Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, holds the Guinness World Record for the highest density of white marble buildings, with a dental hospital shaped like a tooth, an airport terminal shaped like a falcon, and a development bank topped with a giant coin. It sits in a narrow oasis between the Karakum desert and the Kopetdag mountains, about 30 miles from Iran, on a fault line. Its roots go back to Konjikala, a Silk Road wine village leveled by an earthquake in the first century BC and later wiped out by the Mongols. The name likely comes from Ashk, the Persian name of Parthian founder Arsaces I, with abad meaning city, not the popular reading of city of love. In 1881 the Russian Empire built a garrison with a European street grid and brought in the Trans-Caspian Railway.

In October 1948 a magnitude 7.3 earthquake struck at night and shattered the city’s adobe buildings, killing an estimated 110,000 to 176,000 people, about two thirds of the population, while Soviet reports claimed 40,000. The drained postwar Soviet Union rebuilt on the same 1880s grid with drab concrete blocks. After independence in 1991, President Saparmurat Niyazov launched the White City project with French and Turkish firms, cladding towers in marble imported from Italy and Vietnam. Human rights reports describe forced, uncompensated evictions as new development lines spread, often of homes survivors built after 1948 and never registered.

• Why adobe, strong under vertical weight, disintegrated under the side-to-side shaking of 1948
• The brief 1920s renaming of the city as Poltoratsk
• The Arch of Neutrality’s golden Niyazov statue that rotated to follow the sun until it was moved in 2010
• Monuments to the bicycle and a gilded Alabai sheepdog in a traffic circle
• The Altyn Asyr bazaar, known as Tolkuchka, where carpets, livestock, and used cars keep the Silk Road trading spirit alive