Turkmenistan (interesting facts)

Day 3,455, 04:07 • Published in New Zealand New Zealand • by tropic sparrow

Another article inspired by "25 comments mission", but also by one interesting country too. 🙂



So there are few interesting facts about Turkmenistan, country in Central Asia (bordered by Kazakhstan to the northwest, Uzbekistan to the north and east, Afghanistan to the southeast, Iran to the south and southwest, and the Caspian Sea to the west):

1. Written Turkmen has gone through a vast number of different alphabets. Prior to 1929, Turkmen was written in the Arabic script. Between 1929 and 1938, a Latin alphabet was used. Then, from 1938 through 1991, the Cyrillic alphabet became the official writing system. In 1991, a new Latinate alphabet was introduced, but it has been slow to catch on.



2. Roughly 80% of Turkmenistan is covered by the Karakum (Black Sands) Desert.
3. Average population density of Turkmenistan is merely 10 person/km.



4. Turkmenistan has four distinct seasons & it faces two extremely opposite atmospheric conditions, in summer its temperature might go beyond 50 degree Celsius, while in Winter it might get less than zero resulting into snowfall.



5. Almost 90% of workers in Turkmenistan are employed by government.

6. Turkmenistan is 4th biggest reserve of natural gas in the world. Turkmenistan exports 41.1 billion Cubic meters of gas every year, while the proven reserve of gas beneath the Turkmenistan territory is more than 17.5 trillion cubic meters. Despite of immense deposits of natural gas, 60% of Turkmenistan people (Turkmens) lived below the poverty line in 2004.



7. If we consider people over 15 who can read and write literate, Turkmenistan has 99.6% literacy.



8. There are 26 public airports in Turkmenistan, good enough for country with only 5 million residents.

9. Turkmenistan is world widely famous for its ethnic style of carpets & there is even a carpet museum with more than 1,000 different carpets from 18th & 19th century & more from 20th century.
A group of people made a 313 square meter carpet for the Turkmen carpet museum which is recognized as the largest hand-woven carpet in the world in Guinness book of world records.





10. Turkmenistan is 6th most corrupted out of 174 worldwide countries as per a survey.

11. There are only 80,400 people in Turkmenistan using Internet (~ 1.59% of its population) which puts Turkmenistan in bottom 10th percentile among all countries in the world.



12. If you loved dinosaurs, you can find real dinosaur foot prints at Kugitang Nature Reserve which is one among most pristine among Turkmenistan’s natural reserves.



13. There is more than 70 feet wide burning natural gas crater in Turkmenistan widely known as Darwaja which contains bubbling gas active since more than 40 years. This huge gas crater was accidentally found by the drillers from Soviet Union state government of Turkmenistan who burnt the fire in the crater in hope of clearing the gas out of it however, it didn’t work and the gas is continuously burning since than.



14. There is no such country as Turkmenistan in eRepublik yet but Turkmenistan will be introduced in future, probably when Serbia became part of European Union...