I have completed an overhaul of Turkmenistan’s municipalities in the OpenStreetMap database. All cities are identified, plus all but four towns (those pesky four are still hiding), and 256 out of 481 “village councils” are now on the map, as well as 504 out of 1,717 “villages” known to exist. If anybody knows offhand where the four missing towns (şäherçeler) are located, please drop me a line.

Each geolocated village now also has addr:city tags so we know to which municipality it is subordinate (this is important because so many village names are used over and over again), as well as addr:district tags to aid in identification.

Misnamed municipalities or those with obsolete names have been corrected or updated, and old_name tags have been added where appropriate. Mapillary key numbers for images of signs have been added in several cases to assure positive identification.

On the wiki, the “Turkmenistan Geoname Changes” page features a list of cities and towns with hyperlinks to their respective nodes and ways on osm.org, and “Districts in Turkmenistan” features a list of villages with the same for them, wherever a village has been geolocated. This will ease finding specific municipalities by province and district.

I spent a bit more than four years mapping Turkmenistan en situ and did not want the accumulated knowledge to go unused, hence this effort to get everything I learned into the database..There is still more to do: 1,213 villages remain unidentified, and those four towns are out there somewhere. But this is a good start, and the map is in much better shape than it was in 2015.