The ancient Greeks believed the entrance to the underworld was located somewhere in Turkey. In the Inferno, Dante seems to find the gate to hell, with its famous “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here!” inscription, just by going on a stroll through the woods outside of Florence. Today, I don’t know where on Earth you’d expect to find the door to hell. Antarctica? West Texas? New Jersey? Well, would you believe Turkmenistan?
View Maphead: The Door to Hell in a larger map
Seventy percent of the central Asian republic of Turkmenistan is a vast and unwelcoming desert: the Karakum Desert, to be precise. This desert was a major obstacle along medieval traders’ Silk Road. Between the burning black sands, the treacherous salt marshes, and the lack of drinkable water, it’s not an easy place to visit.
But beneath those inhospitable sands lay oil. In 1971, a team of Soviet scientists began drilling for gas near the village of Derweze in the central Karakum. Early samples were promising, but then the rig drilled into a methane-choked cave. The drilling platform collapsed into a 230-foot-wide crater, releasing clouds of poisonous gases. Faced with an environmental crisis, the scientists decided to set the crater on fire, assuming it would burn out within a few days. Forty-two years later, the fire is still going.
Every year, hundreds of visitors now flock to the crater, which locals have named “The Door to Hell.” The sixty-foot deep pit of flaming mud gives off a brilliant orange light and the ominous smell of brimstone. (The Karakum Desert holds the world’s third largest sulfur deposits.) By night, the glowing crater is almost hypnotically eerie.
In 2010, Turkmenistan’s President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov visited the crater and announced that the 40-year fire had “hindered the accelerated industrial development” of the region. He ordered the fire put out, to allow for better production from gas fields in the region. But luckily for visitors to this remarkable place, the president’s edict has so far gone unfollowed. It burns, burns, burns, that ring of fire.