Northern Turkmenistan's cotton plains and the gateway to Köneürgench — one of Central Asia's greatest lost Islamic cities
Daşoguz (Dashoguz) is a flat desert city of 250,000 in northern Turkmenistan, surrounded by irrigated cotton fields on the margins of the Karakum Desert, 90km south of the Uzbek border. Its primary significance as a destination is as the gateway to Köneürgench (Konye-Urgench), 100km to the west — a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the former capital of the Khorezmian Empire, one of the most powerful and cultured Islamic states of the 12th–13th centuries before its complete destruction by Genghis Khan in 1221. Köneürgench preserves the Kutlug-Timur minaret (60m — the tallest in Central Asia), th…
The Khorezm region around Daşoguz was one of the earliest centres of irrigated agriculture in Central Asia — the Khorezmian Empire at its height in 1200 AD rivalled the Islamic caliphates in wealth and cultural sophistication, with Urgench (Köneürgench) as its capital having a population of over 100,000 and producing scholars including Al-Biruni. The Mongol destruction of 1221 was so thorough that the city never fully recovered; the capital shifted to Urgench in Uzbekistan (the present city of Urgench), leaving Köneürgench as a ghost city whose ruins are better preserved precisely because the…