Category: Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov

Categories

Dark Tourism & Books

The title of this post is the theme that in the recent theme poll of the previous post (and DT Newsletter) was the winner, leaving the theme DT & Beds in second place. But I may turn the latter into a post at some point too.

So, for now let’s kick off with DT & Books:

And let’s get the most obvious book to feature here out of the way right at the start. It’s possibly the historically darkest book ever,

Trouble in the Stans

“The Stans” is shorthand for the five former Soviet republics in Central Asia whose names all end in -stan, that is: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan (but not Pakistan and Afghanistan!).

All of these have been in the media for more or less unsavoury reasons over the past few decades, but Kazakhstan seemed to be the calmest and least