Merv, an oasis of Turkestan, lying between Bokhara and the north-eastern corner of Persia, 512 miles by rail (opened in July 1886) from the Caspian and 118 from the Oxus. The oasis consists of a district 60 miles long by 40 broad, watered by the river Murghab, grows wheat, sugar grass, cotton, and silk, has a hot, dry climate, and is inhabited by half a million (O'Donovan; the Russians say less than a quarter million) Tekke Turkomans. The people live scattered over the country. But there is an old citadel, Kaushid Khan Kala, and adjoining it a new Russian fort garrisoned by nearly 3000 men; on the opposite bank of the Murghab a new Russian town is growing up, several Armenian merchants having settled on the spot and monopolised the trade, worth about £150,000 a year. The men are clever workers in silver, and breed horses, camels, and sheep; the women weave silk and make carpets. Merv or Mourn is mentioned in the Zend Avesta. There Alexander the Great built a town. The oasis was held successively by the Parthians and the Arabs, who made the city of Merv capital of Khorassan. It was the seat of a Nestorian archbishop in the 5th century, and of a Greek archbishop in the 14th; and in the 8th it was the headquarters of Mokanna (q.v.), the 'Veiled Prophet of Khorassan.' Under the Seljuk Turks Merv enjoyed its period of greatest splendour, especially under Sultan Alp Arslan. It began to fall into ruin after being taken and sacked by the Mongols in 1221. From the Uzbegs it passed in 1510 to the Persians, who lost it in 1787 to the emir of Bokhara. In 1856 the Turkomans made themselves masters of the oasis; but they in turn submitted to the Russians in 1883, who built the railway from the Caspian to the Oxus, passing through the oasis. Merv occupies an important strategic position at the intersection of the routes Bokhara-Meshhed and Khiva-Herat.
See Marvin, Merv (1880); O'Donovan, Merv Oasis (2 vols. 1882); Lansdell, Russian Central Asia (1885), and Russians at Merv and Herat (1883).