Nisa

Turkmenistan does not make it easy to visit, and once you’re in, Ashgabat — the capital, a hallucination of white marble and gold-domed government buildings — does its level best to convince you the country has no history older than 1991. So it’s a strange relief to drive eighteen kilometres out of that gleaming city and arrive at Nisa, where the actual deep past of this land sits eroding quietly in the foothills of the Kopet Dag mountains, undisturbed by marble.

Nisa was one of the earliest capitals of the Parthian Empire — the power that, at its height, fought the Roman legions to a standstill and controlled the trade routes between East and West for centuries. The Parthians are one of those great forgotten empires, and standing among the remains of their fortress-city, I felt the particular vertigo of being somewhere that mattered enormously and is now visited by almost no one. We had the entire site nearly to ourselves, save for a custodian and a tortoise that crossed the path with bureaucratic slowness.

A city made of earth

The thing to understand about Nisa is that it was built almost entirely of mud-brick, and mud-brick, given two thousand years, does not hold its lines. What survives is not a ruin in the marble-column sense but a topography — great rounded ramparts, the soft melted shapes of towers, walls slumped into ridges of warm clay. UNESCO inscribed the Parthian Fortresses of Nisa on the World Heritage list, and you can see why: even half-dissolved, the scale of the place is obvious. The walls were once eight or nine metres thick.

Our guide — a wiry, opinionated archaeology graduate who clearly resented how few people came — walked us through the layout of the royal complex at Old Nisa. Here a square hall whose roof was once held up by enormous columns; there a round temple; over there the treasury where excavators found ivory drinking horns, marble statues and ceramic wine vessels, now mostly in the museum in Ashgabat. He pointed out a low, unremarkable rectangle in the dust and informed us, with total confidence, that we were standing in a Parthian throne room. I have no way to verify this. I chose to believe him entirely.

What the ground still holds

The most haunting thing about Nisa is how much of it remains unexcavated. Large areas are still just grassy mounds, the city sleeping underneath. Lia, who has a good instinct for these things, kept stopping to pick up small shards of pottery that lie scattered across the surface — fragments of jars and bowls last touched by Parthian hands, now just lying there in the dirt as if the whole place had been abandoned recently rather than nearly two millennia ago. We put them back, of course. But holding one, even for a moment, collapses the time in a way no museum case ever manages.

From the top of the ramparts the view runs in two directions: north toward the white sprawl of Ashgabat shimmering on the plain, south to the bare brown wall of the Kopet Dag rising sharply, with Iran on the other side. Standing between the two — the manufactured present and the wild old border — I had a strong sense of how thin and recent the city below me really is.

Practical notes

Nisa is an easy half-day trip from Ashgabat and pairs naturally with the city’s National Museum, where the actual treasures of the site are displayed — go to the museum after Nisa, not before, so the empty fortress comes first and the objects fill it back in. There’s little shade and the summer heat here is genuinely dangerous; go early. And remember that Turkmenistan travel means visas, registered guides and a degree of planning that would be absurd anywhere else — but Nisa, quiet and enormous and almost entirely yours, is reason enough to bother.

When to go: April to May or September to October, when the foothills are not an oven. Early morning gives the best light on the eroded walls and the only bearable temperatures.