Turkmenistan

Turkmenistan holds a ruin and a capital rebuilt twice. Merv was among the largest cities in the world in the twelfth century and was destroyed by the Mongols in 1221 with a death toll that medieval chroniclers put in the hundreds of thousands; Ashgabat was levelled by an earthquake in 1948 and rebuilt again from the 1990s in white marble, holding a Guinness record for the density of it. One country, two total erasures, three hundred years apart.