Skirting the Gulf with a day in Baku

I arrived in Azerbaijan on the evening of Nowruz. The timing was unintentional; in fact, had I realised my trip was to coincide with the weekend of the New Year, I probably would have arranged things a little differently. My original plan had been to fly to Islamabad via Sharjah on Sunday, but when Iran – in response to the recent US-Israeli offensive – began to launch strikes against its neighbours, my flight was cancelled. I scrambled at the last minute to figure out an alternative route, which eventually yielded the option of flying around the affected zones: From Baku to Tashkent and from Tashkent to Islamabad. Due to the timing of the flights, I ended up having one day to explore Baku and another two days in Tashkent.

I woke up before seven on Saturday, which came as a surprise seeing as Baku is three hours ahead of Central European time. With the boon of an early start, I decided to walk to the city centre from my hotel close to the main train station. My excursion led me past the Heydar Aliev Palace and Füzuli Park, where a turn southward brought me to the Caspian shore. All the parks I passed through were impeccably manicured and clean, and the promenade lined with its freshly painted nineteenth-century townhouses radiated wealth. I noticed that the university close to my hotel was called “Azerbaijan State Oil and Industry University” – an indication of how a large portion of this wealth was created.

From the seaside, I entered the old walled city. Nowadays, this is easy to do, as a wide boulevard runs right between the old city and the seaside park, but the medieval walls still defend this centre from all other sides. The area of Baku and its environs has been inhabited for thousands of years, yet it took on the contours recognisable to us today in the Middle Ages. The Shirvanshah dynasty moved its court to Baku in 1191 where it subsequently erected massive fortifications, as Baku frequently had to repel attacks from the Khazars and Rus’. In 1501, Baku was conquered by the Persians. For a while, these new overlords allowed the Shirvanshahs to rule under their suzerainty, but this arrangement only lasted until the reign of Tahmasp I. In the eighteenth century, Baku changed hands a few times between the Persians and the Russians, until it was definitively handed over to the Tsar following the Russo-Persian War of 1804 to 1813 – along with most Persian possessions in the Caucasus.

One building whose foundations likely predate the Shirvanshahs is the strangely shaped Maiden Tower. Some scholars believe it stands in the location of an ancient Zoroastrian fire temple tower, dating as early as the seventh century BCE. Such theories are partly fed by the tower’s mythology, which associates it with Islam’s predecessor in the region. One legend recounts that the temple was once besieged, and Ahura Mazda answered the people’s prayer for deliverance by sending them a maiden with blazing hair. When she emerged from the temple’s sacred fire, she told the citizens of Baku that she would fight for them, and marching out of the tower she defeated the enemy chief in single combat. One version has it that the two fell in love and later married, while others say that after killing the enemy general, the lovestruck maiden committed suicide.

I took a few pictures of the tower and continued to the western end of the city walls, which I followed to the Palace of the Shirvanshahs. Besides being a palace, this complex houses a royal mausoleum, a mosque, and a bathhouse dating to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Nowadays, the royal living quarters serve as a museum for mostly decorative items and ornate dishware. Interestingly, an outside wall of the palace is said to be riddled with bullet holes from the “March Days” in Baku, which the Azerbaijani displays label a genocide by Armenian Dashnaks. I got another insight into Azerbaijan’s official historical memory later at the Atesgah Temple, which categorically refuses to recognise as Armenian any Christians who lived in what is now Azerbaijan, instead referring to them as Caucasian Albanian Christians.

When I finished my tour of the old city, I kept walking through the park along the coast, strolling past a bizarre recreation of Venetian canals and a somewhat quainter museum of Azerbaijani carpets: it is shaped like a giant rug with rolled up ends. Initially, I thought I would take the nearby funicular to the top of the hill that overlooks the city, but the line was so long that I ended up climbing. It being March, the climb was not altogether uncomfortable, and I believe I did make it up to the lookout point over the city faster than I would have if I had waited.

The lookout over Baku offers views in multiple directions. Below, of course, one can see the old town as well as the promenade and some of the newer buildings like the carpet museum and the Baku Eye. To the northwest, the hill continues towards Baku’s famous Flame Towers: three glass structures shaped like flames that can be seen from almost every corner of the city. The flames draw on the historical importance of fire to Azerbaijani culture, which ultimately derives from Zoroastrian and even pre-Zoroastrian forms of worship. Both the lookout point and the Flame Towers border a large park dedicated to the memory of the country’s martyrs. The Shahidlar Monument with its eternal flame memorialises the Ottoman soldiers killed in the Battle of Baku, and the path I took towards the Flame Towers was fringed by the graves of those who fell during Black January in 1990 and the Nagorno-Karabakh War of 1988-1994.

I had done enough research on Baku to feel confident navigating its metro system, and given the absence of a timetable at the nearby roadside bus stop, I figured that the metro would be the best way to return to my hotel. I had left a plastic bag there with my laptop and basically all my clothes – items that would have weighed me down considerably if I had taken them with me. I ate a little lunch and got my bearings at a nearby café, drawing up the following itinerary: take the 5 or 11 bus to the Heydar Aliyev Centre, and then the metro and 184 bus to the Atesgah Temple. The temple, I figured, lay so close to the airport that it made no sense to go all the way back to the city from there. Instead, I would take the 104 bus to the highway and then walk just a few metres to the Airport Express bus stop.

To my shock, this plan worked. Admittedly, I had a difficult time trying to find the 184 bus even though the metro station had signboards listing all the busses leaving from each exit. The problem was that the number 184 was written at multiple exits, which was unhelpful when this information turned out to be false. Fortunately, I could rely on my garbage Russian to source directions from a very helpful lottery ticket seller.

Given its relative remoteness on the outskirts of Baku, I found the Atesgah Temple fuller than I expected it to be. Most people, I conjectured, had either arrived by car or by tourist van, as very few had gotten off the bus I had taken. The complex was smaller than I had expected, and I imagine much of it has been reconstructed so as to better house the bizarre life-size dioramas depicting Hindu and Zoroastrian religious practices. The Atesgah Temple was built during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by merchants, though it is claimed that the site served as a place of worship for thousands of years. This idea is not altogether unreasonable, as the location used to have naturally occurring fires fed by gas leaking from the ground. After the temple’s abandonment and the steep rise of oil and gas extraction in the neighbourhood, the natural flame died. The altars that were used to worship these flames are now lit by an artificial gas supply.