Ashgabat
The Marble Mirage
Portrait
An earthquake destroyed Ashgabat in 1948, killing perhaps a third of the population, and the city was rebuilt twice — as Soviet blocks, then from the 1990s in white Carrara marble on Niyazov's instruction, to the point of holding a record for marble-clad buildings. Cars must be white, buildings must be white, and the effect in the desert sun is genuinely disorienting.