Like in every country in the world, there are rich people also in Turkmenistan. And like in every post-Soviet country, there are people who are obscenely rich, i.e. people whose fortune is incomparable to the living standards of ordinary people. However, unlike in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan or Ukraine, you will see no Hammers cruising the Turkmen […]

Information agencies have recently observed increased German activity in Turkmenistan. Its most recent manifestation was the Turkmen-German Economic Forum held in Ashgabat on February 26.
The delegation consisted of representatives of Germany’s big banks and well-known companies, including Siemens AG, Mannesmann Fuchs Rohr GmbH, Wintershall Holding AG, MAN Ferrostaal AG, Wirtgen International GmbH, LEMKEN GmbH […]

The author of the Nähili.com blog I have already written about devoted one of his posts to the problem of the Russian language in Turkmenistan. He wonders why many Turkmen use the Russian rather than their native Turkmen language in their everyday life. Indeed, it was one of the things that struck me when […]

I wish everyone lots of love in the coming week!

The Western mainstream media are not exactly known for their comprehensive, well-informed and balanced reporting of events in many parts of the world, and, unsurprisingly, stories from Turkmenistan are no exception; there’s got to be something a little exotic, dare I say even bizarre, for a story to warrant interest (supplying humanitarian aid is […]

I’ve just read an article written by a Russian daily’s Vremya Novostey journalist Arkadiy Dubnov entitled „The Turkmen issue in Europe” with an excellent subheading: “Western human rights activists look like Russia’s allies”. The author writes about the European Parliament’s repeated rejection of a temporary commercial agreement to be signed between the EU and […]

This is a translation of Abdulgamid’s post on the Russian blog
There are some names of places, regions and areas, which are used by world mass media as common nouns, e.g. Gaza Strip, Nagorny Karabakh and Falkland Islands – and “conflict” is the word that can be at once associated with such places. There […]

Yesterday Turkmenistan celebrated the Turkmen Flag Day introduced by Saparmurat Niyazov back in 1994. For the first time this year, the festivities were not accompanied by the celebration of Turkmenbashi’s birthday (February 19).
By tradition, the festivities started with a flower laying ceremony at Independence Monument in the southern part of the Turkmen capital, the Ashgabat […]

I’ll start by quoting news that I read today in the morning on the Turkmenistan.ru website. I must confess that I was dumbfounded after reading it. I didn’t know whether I should start laughing or crying first. Here’s a quote from the article:
President of Turkmenistan Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov was awarded an international order “For Outstanding Achievements […]

The Turkmen city of Krasnovodsk (today called Turkmebashi) lies about 400 kilometres from the Kazakh town of Zhana-Ozen in the Mangystau region. It takes 15 hours to reach one place from the other, mainly because there is no road on the large part of the route, just rutted tracks meandering back and forth in […]