Almost nothing in this city predates 1948.
On 6 October 1948, a magnitude 7.3 earthquake flattened Ashgabat: virtually all adobe construction was lost, along with 95% of the fired-brick buildings. What you see today — a capital of a million people faced in white marble — is the second city built on the same spot, and not even the one raised back then.
01 A city without layers
The figure that organises everything fits in one line. On 6 October 1948 an earthquake of roughly magnitude 7.3 destroyed virtually every adobe building in the city and 95% of those in fired brick. No historic centre was left to restore. What was left was a vacant lot the size of a capital.
The death toll remains unsettled, and it is worth saying so plainly: published estimates run from 110,000 to 176,000 dead, while the official Soviet announcement of the time gave 40,000. It is a wide discrepancy and I do not resolve it here; I flag it because whatever figure you read comes from one or the other of those two worlds.
02 What happened on 6 October 1948
The earthquake was not a geographic accident. Ashgabat sits right at the foot of the Kopet Dag, in a zone of active tectonic contact, and the same relief that gives the city its mountain backdrop is what explains the risk. Traditional adobe construction, moreover, is the worst possible material in a quake: heavy, brittle and unable to deform.
What went up afterwards was a textbook Soviet city, with low blocks and wide streets. And from the 1990s came the second reconstruction, the one that dominates today: entire blocks demolished and replaced by buildings faced in white marble. Two new cities in under a century, on the same grid.
03 The marble
In 2013 the city entered the Guinness Book of Records for having the world's highest concentration of white marble buildings. Specific figures circulate online for how many buildings and how many square metres; I found no source that stands them up, so they do not appear here. The record, as registered, is qualitative.
And it works exactly as you would expect: a pale cladding over regular volumes, coloured roofs — greens and turquoises above all — and irrigated gardens in the middle of the desert. From above, the whole has a uniformity of material that resembles no other capital.
04 Where exactly it is
The city stands at 273 metres, wedged between two things with nothing in common: the Karakum desert to the north, the Kopet Dag range to the south. The Iranian border is some 50 kilometres away. It covers 470 square kilometres and had 1,030,063 inhabitants at the 2022 census.
The water does not come from a river: it is brought by the Karakum Canal, which runs through the city. Without that infrastructure, the gardens you see between the white buildings would not exist, and probably nor would the city at this scale.
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05 How to look at it
The name hints at the depth the place does have, even if you cannot see it. Ashgabat comes from Persian and is usually translated as "city of love" or "city of devotion", but several historians point to an earlier, Parthian origin, possibly connected to Arsaces I. Which is to say: the place name is far older than any standing building.
So the useful way to walk it is not to hunt for the old inside the city — it is not there — but to go looking for it outside. Eighteen kilometres from the centre, the Parthian fortress of Nisa has been in place since the third century BC. That is the stratum Ashgabat is missing under its feet.
And inside, look at the scale. The avenues are enormously wide, the blocks large and the space between buildings generous: this is a city designed in one go, not grown. You notice it in the near-total absence of narrow streets and odd corners, the things that in other capitals are the residue of an earlier plan. Here there was no earlier plan to respect.
