In July, UNESCO added ten examples of Tashkent’s modernist architecture to the World Heritage List, recognizing the buildings and urban complexes that helped reshape the Uzbek capital after the devastating 1966 earthquake. In neighboring Kazakhstan, prominent Soviet-era buildings in Almaty are protected through national and local heritage registers.
Turkmenistan has also gained international recognition for ancient sites such as Merv and Nisa, along with traditions of carpet weaving and horse breeding. Yet Ashgabat’s 20th-century architecture remains largely absent from this system of recognition.
This has taken on added urgency because some of the buildings that tell the story of modern Ashgabat are already disappearing.
Image: TCA, Stephen M. Bland
In August 2026, turkmen.news reported the demolition of several buildings near Ashgabat’s 30th microdistrict. Some were residential blocks. Although some occupants received replacement apartments, other families objected to the relocation terms.
In February, the former building of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography on Azadi Street was also demolished. At different times, it had housed a court and the Cultural Heritage Center. An additional floor and marble cladding had already changed its appearance, although some neoclassical elements survived.
Once a building has been demolished, its architecture can be studied only through archives and photographs. For Ashgabat, this is particularly significant because much of the city visible today emerged from one of the worst disasters in its history.
The City After the Earthquake
The 1948 Ashgabat earthquake struck on the night of October 6, destroying or severely damaging much of the city. The capital had to be largely rebuilt.
Architectural historian Ruslan Muradov writes that postwar reconstruction began with two-story brick apartment buildings designed to meet higher seismic standards. Their facades featured decorative plasterwork and carved wooden elements on the loggias, or recessed balconies. New residential blocks were organized around shared courtyards and greenery.
In the 1950s, the Academy of Sciences, the railway station, Turkmen State University, theaters, administrative buildings, and new housing transformed the city center. From the 1960s through the 1980s, hotels, public buildings, and residential districts added another architectural layer.
Behind this architecture was the everyday life of several generations. Courtyards became extensions of apartments, while institutions and shops occupied the ground floors. The postwar city gradually became an ordinary, lived-in urban environment.
Its surviving buildings still offer clues to how Ashgabat recovered after 1948. They show how seismic risk changed construction, how the climate influenced housing design, and how planners used the spaces between buildings.
But unlike some neighboring capitals, Ashgabat has no publicly available inventory identifying the most significant examples of its postwar architecture. The time available to document them is shrinking.
Image: TCA, Stephen M. Bland
Turkmenistan’s Heritage Focus
Turkmenistan has five properties on the World Heritage List. Ancient Merv, Kunya-Urgench, and the Parthian Fortresses of Nisa make up three of them. The other two are transnational properties, the Silk Roads: Zarafshan-Karakum Corridor and the Cold Winter Deserts of Turan.
Another nine sites are on the country’s Tentative List, an inventory of properties a state may later nominate for World Heritage status. They range from Dehistan and Silk Road sites to nature reserves. The latest addition came in August 2025, when Turkmenistan proposed its part of the transboundary Karst, Canyons, and Caves of Kugitang property, which also includes neighboring Uzbekistan.
Architecture from the past century does not appear among these nominations.
UNESCO nominations begin at the national level. A state must first identify a property as worthy of research and protection before it can be considered internationally. The fate of Ashgabat’s 20th-century architecture is therefore determined long before UNESCO becomes involved.
Tashkent’s Post-Earthquake Architecture
Tashkent offers an instructive comparison. Eighteen years after Ashgabat’s disaster, the 1966 earthquake led to another large-scale reconstruction and a period of architectural experimentation.
In July 2026, the World Heritage Committee inscribed Tashkent Modernist Architecture. Modernity and Tradition in Central Asia on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The serial property consists of ten buildings and urban complexes dating from the 1960s to the early 1990s, all associated with the capital’s transformation after the earthquake.
In assessing Tashkent’s architecture, UNESCO highlighted how modernist planning and design were adapted to the local climate, earthquake risk, and cultural traditions.
The buildings show how the Uzbek capital rebuilt itself after the disaster and what kind of city it sought to become.
Almaty Takes a Different Route
In Almaty, the Kazakhstan and Otrar hotels are included in the state list of historical and cultural monuments of local significance, together with other 20th-century buildings.
The Palace of the Republic, opened in 1970, has the status of a historical and cultural monument of national significance.
Official protection did not prevent major changes to the building itself. The ARCHCODE research project says the Palace of the Republic completely lost its original exterior appearance after reconstruction.
The example illustrates the limits of formal protection, but it also shows that Soviet-era architecture can be identified and treated as part of a country’s heritage without waiting for UNESCO recognition.
In Ashgabat, some buildings disappear before that discussion reaches the same stage.
A City Between Nisa and White Marble
Ashgabat has undergone several major transformations. The earthquake destroyed much of the prewar city, and postwar construction created another in its place. After independence, the central districts changed again as older buildings were remodeled, clad in marble, expanded upward, or demolished.
Each such change reduces what remains of the 20th-century city.
Ashgabat’s history today is easiest to see from its two ends. At one end stands ancient Nisa with its Parthian fortresses. At the other is the present-day capital, with broad avenues, monumental structures, and white-marble facades.
Between them lies the city formed by postwar reconstruction, late-Soviet development, and another large-scale transformation after independence. Its history survives in everything from residential neighborhoods and courtyards to former institutes and hotels, even where their facades have been altered.
Ashgabat first needs a map of its own 20th century: what still stands, who designed it, how the buildings were used, and how much of the original architecture has survived.
The 1948 earthquake destroyed old Ashgabat in a single night. The postwar city could suffer the same fate, one building at a time.
