Turkmenistan is one of the world’s most closed societies, a natural gas-rich Central Asian republic that opened slightly after independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 and closed again under President Saparmurat Niyazov, who renamed himself Turkmenbashi (Father of the Turkmen) and installed his own personality cult. His gilded rotating statue on a tripod in Ashgabat tracked the sun throughout the day. He renamed the days of the week and months of the year after himself and his family. He wrote a spiritual book, the Ruhnama, and required it to be memorized for government employment and driving tests.

He died in 2006. The rotating statue was relocated. But Turkmenistan remains one of the most isolated countries on Earth.

The timezone is UTC+5, inherited from the Soviet era, and has not changed.

The Soviet clock

Turkmenistan’s UTC+5 is the standard Central Asian offset, shared with Pakistan and parts of Russia’s Yekaterinburg zone. Ashgabat sits at 58.4 degrees East, which corresponds to a natural solar time of about UTC+3:54. UTC+5 runs about 66 minutes ahead of solar noon, a significant offset that puts solar noon at roughly 1:06 PM local time.

This is a standard Soviet legacy: the USSR assigned timezones for administrative convenience, not solar accuracy. Post-independence, Turkmenistan retained the Soviet offset. The country abandoned daylight saving time in 1991, the year of independence.

The Door to Hell

In the Karakum Desert, about 260 kilometers north of Ashgabat, there is a crater approximately 70 meters in diameter and 30 meters deep. It has been on fire continuously since somewhere around 1971.

Soviet geologists drilled for natural gas at this site and hit a large cavern. The drilling rig collapsed into it. To prevent methane spreading across the desert, they lit the gas alight, expecting it to burn off in a few weeks.

It is still burning.

The crater glows orange against the Karakum Desert night. It has attracted enough travelers to become one of the few functioning tourist attractions in an otherwise largely inaccessible country. Locals call it the Door to Hell (Darvaza means “gate” in Turkmen).

In 2022, President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow announced plans to extinguish the crater, citing environmental concerns and lost gas revenue. As of 2026, it is still burning.

The closed country’s open gas

Turkmenistan has the world’s fourth-largest natural gas reserves, concentrated primarily in the Galkynysh field. This wealth underpins a heavily subsidized domestic economy where gas, electricity, and water have historically been provided free or nearly free to citizens.

The country’s primary export revenue comes from gas sales to China via the Central Asia-China pipeline. This trade runs on UTC+5 meeting China’s UTC+8, a three-hour gap that structures the working day of Turkmenistan’s energy industry.

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