Silk Road Cities: Merv
A lonely city in Turkmenistan, whose monuments will haunt you
Jenghiz Khan was ruthless with cities under seige. If their people resisted, they were massacred, and the city razed. This was the fate of Samarkand, Bukhara and Urgench in 1220, and of Merv in 1221.
The city of Merv, founded 2,500 years ago by the Margush empire, stretching in several different sections over 15,000 hectares of desert that was once a fertile oasis, changed hands several times, belonging in different centuries to the Parthian empire, the Persians, Arabs, and the Seljuks.
The Seljuks took over in the 11th century and transformed Merv into one of the greatest Muslim cities in the world, replete with libraries and Madrassahs and orchards. It was here that the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was written, and many of the stories in the Thousand and One Arabian Nights were set. In 1221, when the Mongols appeared at the gates, Merv was second only to Baghdad in the Muslim world.
In 1218 Jenghiz Khan demanded a tithe of grain and the choice of the city’s most beautiful maidens from the sultan at Merv. Instead, the sultan slew the Khan’s tax collectors. Three years later, an army under the command of Tolui, the Khan’s most brutal son, arrived at the city and accepted Merv’s surrender. But because the governors of the city had resisted the Mongol hordes, The Mongols, in revenge, demolished nearly every structure in the city, murdered all of its estimated one million inhabitants, stacked their severed heads in mounds, and razed its gardens and its system of canals and cisterns, flattening the city to the ground in their low-tech version of the nuclear bomb. The terrified survivors fled into the desert. The Mongol army left, only to return after the survivors had crawled back into the city and finish the job, killing the rest of them.
Afterwards a few structures were rebuilt under the fifteenth century Timurid Empire, and later the area was inhabited by Uzbeks, who fought Persian incursions into their territory until 1860. But the city never regained its glory.
What impresses about Merv is the vast emptiness of the place, a sweeping plain with a scattering of structures, less a set of ruins that one expects on Earth than the ruins of an ancient civilization one might encounter in Science Fiction on the unexplored, blasted plains of Mars.
The first monument, if one is coming by car from Bairamaly, is Gyz Gala. There is a legend that, when the Mongols came to kill everyone in the city, the women who lived here threw themselves from the windows of this small fortress, in order to avoid being ravaged.
The recently restored tomb of Sultan Sanjar rises alone from the desert. Sultan Sanjar, it is said, fell in love with a Peri (fairy) princess, who gave him three rules: never to touch her waist, never to touch her while she was walking, and never to look at her hair when it was down. He broke the rules, and she turned into a dove and flew away, then later came to him in a dream and told him to construct the building. If he did so, she would return to him every Friday through a hole in the center of the dome.
It took 17 years to complete the building, and he died shortly afterwards. He was buried in a stone sarcophagus in the center of the earthen floor. When the Mongols invaded they left the structure standing, but they ripped open his sarcophagus and scattered his bones in the desert. The current sarcophagus dates from the nineteenth century, and whose is body inside it is unknown.
From here one begins the drive along the walls of the 11th Century city of Sultan Gala, whose 200 watchtowers once burned all night with torches, keeping an eye on the approaching caravans and scanning the horizons for enemy troops.
Erk Gala, the 250 B.C. Acaemenid fortress, and one of the earliest structures, is a towering, circular ring of earth, sloping down at a steep angle toward the flat desert. The fortress could only be reached by a winding staircase which wrapped around to the left, leaving attacking soldiers vulnerable, with their sword-arms against the wall and their shields on the outside.
From the heights all of ancient Merv is laid out before you. Visible in the distance is the physical proof that Central Asia was once the crossroads of the world. There are the ruins of a Buddhist temple, a mosque, and what may have been an early Christian church within walking distance of one another, each religion briefly establishing its own dominion here before fading or being wiped away by the next. In the valley, cisterns built by the Parthians were restored centuries later with layers of Seljuk brick and the tombs of Seljuk holy men were rebuilt and enshrined centuries later by Timurid blue tiles.
The marble sarcophagi of the Seljuk saints are covered in finely carved Arabic picture-script, but chiseled into the cool stone are hundreds of names in Cyrillic, graffiti from the Russian conquest, and the Bolsheviks have chiseled the name of god out of the Timurid tilework that guards these tombs and marks them as sacred.
We visit the tomb of XII Muhammed Ibn Zaida, the walls inside the tomb crawling with Arabic script, the sarcophagus icy cold to the touch, remnants of the original painted designs, the color of paint a thousand years ago, fading under the light of a single bare bulb.
There is a mosque nearby, the devout prostrating themselves toward Mecca. The call for prayer sounds from the minaret, a beautiful and mournful sound. In a cemetery beyond the mosque, the hardscrabble desert trees are covered in tiny bits of cloth, each one representing a wish that someone has come to this holy place to make.
Getting There: Ancient Merv is a short drive from the modern city of Mary, which is accessible by plane, taxi, and minibus from the capitol of Ashgabat.
