White marble, a Guinness record, Parthian Nisa next door, and what fits into one day.
Ashgabat resembles nothing else, and you understand that within fifteen minutes of leaving the airport. The city has been rebuilt almost entirely over the last thirty years and faced in white marble — in 2013 it entered the Guinness Book of Records for the highest concentration of white marble buildings in the world. The streets are wide, the buildings stand far apart, and in daylight the whole thing dazzles.
This did not happen out of a fondness for white. In 1948 Ashgabat was almost completely destroyed by an earthquake, and virtually nothing of the earlier city survived. What stands now is entirely post-war and in large part post-Soviet.
If you have one day, a sensible order is this. Morning: **Nisa**, the Parthian fortress half an hour out of town and also a UNESCO site — earth walls on a hill and a view of the Kopetdag that starts dissolving into haze towards noon. Then the city: the Neutrality Monument, the squares, the Ertugrul Gazi mosque. In the afternoon, the **carpet museum**, which holds one of the largest hand-woven carpets in the world; this is not «another museum» but the most Turkmen thing in the city.
Leave the evening for a walk. The lighting here is generous, and a city that dazzles by day looks like something else entirely after dark.
Two practical notes. Photographing government buildings and people in uniform is taken seriously; if in doubt ask your guide rather than find out for yourself. And from midday to four in summer there is nothing to be done outdoors — plan something indoors for those hours.