen clothing for photographs. The clothes won. They had home-field advantage.

The Soviet-era nickname still gives the market a different identity from the much larger Altyn Asyr complex outside the center. For our route, the useful contrast was simple: Gulistan felt like a working city market rather than another monumental attraction.

Gulistan Bazaar The Russian Bazaar market hall and our brief experiment with traditional Turkmen clothing.

Artbazar Showroom: Contemporary Turkmen Art

Off Ataturk Street, Artbazar Showroom gave us a smaller and more personal view of Turkmen creative work after the scale of the capital’s monuments. The space mixed handwoven carpets, silk scarves, paintings, ceramics and embroidered pieces, putting traditional craft beside newer work rather than separating the two into different worlds.

Co-founder Gurbanova Tajigul hosted us and talked us through the work with warmth and obvious enthusiasm. That conversation made the visit feel less like browsing a souvenir shop and more like meeting people who could explain what the patterns, materials and techniques meant to them.

A raised traditional seating platform also let visitors put on Turkmen clothing for photographs. We obliged, because travel occasionally requires accepting that somebody else’s hat is going to improve the picture considerably.

Posing as Turkmen at Artbazar showroom, Ashgabat

Altyn Asyr Bazaar (Altyn Asyr Gündogar Bazary): Ashgabat’s Grand Bazaar

Altyn Asyr Bazaar sits outside central Ashgabat and operates on a far larger scale than Gulistan. The complex is divided into broad market areas, and our visit included the livestock section as well as stalls selling everyday goods and food.

The livestock area was the part that most clearly separated this stop from the city bazaar. Cattle, sheep and other animals turned the market from a shopping stop into a reminder that Ashgabat sits beside a country where pastoral life remains economically and culturally important.

After the capital’s immaculate marble core, the bazaar was useful precisely because it was practical. People came to buy, sell and move goods; the architecture did not need to win anything.

Altyn Asyr Bazaar (Altyn Asyr Gündogar Bazary): Ashgabat’s Grand Bazaar

A Traditional Turkmen Kabob House in Ashgabat

On the rural outskirts of Ashgabat, we ate at a traditional kabob house called Behist. A private room had floor seating, carpets, embroidered cushions and a low raised table, a welcome change of scale after a day spent looking up at monuments.

The meal began with warm bread and small accompaniments before the grilled skewers arrived from the fire. On our table were nan, dried yogurt gurt, kabobs, plov, manti and green tea. The useful travel memory is less the menu taxonomy than the rhythm: food kept arriving, everyone shared it, and nobody seemed in a hurry to make lunch efficient.

The kabobs brought the smoke and char of the grill; the rice and dumplings made the meal heavier; tea slowed the ending down again. After marble halls and ceremonial avenues, sitting cross-legged around one table was one of the most ordinary moments of the day, and therefore one of the easiest to remember.

Central Asian hospitality does not require a giant monument. It does, however, appear to have strong opinions about whether you have eaten enough.

Kabob House Floor seating around a low table and part of our meal at Behist.

Seyit Jemaleddin Mosque

At Anau, southeast of Ashgabat, the ruins of the Seyit Jemaleddin complex preserve one of the strongest historical contrasts in this episode. The shrine-mosque was completed in 1455–1456 during the reign of Timurid ruler Abu’l-Qasim Babur; historical research attributes its construction to Muhammad Khudaydot in memory of his father, Shaykh Jamal al-Din.

The complex belonged to the Timurid architectural world of decorated portals, brick construction, geometry and colored tile. The surviving turquoise fragments on the damaged portal are small compared with what once stood here, but they give the eye enough evidence to imagine why the facade mattered.

The 1948 earthquake destroyed much of what remained of the structure. Today the arched walls, foundations and portal fragments sit open to the sky, with the information board doing some of the reconstruction work that the bricks can no longer manage.

Against Ashgabat’s recent white marble, Anau felt wonderfully stubborn: broken, old and under no obligation to match the municipal color scheme. The surviving brick, turquoise tile and damaged portal supplied plenty of story without supernatural assistance.

