01 What Nisa actually is
Nisa lies beside the Bagyr neighbourhood, eighteen kilometres west of the centre of Ashgabat. Tradition holds that Arsaces I founded it, between roughly 250 and 211 BC, and that later Mithridates I — between 171 and 138 BC — gave it the name Mithradatkert. It was one of the strongholds of the Parthian world in its first century.
And it ended the way Ashgabat ended two millennia later: the city was completely destroyed by an earthquake in the first decade BC. The coincidence is not poetic, it is geological: the same tectonic contact beneath the Kopet Dag.
02 What came out of it
Excavations brought to light large buildings, mausoleums, a good number of inscribed documents and a treasury that had already been looted in antiquity. Also artworks of Hellenistic workmanship, which is in itself the site's argument: here you see how the Greek world and the Iranian world mixed inside a single building.
The ivory rhyta from Nisa are among the most important Parthian objects that exist, and they are not in London or Paris: they are twenty minutes from the site.
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03 How to lay out the three days
Day one, the National Museum of History, in the city. That is where the rhyta are, along with the terracotta architectural pieces and the marble sculptures that came out of the site. Go to the museum first: do it the other way round and at Nisa you will be looking at mounds without knowing what to look for.
Day two, the site, first thing. Eighteen kilometres is half an hour by car, and morning light is what makes the building plans legible: with the sun high, the mudbrick walls flatten out and vanish. Take water, a hat and closed shoes; there is no shade anywhere on the site.
Day three, go back. To the site or to the museum, depending on which left you with more questions. This is a destination that gives little on a first visit and a fair amount on a second, and since you have already made the effort to get here, there is no sense in rationing it.
04 What you have to accept
Two things, and I will say them plainly. First: every foreigner needs a visa to enter Turkmenistan, and the process is slow and unpredictable. Start months ahead and do not buy flights before it is settled.
Second: the month matters more than at almost any other destination. From June to August the mean high in Ashgabat runs between 36 and 38 degrees, and the site does not have a single tree. April, May, September and October are the four months in which this trip works; the rest, it does not.
If you fit the profile, the argument fits in one sentence: you will have to yourself a World Heritage site almost nobody visits, on the exact spot where one of antiquity's great empires began, and then you will see its finest objects twenty minutes away. Very few destinations offer that complete chain.
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