Turkmens Erotic

The Turkmens are an Oghuz Turkic people whose identity was forged on the move. Their ancestors swept south and west out of the Central Asian steppe in the eleventh century — the same migration that produced the Seljuks and, eventually, the Ottomans — and the Turkmen who stayed behind around the Karakum desert kept the older nomadic life longest. Until the Soviet conquest in the 1880s, the defining unit of Turkmen society was not the village or the state but the tribe: the Teke, Yomut, Ersary, Salyr, Saryk, Chowdur, Goklen and others, each with its own dialect inflections, carpet motifs, and historical grievances. A Turkmen still introduces himself by tribe before nationality in many contexts, and the tribal map continues to shape politics inside Turkmenistan and the Turkmen communities of northern Afghanistan and Iran's Golestan Province.

Their language is Oghuz Turkic, in the same branch as Turkish and Azerbaijani — a Turk from Istanbul and a Turkmen from Mary can puzzle out a conversation if both speak slowly. But Turkmen has stayed closer to its older grammar, and a thousand years of Persian neighbors have layered Persian vocabulary into everyday speech, especially in the south. Sunni Islam of the Hanafi school arrived gradually and sat lightly on top of an older steppe religion: Sufi orders, particularly the Naqshbandi and Yasawi, did the actual conversion work, and the cult of saints — pilgrimage to the tombs of holy ancestors, the owliya — remains more central to lived practice than mosque attendance. Among older Turkmen, the line between Islamic piety and pre-Islamic ancestor veneration is not a line anyone bothers to draw.

The Akhal-Teke horse and the hand-knotted carpet are the two artifacts the Turkmen have carried into world memory, and both repay attention. The carpets, with their tribal gül medallions, functioned as portable identification — a Saryk rug and a Yomut rug were as distinct as flags, and Turkmen women wove their tribe's gül from memory long before any of it was written down. Turkmen weddings still feature the bride's kürte, a heavy embroidered coat draped over the head; brideprice negotiations remain serious business; and the New Year festival of Nowruz, shared with the Iranian world, is celebrated alongside the Islamic calendar with no apparent contradiction. Turkmenistan itself, sealed off for most of the post-Soviet period under an eccentric personality cult, has kept much of this older texture preserved almost by accident.