Seyit Jemaleddin Mosque information board

The portal’s most famous decoration no longer survives: a pair of mosaic-faience dragons once filled the spandrels of the entrance iwan. Scholars recorded the motif before the 1948 earthquake destroyed the complex, and the dragons remain one of the features that made the Anau shrine unusual within Timurid architecture. The information board therefore carries a detail the surviving brickwork cannot, which is a rather efficient division of labor between archaeology and signage.

Seyit Jemaleddin Ruins Two views of the surviving Timurid shrine-mosque ruins at Anau.

Turkmenbashi Ruhy Mosque

The Turkmenbashi Ruhy Mosque at Gypjak near Ashgabat was completed in 2004 during the rule of Saparmurat Niyazov. The French-designed complex uses white marble, a large gold dome and four 91-meter minarets, and was built for a stated capacity of about 10,000 worshippers.

The scale is immediate from the grounds: long approaches, broad open space and minarets high enough to stay in view well before the details of the facade become clear. Quranic text appears in the religious decoration, but the building also carries inscriptions associated with Niyazov’s Ruhnama.

That combination is what makes the site complicated rather than merely grand. The complex contains Niyazov’s mausoleum as well, tying mosque, personal rule and memorial architecture together in one place.

We covered up respectfully, visited the mosque and mausoleum, and left with the architecture and the politics still arguing quietly with each other. The building can be visually magnificent and politically peculiar at the same time; Turkmenistan had already taught us to leave room for both ideas.

Turkmenbashi Ruhy Complex The mosque, its grounds and the adjoining Turkmenbashi mausoleum.

Turkmen Alabai Dogs at a Local Dog Facility

The Alabai, or Central Asian Shepherd Dog, is closely associated with pastoral life in Turkmenistan and is treated as a source of national pride. The breed developed as a livestock guardian across Central Asia, where dogs had the practical job of staying with herds and reacting to predators or other threats.

That working history explains the heavy build, thick neck and calm watchfulness we saw in the adult dogs. They do not need much help looking serious. A large guardian dog can deliver a surprisingly complete border-control interview without asking a single question.

We visited a local breeder’s facility, which was also functioning as a rescue shelter, and met adult dogs and pups. Up close, the breed’s size and calm watchfulness were more memorable than any decorative treatment back in the capital.

Turkmenistan’s public affection for the breed is hard to miss. A huge gilded Alabai statue was unveiled in Ashgabat in 2020, giving a working livestock guardian the full capital-city treatment.

Turkmen Alabay: Ancient Central Asian Shepherd Dog

Ashgabat TV Tower and the World’s Largest Architectural Star

As we climbed toward the Kopet Dag foothills, the Ashgabat TV Tower became the obvious landmark above the city. The tower is 211 meters high, and the glass-clad Oguz Khan star built into it holds the Guinness World Record for the largest architectural star, covering 3,240 square meters.

The star is an eight-pointed form set into the tower rather than a small emblem pasted onto it. That distinction matters when the emblem itself covers more than three thousand square meters. Ashgabat does not often confuse symbolism with miniaturization.

From below, the star and tower sit above the capital like an oversized punctuation mark. At night the structure is illuminated, while the higher ground around it gives broad views back across Ashgabat and toward the dry country beyond the city.

The road up the foothills, the changing angle on the star and the widening city view did the job from ground level. The tower kept changing shape against the mountains as our route climbed.

Ashgabat TV Tower Two views of the TV Tower and its record-holding Oguz Khan star.

Ashgabat at Night

After dark, Ashgabat changes character without changing its fondness for display. White facades, towers, hotels, shopping buildings and long boulevards pick up bands of blue, white, gold and other colored light. During the day, individual buildings compete for attention; after dark, the lighting ties whole stretches of the city into one visual composition. The result is less subtle than a candle and rather more difficult to misplace.

Ashgabat at Night (Panorama)

From the foothills, the first panorama showed how far the lighting spreads across the capital, picking out long avenues and major buildings against the dark. The viewpoint also stripped away much of the street-level scale: monuments that had filled our windshield became small bright markers in a much larger grid. Moving along the slope changed their alignment again, so the city kept rearranging itself without actually going anywhere.

