Olivier Hein, "Mother of the World: The Remarkable History of Turkmenistan" (Hurst, 2026)

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Turkmenistan rarely made international headlines. When it did, it was often stories that highlighted things like the strange cult of personality that surrounded Saparmurat Niyazov, his first post-Soviet president, who named months after himself and made his memoir Required Reading.
Olivier Hein joins us on the show to talk about Turkmenistan's actual long history. As a possible origin for Zoroastrianism, the first monotheistic faith, the rise of Merv at one point, possibly one of the world's largest cities, the emergence of the Turkmen, and how this region ended up becoming the crossroads of empires. Olivier's work is now a book, Mother of the World, The Remarkable History of Turkmenistan. He is a Mauritian-British author whose books include Starring Keith, Historical Adventure of Mauritius, and Borneo, The History of an Enigma. Formerly a UN, UK, and OSCE diplomat, posted to New York, Paris, Kosovo, and Turkmenistan. He also contributes to The Chap magazine. Olivier, thank you for coming back onto the show to talk about your book, Mother of the World. You've written books about Mauritius, you've written books about Borneo and Peru.
Why Turkmenistan? Why was this the next country you wanted to tackle in your writing?

**Olivier Hein** (2:49)
Sure. Well, firstly, thanks, Nick, for having me back on. It's great to be here again. In answer to your question, the short answer is like with Mauritius elsewhere, I live there.
Quite a way back in 2003, I was posted to Ashgabat, capital of Turkmenistan as a diplomat with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the OSCE. And within weeks of arriving at a place I knew virtually nothing about at the time, I was completely blindsided by the place, not just the landscape, which is extraordinary, it's vast and alien, frankly, unlike anything I've seen before, but also by the history because you could go camping. I used to go camping and literally just pick up ancient coins and pottery from these unexcavated sites lying in the open desert. And I'd never come across anything like that before. So you have this, there's a lot of visceral sense of being connected to these ancient civilizations. So Mauritius and Borneo, the two previous books, these were, I call it the edges of the map place. They were islands where empires sort of collided and occasionally became unstuck. And Turkmenistan is different in landscape. It's very much more desert rather than sort of jungle or tropical areas. But it is similar in function in that it was a sort of crossroads like the others that had been sort of used and exploited and sort of romanticized a bit.
But interestingly, it was rarely listened to on its own terms like the other ones.
And fundamentally, when you talked to ordinary Turkmen, who were wonderfully proud, warm, generous people, they would tell you all about their past when you met them about places where people would talk about like Merv and the Silk Road and Zoroaster. And it seemed almost too extraordinary to be true. And I thought, oh, you're just recounting this as a sort of rather mythologized version of the history. But then I looked into it, no, no, this is actually true. And it seems that nobody outside the region knew about it. And so my popular histories are always about writing about places that are underrepresented in the English language, it's sort of history books and places where I felt they had a really interesting story that needed to be told. So Turkmenistan is just a very good example of that. And what I joke is that it's arguably the biggest country most people couldn't place on a map. And yet, I believe its history is, well, I'd argue that it's as consequential as almost anywhere on Earth. So that's why I wrote it.