Turkmenistan's Caspian port and oil-town gateway — Soviet-era promenade on Central Asia's inland sea
Turkmenbashi (formerly Krasnovodsk, renamed in 1993 for the country's first president) is Turkmenistan's main Caspian port, a city of 90,000 at the foot of bare desert cliffs on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea. It is the western terminus of the Trans-Caspian Railway and the departure point for the Caspian ferry crossing to Baku (Azerbaijan) — a 12–20 hour voyage across the world's largest lake that remains the most unusual overland route between Central Asia and the Caucasus. The Avaza National Tourist Zone, a state-built resort strip of hotels, a water park, and a promenade constructed…
Krasnovodsk was founded as a Russian military base in 1869 during the expansion into Central Asia, and quickly became the railhead for the Trans-Caspian Railway that pushed east toward Tashkent between 1880 and 1888 — one of the most strategically significant rail projects of 19th-century imperialism. The Krasnovodsk massacre of 1919 (the execution of 26 Baku Commissars by British-backed anti-Bolshevik forces) was one of the defining events of the Russian Civil War in Central Asia. The city's petroleum infrastructure (oil processing and Caspian oil terminal) made it economically strategic thr…