Faces of Turkmenistan

Some portraits from our brief stay in Turkmenistan:

One way of categorizing countries may be countries where you can take pictures of police and soldiers and countries you cannot. Surprisingly, for a place reputed to be a police state, this Turkmen officer permitted Derek to take his picture. I believe the exaggerated brim must be a feature of the old Soviet police uniform, as we also recall it from our 2003 visit to Uzbekistan.

These girls must have been on their way to some sort of cultural performance. The Turkmen government, headed by former president Niyazov, has very aggressively pursued national cultural/heritage-type projects in an effort to develop a strong sense of national identity for the newly independent republic. Most famous among these is Niyazov’s book the Ruhnama, an epic telling the (legendary) history of the Turkmen people from ancient times to present, which is compulsory reading in Turkmen schools.