Lost City of the Silk Road
Travel Stories: To know the heart of Turkmenistan John W. Kropf thought he had to know the ancient city of Merv. That was just the beginning of his search.
09.12.06 | 10:21 PM ET
Photo by John W. Kropf.We came in view of an immense wilderness of ruined buildings, forming a semicircle in front of us to the north and south. —Edmund O’Donovan, The Merv Oasis, 1882
A man named Kurbam sat in the passenger’s seat of my Jeep, instructing me in Turkmen to drive off the dirt road bordering a cotton field and into a line of ruts in the sand. Kurbam was my guide to find an archeological dig of Margush, an ancient fortress that pre-dated the legendary Silk Road city of Merv. Driving through the soft sand, I kept repeating a four-wheel mantra to myself—keep the tires moving.
The unlikely adventure began after my first year in the secretive Central Asian country of Turkmenistan working for the American Embassy. I was fortunate enough to be invited to a rural village outside the provincial city of Mary by a young Turkmen friend, Dovelet. From Dovelet’s family home, we hoped to venture out for a look at an archeological dig outside the ruins of Merv.
To know the heart of Turkmenistan, I had to know the ancient city of Merv. Once heralded as “Queen of the Ancient World,” it rivaled Baghdad as a center of Islamic art, culture and learning. Merv’s position between the great civilizations of East and West fixed it squarely in the path of the West’s greatest empire builder, Alexander the Great, and the East’s greatest empire destroyer, Genghis Khan. Alexander and Ghengis Khan were like bookends to Merv’s noble history with the trade routes known as the Silk Road. Since the abrupt end of its golden age at the hands of the Mongols in the early 13th century, nature had buried its acres of desiccated remains under the sands of the Kara Kum Desert, leaving only the nearby Russian-founded city of Mary (pronounced Mer-REE).
After a year of a friendship with Dovelet, he invited me to visit his village outside Mary. Turkmen are very private, clannish, and wary of outsiders, so when Dovelet extended the invitation, I felt we had crossed an important threshold of trust. Unlike the more gregarious Arab world, an invitation to eat with a Turkmen in the family home was not made lightly. Dovelet also had to be cautious because the Government would take particular interest in anyone who visited with foreigners, particularly those associated with the American Embassy. The family was the most valued part of Turkmen life.
Dovelet was unusual for a Turkmen. He lived and worked in the capitol city of Ashgabat but came from a small agricultural village. He was proud of his tribal heritage as member of the Merv branch of the Tekke tribe. At the same time, he had worldly interests, showed talent for painting and music, and spoke Arabic, English, German and French. Dovelet aspired to study in the United States and to work for the United Nations. He and his two younger brothers were raised by a single mother who had been a schoolteacher and had divorced her husband, something almost unheard of in Turkmen society. Usually it was the husband who divorced his wife. She was also one of the first women in Mary to drive her own car.
On a May morning, Dovelet and I set out from Ashgabat to follow in the eastward route of the Silk Road to Merv. By early afternoon, we had crossed the nearly dry Murgap River south of Mary, and turned off the paved road onto a dirt road that lead to Dovelet’s village. We had covered in four hours what might have taken a camel caravan four days in the 19th century.
“This is where I feel strongest,” Dovelet said. “I want to move back here one day.”
Dovelet’s passion for his tribal village disproved the theory of “Soviet Man”—a mythical citizen devoid of all cultural ties, whose only loyalty was to the State, an idea propagated by the Soviet Union. Turkmen love their country—from the persecuted Christians who chose to remain in Turkmenistan and practice their religion; to the exchange student who returned after a year in the U.S.; to the cultured, western-oriented intellectual struggling to make a decent life for his family.
The village was a series of one-story, dust-yellow brick houses. There were no street signs or traffic lights or pictures of the president. House fronts were lined in the traditional way with high walls facing the street. Backyards were filled with gardens, fruit trees, sheep, and usually a lone camel.
The next morning, we met our guide Kurban at his home in the desolate cotton fields north of Mary. Introduced in the usual Turkmen way with a double-handed clasp, and the greeting of “Salaam,” his response was impassive while simultaneously conveying a sense of superiority. I found this puzzling. I wondered how this man, in his barren surroundings, could convey such a strong sense of pride. It only occurred to me later that, like Dovelet, he was understandably proud because he was tied to a culture thousands of years old, the remains of which were here in his backyard.
Once off-road, Kurbam navigated through a series of gestures instructing me to drive into dry streambeds, flat desert, over sand dunes, and around mud pits. I hoped my Jeep would perform like advertised in all those commercials showing robust off-road, go-anywhere-do-anything adventure. The steering wheel felt mushy in my hands as if I was driving on under-inflated tires. All that I could remember about four-wheel driving was, keep the tires moving.
Every so often the absurdity of my situation would occur to me. I was in the company of three Turkmen, dependent on one man—Dovelet—to translate, while driving through unmarked desert wasteland. I realized that no one at the Embassy knew exactly where I was. Plus I had violated the first rule of desert travel: always travel with at least three vehicles in your caravan. If one got stuck the second could pull the first out and the third could go for help.
Keep the tires moving.
I tugged the steering wheel right and left through heavy sand to keep the wheels from rutting into the sand.
After an hour, we were moving through a featureless horizon. The sound of the in-line six cylinders labored in and out of small sand dunes mixed with the occasional scratch of thorny shrubs against the Jeep’s skid plates.
Keep the tires moving.
At the end of the two hours, we crested a small ridge overlooking what seemed like a giant maze of mud walls. This was the foundation of the ancient city of Margush spread out before my wheels.
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