Off The Record
Eerie Reason Windows Stay Shut In $14B Abandoned ‘Ghost City’
Turkmenistan, with only 10,000 to 20,000 international visitors annually, is one of the least visited countries in the world, preventing many of you from experiencing its sights and sounds. Nevertheless, there are some strange and amazing places to visit.
The ‘City of the Dead’, officially known as Ashgabat, is located in Turkmenistan, along with the Gateway to Hell, which has been blazing for fifty years. In an episode of Netflix’s Dark Tourist, documentarian David Farrier travelled to Turkmenistan’s capital for the 2018 miniseries, giving viewers a glimpse of what’s inside. Only 1,030,063 people reside in this gleaming metropolis, despite $14 billion being spent to make it a reality, according to a 2022 census.
Even then, it seems hard to find any of them, with Ashgabat earning its ‘City of the Dead’ name due to its streets being eerily empty. A 1948 earthquake killed two-third of Ashgabat’s population and flattened much of the city, but under the rule of the late Saparmurat Niyazov’s, his “White City” urban renewal project saw Ashgabat grow into a dystopian city that has the record for the world’s highest concentration of white marble buildings. After founding ‘new Ashgabat’ in the early noughties, Niyazov said: “We shall only build with white marble. Greedy people don’t get it, they seek for other materials, we have to give orders.”
Ashgabat is a supposedly lovely resort that also has the largest indoor Ferris wheel in the world, but that doesn’t seem to be the whole picture, according to Stanislav Volkov’s 2017 piece in The Guardian about what it was like to live there.
After the death of Niyazov, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov took power and apparently unleashed “a new wave of destruction in the city.” Saying how Berdimuhamedov wanted to remove the memory of Niyazov, Volkov said: “He initiated ‘reconstruction’ of the central avenue, named after Niyazov, meaning it was entirely torn up. He built his new palace there, demolishing dozens of houses for the purpose, and blocked an entire street to the public, turning it into his personal boulevard.”
Ashgabat’s stringent regulations, censorship, and lack of access to outside news have earned it the moniker “new” North Korea, and it seems that this has permeated its citizens’ homes. Volkov reiterated: “Along any central street through which the president might pass, it is forbidden to open windows, install air conditioners or satellite dishes and hang clothes.”
Despite significant infrastructure investments by the government, some residents experienced days without electricity or water during the hot summer months, while “the centre of the city fountains flow around the clock and lights burn brightly for no one.”
While a bird-shaped airport that cost $2.3 billion and is only expected to operate at 10% capacity, there is an international bus terminal that did not service an international route for its first five years.
About 50,000 people lost their homes when 10,000 buildings were demolished to make room for the airport. The President apparently feared that when tourists came on flights, they would witness the “unattractive” homes of common people.
Journalists are imprisoned, and Volkov says he was once sprayed with acid. Those in positions of authority wish to present Ashgabat as something quite different from what it is, as Farrier pointed out in Dark Tourist.
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