Science
What Happened To This $14B ‘City Of The Dead’? Once Home To 1 Million, Now A Ghost Metropolis
The ‘new’ North Korea is Turkmenistan, but there are some strange and amazing locations in the world. The thinly populated nation, which is surrounded by Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and Iran, has more natural gas reserves than the United States and ranks fourth in the world.
Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, has a population of only 1,030,063 (based on a census conducted in 2022), despite spending $14 billion to build the gleaming white marble monument that it is today.
Ashgabat is drawing a new wave of “dark tourists” who wish to see inside Turkmenistan, which has been notorious for its Gateway to Hell burning for the past 50 years. This country is reportedly almost as stringent as North Korea.
Despite being there since 1881, Ashgabat was largely destroyed by an earthquake in 1948, and two-thirds of its residents were buried beneath the debris.
Under the rule of the late Saparmurat Niyazov’s “White City” urban renewal project, Ashgabat has grown into the so-called ‘city of the dead’. When ‘new Ashgabat’ was founded in the early noughties, Niyazov once said, “We shall only build with white marble. Greedy people don’t get it, they seek for other materials, we have to give orders.”
Documentarian David Farrier, who included Ashgabat in an episode of his Dark Tourist Netflix series, described his experience travelling there in a 2018 piece published in The Guardian. Turkmenistan built a $5 billion village with enormous stadiums after negotiating the right to host the Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games.
Ashgabat holds the record for the highest density of white marble structures, according to Farrier.
As well as the Ashgabat Fountain complex holding the record for the “Most Fountain Pools in a Public Place”, there’s a four-foot gold statue of Niyazov that stands in the middle of the city and rotates once every 24 hours. Other records include the world’s largest indoor ferris wheel and the world’s largest star, with part of the $5 billion Olympic spend going on a giant bird-shaped airport expansion. Although it can handle 14 million passengers a year, an average of just 100,000 people use it annually.
The otherworldly city of Ashgabat, capital of the lesser-known authoritarian state Turkmenistan
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Black automobiles are said to bring bad luck, according to President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, who famously seized several of them in 2018.
In relation to Berdimuhamedov, the public is not permitted to enter the gold-domed Presidential Palace, and photography is prohibited.
Discussing his time there, Farrier suggested Ashgabat was just a facade as he mused, “Guides steered us where they wanted to go. It was illegal to leave the city limits. Public transport made no sense. There was only one way to do anything.”
Massive parks and squares are deserted, and although a lighted Ashgabat at night appears to be a bustling metropolis, many sources describe it as a bleak marble monument that has earned the moniker “city of the dead.”
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