The Cult of Turkmenbashi

Just a couple quick notes... Hugh Pope is speaking at the University of Wisconsin in Madison on Monday, April 24, at 7:00 pm. His topic will be "Journeys through the Turkic World: New Connections along the Old Silk Road," in the Fluno Center auditorium, 601 University Ave. The talk, illustrated with slides, is free and open to the public.

An archive of Pope's interview on Wisconsin Public Radio's "Here On Earth" is up and running, and you can listen to it here.

Also, in today's New Yorker, there is a short article on Turkmenbashi, the dictator of Turkmenistan, and the Turkmen novelist Rahim Esenov. Hugh Pope's SONS OF THE CONQUERORS has a full chapter on Turkmenistan and Turkmenbashi if you want to learn more there, but here is a quick introduction from The New Yorker's David Remnick:

"Of the fifteen states of the former Soviet empire, Turkmenistan, just north of Iran, is the one that has turned out to be a cruel blend of Kim Jong Il’s North Korea and L. Frank Baum’s Oz. Not long after the Soviet collapse, in 1991, a former Communist Party hack named Saparmurat Niyazov became President-for-life, dubbed himself Turkmenbashi—Leader of All the Turkmen—and commenced building the strangest, most tragicomic cult of personality on the Eurasian landmass. Doctors there now take an oath not to Hippocrates but to Turkmenbashi; the month of January is now called Turkmenbashi; and in the capital, Ashgabat, there is, atop the Arch of Neutrality, a two-hundred-and-fifty-foot gold statue of Turkmenbashi that, like George Hamilton, automatically rotates to face the sun."

...that picture is the Hamilton-esque statue described above (click for full-size).
--John Mark