by Gideon J. (9th Grade)

As this year we have been studying world geography, including every major region in the world (except Antarctica), we recently studied Asia. The region that I researched was Central Asia, which is—if you are also in sore need of Geography class and had not already realized—in this world. Central Asia as a whole was interesting enough to research, but I found one country the most interesting of the five in the region: Turkmenistan.
Turkmenistan’s capital is Ashgabat, the Guinness world record holder of the “highest concentration of white marble buildings” in a city. This alone gives the capital the look of a whitewashed penguin, but the city’s law that all the cars in the capital must be clean (which isn’t necessarily easy for a city in the middle of a desert), and painted either white or silver, adds a second and excessive coat.
A few random facts I collected are that dogs were once banned in Ashgabat on the grounds of their “unappealing odour,” and that, excluding the few exceptions, it is illegal for men to have beards in Turkmenistan. A slightly more applicable fact I learned is that the writing script of Turkmen, Turkmenistan’s official language, is the Latin alphabet, which is odd because most of the country’s neighbors use Cyrillic.
Turkmens celebrate the second Sunday of August as national Melon Day. I did not go in depth in researching Melon Day—a great folly, I am sure—so I cannot tell you why Turkmens have a national Melon Day. I guess it’s just because they like melons so much. It makes me wonder why we don’t have a national Melon Day. Anyway, on Melon Day Turkmens celebrate melons (they have 430 different varieties) and participate in melon competitions and parades.
Somewhere far from the capital and likely far from melon parades, in the great nothingness of the Karakum desert, is a massive inferno that has been burning for decades. The Darvaza gas crater is thought to have been formed about fifty years ago by Soviet geologists who set fire to natural gas in order to burn away leaking poisonous fumes. This thought, however, is not fully confirmed. I don’t know about you, but I find a gigantic blazing pit that’s been burning a hole through the desert for half a century, whose details of origin are not fully confirmed, just a little worrying. Unfortunately, the fire in the Darvaza crater is actually beginning to die, so whatever issues it used to have will matter little soon.
In my cursory examination of the government I learned that Turkmenistan is currently
under the control of a totalitarian dictatorship. The current president (dictator) is Serdar Gurbangulyýewiç Berdimuhamedow (if you have not done so already, please repeat that out loud). His mother is an “Honored Carpet Weaver of Turkmenistan,” a title which strikes me as very peculiar.
I also learned that Turkmenistan had a dictator twenty years ago, Saparmurat Niyazov, who wrote a book, Ruhnama, which had to be memorized and recited everyday by Turkmens. It was legally required to be placed in every mosque, a statue was made of it, it was sent to space, and Turkmens even had to answer questions about it before getting a driver’s licence. This same dictator renamed all the days of the week and the names of the months after his family members.
There are lots of other, even more cool things about Turkmenistan, I’m sure. I recommend researching it! I found it a really cool place! And if you are exceptionally eager about researching foreign countries, in fact, I recently heard of a really interesting country. I can’t quite remember its name, besides that it started with ‘B’ and ended with ‘a’ and most certainly did not have ‘olivi’ in the middle, but I do remember it was a really cool place with a fantastic culture, a unique history and people, and a small but excellent international Christian co-op school somewhere in the nation’s capital.