Ashgabat at Night (Panorama)

Closer views brought the Yyldyz Hotel, Wedding Palace and shopping district out of the wider glow. Their shapes became easier to separate once we stopped treating the entire city as one illuminated object and started picking out individual landmarks again. Ashgabat does not so much switch on its lights as make an announcement, and the announcement appears to come with several supporting exhibits.

Ashgabat After Dark The Yyldyz Hotel and Wedding Palace, followed by the illuminated shopping district.

The shopping buildings carried the same geometric lighting as the monumental district, while the roads in our photographs remained sparse and quiet. With fewer moving vehicles to dominate the frame, the fixed lighting on facades, medians and towers did most of the visual work. The effect made ordinary commercial blocks look unusually ceremonial, as though somebody might cut a ribbon before allowing us to buy toothpaste.

Ashgabat night view from foothills of Kopet Dag mountains

From higher ground the city became a field of white and colored points below the Kopet Dag. The boundary between the illuminated urban core and the darker slopes was much easier to read from here than from the boulevards below. The scale made more sense from up there, although “sense” remains a flexible word in Ashgabat. We could finally see the city as a whole without any single monument elbowing its way into the foreground.

Ashgabat Night Streets Illuminated boulevards, shopping buildings and the Yyldyz Hotel after dark.

Ashgabat to Turkmenbashi by Overnight Train

Rather than fly west, we boarded the overnight sleeper from Ashgabat to Turkmenbashi. The route belongs to the historic Trans-Caspian Railway corridor, built by the Russian Empire during its late-19th-century expansion across Central Asia. Construction began from the eastern side of the Caspian and pushed inland; the western terminus was later established at Krasnovodsk, today’s Turkmenbashi.

Our four-berth couchette had clean beds, fresh linen and bathrooms that compared favorably with our earlier Trans-Siberian and Trans-Mongolian Railway trips when we went Moscow to Beijing by train. Once the train left Ashgabat, the white city disappeared and the Karakum took over the windows.

The night passed with the steady rocking of the train. By dawn, the Caspian Sea and port infrastructure began appearing beside the tracks before we rolled into Turkmenbashi station.

The railway began as an imperial military project and later became an important transport artery for Central Asia. Riding it now did not recreate a Silk Road caravan, mercifully, but it did put us on a corridor whose technology and political purpose had changed while the broad east-west geography remained stubbornly useful.

Rail Arrival Ashgabat departure, the port-side rail approach and Turkmenbashi station.

Turkmenbashi on the Caspian Sea

Turkmenbashi, formerly Krasnovodsk, is the Caspian end of the railway we had just crossed overnight. Its modern port and rail terminal make it an important transport gateway on Turkmenistan’s western edge, distinct from the older caravan routes farther inland.

Our first views came through the train window at dawn, with rail yards, port infrastructure and the Caspian appearing as the overnight journey finally ran out of desert. After the polished order of Ashgabat, the western terminus felt more like a working transport city.

We visited the Caspian port area and the Gates of Central Asia monument, two tall white pillars linked by a curved top and decorated with Turkmen motifs. The setting between city, port and open dry ground gave it the familiar Ashgabat-family mix of scale, symmetry and slight disbelief.

The monument’s isolation was part of what made it memorable. There was enough space around the white structure to make it feel like a marker between the Karakum and the Caspian rather than an entrance to a crowded city.

Turkmenbashi The Caspian port and the Gates of Central Asia monument.

Watch: ASHGABAT Unveiled: Inside World's Strangest Marble City & Night Train to TURKMENBASHI, TURKMENISTAN

Ashgabat and Anau put two very different layers of Central Asian history beside each other: Timurid ruins on one side, a modern capital rebuilt after the 1948 earthquake on the other. The Trans-Caspian Railway added another layer in the late 19th century, carrying Russian imperial power and later trade across the region. Our overnight ride to the Caspian followed that later transport corridor rather than an ancient caravan route, but the recurring lesson was familiar: geography keeps finding new vehicles.

From Turkmenbashi, we head into the Karakum for Yangykala Canyon, continue through Balkanabat to Nokhur, descend to Köw-Ata Underground Lake, and return to Ashgabat in Turkmenistan Part 2.

- The Vagabond Couple