End Of Empire: Color Photos From Tsarist-Era Turkmenistan

Workers at a factory that produced oil from pressed cotton near Mary in 1911.

This photo and the others in this gallery were taken by Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky between 1906 and 1911. The great Russian photographer is most famous for his images of tsarist-era Russia, but he also created dozens of exquisite images in the lands of today’s Turkmenistan. The pictures offer a fascinating insight into what was -- and remains for many -- a remote, mysterious land.
 
 

The inside of a factory in which bales of cotton were pressed. The sign on the wall warns workers to keep the space “clean and tidy,” adding, “Violators will be strictly punished.”

Gorsky perfected an early method of color photography that required three separate images of each scene to be shot with color filters. When the three glass plates were developed and had red, green, and blue light shone through them, a color image could be projected.
 
 

A military man in Bayramaly
 

The ruins of Merv, near Bayramaly. The ancient settlement was once the world’s largest city, with an estimated population of some 500,000 people.
 

A mausoleum stands among the remnants of Merv. The city was destroyed in the 13th century by Mongol horsemen in a murderous rampage that is thought to have left hundreds of thousands of people dead. By the beginning of the 1800s, the devastated city was completely abandoned.

A family of Turkmen pose in front of their yurt near Bayramaly.
 

A vineyard in a property described as “the Murghab estate” in Bayramaly
 

A tribesman rides a camel in the Bayramaly area.
 

Bales of freshly picked cotton being delivered to a processing factory in Bayramaly.
 

A young worker with bales of cotton strapped to his camel for transport.

The interior of a hydropower station in Yoloten
 

A detail of an irrigation canal in Bayramaly
 

A rail bridge across the Amu Darya River, near the eastern city of Turkmenabat
 

The Farap railroad station, a few kilometers outside Turkmenabat
 

Cotton rolling machines in Bayramaly

A detail of mulberries growing in an orchard in Bayramaly.

After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution that took place just a few years after these photos were made, Prokudin-Gorsky fled Russia and eventually settled in Paris. After his death in 1944, the U.S. Library of Congress purchased 1,902 images -- including more than 200 shot in Central Asia -- from the photographer's relatives.