A choir of 4,166 people in Turkmenistan has broken a world record by singing a song penned by the president, in the latest choreographed show of support.
The rendition of Forward Only Forward, My Dear Country Turkmenistan, by President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov entered the Guinness Book of Records for the most people singing in the round, a Guinness employee said.
“I was witness to a huge surge of patriotism as Turkmen citizens performed in a single breath the song of the head of state,” Seyda Subasi, an adjudicator of Guinness World Records, told Turkmen state television after last week’s performance.
The performance featured a big-screen video of Berdymukhamedov playing a synthesiser and singing along with his people. The song was performed inside a giant yurt measuring 35 metres in height and 70 metres in diameter.
The previous holder of the record was Google, which had 3,798 employees sing Pharell William’s Happy in the Irish capital, Dublin, in September.
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Berdymukhamedov came to power in Turkmenistan in 2006 following the death of Saparmurat Niyazov, described as “the father of the Turkmen”, and set about reducing signs of his predecessor’s bizarre cult of personality and creating space for his own.
In May this year the government unveiled a gold-leaf statue of Berdymukhamedov on horseback in the capital, Ashgabat, echoing a similar effigy to Niyazov that once rotated to follow the sun’s movements in central Ashgabat but which has since been relocated to the suburbs.
Berdymukhamedov’s Forward Only Forward was originally published as a poem in August, and it was later converted into a hymn.