Mekdep.com is back
vytya · 9/28/2026 · Views: 6
I’ve relaunched Mekdep.com, a website for schools across Turkmenistan. You can find your school, look through old photos and perhaps reconnect with someone you once shared a desk with.
For many people, it’s about more than nostalgia. Many have left Turkmenistan, and former classmates have ended up in different countries and lost touch. Mekdep used to help them find each other. I’d like it to do that again.
Some of you may remember how it started. In 1998, I made a website for my own school, School No. 6 in Ashgabat. Then people began asking, “Why isn’t School No. 8 there?” (No. 8 is just an example; I received many messages like that.) I added other schools in the city. Then people from other cities started writing to me, and in 2002 it became a website for schools across Turkmenistan.
If you’re curious what the site used to look like, you can explore it on web.archive.org.
Over time, people moved to social networks, and keeping Mekdep running became harder for me. Then, for a silly reason, I missed a hosting renewal and the site was deleted. I didn’t have a recent backup. It still hurts to think about how many photos and stories were lost.
I do have an older version of the site from around 2009–2010, along with emails from people who sent me photos back then. I also have several thousand photo files, but their names give no clue which school or graduating class they belong to. I’m slowly going through the archive, though I already know I won’t be able to recover everything.
But I don’t want what survived to sit on my hard drive. So Mekdep.com is open again, and I’ll keep adding to it as I go.
If you have photos of your school, class or graduating year, please add them to the site. Someone may have been looking for those familiar faces for years.
The site runs on the hosting I use for my other projects, so I can keep it online without major costs. If you’d like to support the restoration and help keep it running, you can buy me a coffee here https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=6SY3SCPZMT4W4 ☕
