Ancient Merv

Merv, in the oasis of the Murghab river in what is now Turkmenistan, was for two thousand years one of the great cities of Central Asia. Instead of rebuilding on the same spot, each era shifted the city slightly, so the site today is a landscape of several separate walled cities side by side. UNESCO inscribed the State Historical and Cultural Park “Ancient Merv” in 1999.

The oldest, Erk Kala, is a round walled mound of the Achaemenid period. It was absorbed into a larger square city, Gyaur Kala, founded in the Hellenistic era and used through Parthian and Sasanian times; here Buddhist, Christian, Zoroastrian and Jewish communities lived alongside one another. After the Arab conquest the city grew to the west, and under the Seljuks in the eleventh and twelfth centuries Sultan Kala became a capital and one of the largest cities of its age.

The great survivor is the mausoleum of Sultan Sanjar, who died in 1157: a cube crowned by a dome raised on a high drum, which once had an outer shell covered in turquoise tile. In 1221 the Mongols took Merv and killed much of its population. Elsewhere on the site stand köshks, fortified mud-brick manor houses with corrugated walls that look like folded curtains, and ice-houses that stored winter ice for summer.