Faryab reaches from the edge of the Kara Kum desert on the Turkmenistan border up into the ridges of the Band-e Turkestan. Its name is an old Persian word for land watered by channels led off a river, and it recalls a prosperous medieval city of Gowzgan. The capital, Maymana, stands where the roads linking the province’s very different regions meet.
From desert edge to mountain ridge
The province covers roughly 21,000 square kilometres and spans several landscapes. The north belongs to the lowlands of Afghan Turkestan, with the large oasis of Andkhoy and some of the lowest ground in Afghanistan, about 257 metres above sea level at the Turkmenistan border. To the south, the hill country known as Kohestan climbs across the Band-e Turkestan to more than 3,000 metres.
Faryab borders Turkmenistan to the north and the provinces of Jowzjan, Sar-e Pol, Ghor and Badghis. The Shirin Tagab is one of the rivers that water its farmland.
A lost city and a revived name
Medieval Faryab stood about 16 kilometres east of the Ab-e Qaysar, at today’s Khayrabad. In the 10th century it belonged to the Farighunid princes of Gowzgan, and geographers noted its flourishing farms and crafts and its congregational mosque, on the road from Marv al-Rud to Balkh. It was devastated by Turkmen raiders in 1037–39 and again in the Mongol invasion of 1220, and eventually fell into ruin.
Maymana was long the seat of an Uzbek khanate, which was annexed to the Afghan state in 1876. In the administrative reforms of the mid-1960s the governorate of Maymana was raised to a full province and given the old name Faryab, roughly doubling in size as Andkhoy and other districts were added.
Carpets, karakul and markets
Uzbeks and Turkmen predominate in the northern lowlands, the southern hills have Persian-speaking villages, and the western Qaysar area was settled largely by Pashtuns; Uzbek, Dari, Turkmen and Pashto are all heard. In the late 1970s Faryab also had one of the largest nomad populations of any Afghan province, most of them Pashtun herders. The NSIA estimated the population at about 1.13 million in 2021–22.
Andkhoy, long a gathering point for caravans heading north to Bukhara, grew into a market for Turkmen rugs, karakul lambskins, wool and hides; in the 20th century its houses were typically roofed with mud-brick domes. Carpet weaving, done mostly by women, remains an important source of income for the Turkmen families of the Andkhoy area; a recent field study recorded 99 weaving terms there, most of them Turkic. The province is also known for its kilims.