Boy, do I have the weirdest country to write about this week: Turkmenistan.

Turkmenistan’s former president made a multilingual rap video introducing his country…despite the fact that it’s bizarre AF and the video editor was his horse (probably), it’s a super fun thing to watch 👇

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xZoa5ArhgA&embedable=true

3 Things To Know Before We Get Started

• The country came into existence in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union, having been a Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic as Part of The Great Socialist Soviet Union (It’s a mouthful) since 1925.

• This had a new president, Saparmurat Niyazov, come into power. He was a totalitarian and despotic dictator who started a personality cult (more on that later). For simplicity, let’s call him Samurai.

• When Samurai died from a heart attack in 2006, another ‘President’ Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, became the dictator of Turkmenistan until 2022. Let’s call him Burgundy.

Bizarre things Samurai did

Ruhnama

• He decided he had a direct line with God, which manifested in Ruhnama (The Book of The Soul). Think of a watered-down version of Mein Kampf + the Bible.
• Ruhnama was a mandatory read for school children, students, and those holding state employment. Oh, if you wanted to get a driver’s license, you had to have read it too.
• There even was a social study field called Rahmana Studies (creative, I know). Half of the exam questions for the 2006 University Entry revolved around themes set in Ruhnama.
• Ruhnama has been translated into 50 languages, though. Go figure 🤷‍♀️ Samurai said that God told him whoever reads it thrice will go to heaven. I’d say go on Amazon right now!

Other crazy things he did

• Banned the use of lip-syncing at public concerts.

• Abolished the Turkmen word for bread and replaced it with Gurbansoltan, his mother’s name.

• Made the second Sunday of August “Melon Day” in honor of melons as he thought they were delicious — finally something I could sign up for.

• Ordered that all mountains and places in Turkmenistan + months and days of the week be named after Turkmen heroes, poets, and leaders.

• In 1997, when he tried to quit smoking, he passed a law that banned it in public to eliminate the temptation.

• Gold teeth were discouraged as he thought everyone was better off chewing on bones to strengthen their teeth and lessen the rate at which they fall out.

• Banished dogs from the capital, citing unappealing odor. Also forbade citizens to own more than one dog or cat (I’ll bet the guinea pig sales went through the roof).

• Ordered the closure of all hospitals outside Ashgabat, stating that the sick should go to the capital for treatment.

• He banned reporting or mentioning contagious diseases such as AIDS or cholera (peekaboo — if we don’t mention it, it means it doesn’t exist — I wish not talking about my student loans would make it disappear).

• He banned car radios because he considered them to be useless.

Oh yeah, he also built a golden statue of himself that was rotating to face the Sun at all times.

Bizarre things Burgundy did

• He was a bit more chill and reversed lots of eccentric laws Samurai brought into existence. He was still an authoritarian dictator, though.

• Black cars were banned in favor of white because it “brings good luck.”

• He was obsessed with Akhal-Teke horses. So much so his entire office only had one prominent motif all over the furniture — horses.

• He’s a former dentist turned rapping president, as we witnessed earlier.

• He liked a dog breed so much he made a golden statue for it 👇

• But he also clearly doesn’t know how to hold a dog. Imagine being a guy who is so bad at holding dogs that Putin has to save it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLLZYFzkqKo&embedable=true

• Let us not forget the time when he tried to kill the rumours he was dead by driving around a BURNING HOLE IN THE GROUND (everything’s normal, nothing to look at)👇

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYiYi8-wCx0&t=11s&embedable=true

More Bizzare Things About Turkmenistan

• Have you ever wondered why there’s a carpet in their flag? You probably didn’t, but I’ll tell you anyway: because they LOVE carpets.

• There’s a Ministry of Carpets, a National Carpet Museum, and a public holiday to honour carpets. They even used to have the world’s largest hand-woven carpet record until Iran beat them in 2019.

• If you want to purchase a carpet, you need a receipt with your age, origin, and date of purchase. This must be certified by the Ministry of Carpets or else the carpet can’t leave the country. I’ll say it one more time: carpet.

• It’s one of the least visited countries in the World — the top 10 least visited countries in fact.

• Locals used to have state-subsidized gas, water, petrol, and electricity between 1993 and 2019.

• Turkmenistan is the only country officially recognized by the United Nations as a neutral nation. Eat that, Switzerland.

• It has a burning hole that’s been on fire since 1971, dubbed Gates of Hell (featured in a fast and furious video by Samurai seen above).

• It was a man-made disaster — a Soviet drilling rig accidentally punched into a massive underground natural gas cavern. This caused the ground to collapse and the entire drilling rig to fall in. So they thought: Why don’t we set this on fire? Maybe that’ll solve this? — it did not.

Took me 3 hours to research this, but it was worth it 😂

Random fact: when I was very young, there was a trend in Lithuania to have a carpet hanging on the wall (seriously).

You’d walk into someone’s living room, and there’d be a proudly displayed carpet hanging on the wall. It looked something like this 👇

To Sum Up

I think we all learned today that Turkmenistan is a super bizarre place to be. Although I wrote this piece with a bit of humor, let’s not forget it’s essentially a dictatorship run by eccentric weirdos. They clearly try much harder than North Korea to portray themselves as cool and fun. Turkmenistan is brandable, as they say in the marketing world.

Also published here.