Serhetabat
Serhetabat, formerly Kushka, is a city in Tagtabazar District, Mary Province, southern Turkmenistan. Serhetabat lies in the valley of the Kushk River. The population was 5,200 in 1991. It is immediately opposite Torghundi, Afghanistan, with which it is connected by a road and a gauge railway.
Etymology
The name of the city is a Turkmen borrowing from Persian سرحدآباد, consisting of two words: سرحد meaning "border" and آباد meaning "inhabited place". The name of the city corresponds to its geographic location on the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan border. A historical part of the Iranian city Karaj shares the same name, Sarhadabad. Gushgy is a Turkmenized form of the Persian word kushk, a term referring to mountain forts. In 1885 after taking the Panjdeh oasis Russian troops constructed a fort on the site of present-day Serhetabat and named it for the village of Kush in Afghanistan. The Turkmenistan government changed the name to Serhetabat on 29 December 1999 by Parliamentary Resolution HM-67.Overview
In 1885, Serhetabat and the surrounding region were seized from Afghanistan by Russian forces as a result of the Panjdeh incident, in which about 600 Afghan soldiers were overwhelmed by over 2500 Russian troops.The settlement was founded in 1890 as a Russian military outpost. A local rail-line branching from Merv on the Central Asian Railway was inaugurated on 1 March 1901, causing some degree of international excitement.
A point south of the city is the southernmost point of Turkmenistan and used to be the southernmost point of the Russian Empire and of the Soviet Union. A 10-metre stone cross, installed to commemorate the tercentenary of the House of Romanov in 1913, memorialises this fact. This cross was one of four erected in 1913, but is the only one still remaining.
In 1988, Afghan mujahideen attacked and successfully captured this town and held it for several days.