CauKazEthnoexp. III. Azerbaijan. Part I. Baku

July 20–23, 2010

If you want to travel to Azerbaijan by car, you should plan to spend at least two-three hours at the border. Without magical incantations such as “Zeynal asked to hurry up, we’ve already come to an agreement with Fuad,” the whole process could drag on indefinitely. A bribe at the border is obligatory. But even a bribe won’t necessarily protect you from arbitrary abuses of power. In our case, the border guard refused to issue us a visa for longer than three days if we planned to depart through another checkpoint. If we wanted to depart through the same one, we had to leave our car registration at the border. But we wanted no such thing.

Many lamp posts in the country are wrapped with rope lights and glow like fairy lights in the night (like in Afghanistan).

Baku

Baku turned out to be an incredibly progressive city. I was expecting nothing but Central Asian low-rise developments; what I found instead was practically Dubai.

They know how to lay cobblestones here.

They build skyscrapers (cloudscrapers, to be exact) here.

There’s an absolutely incredible building in the Old City—a 20-story parking garage with a car elevator. Moscow has never seen such a thing in its wildest dreams, although it would come in quite useful there.

There’s the very old city, which has been mummified to the point of becoming completely boring, and the medium-old part with single- and two-story buildings, which is Baku’s biggest treasure.

It’s really simple. They take a typical Khrushchev-era apartment building.

And remodel the exterior so beautifully and neatly that it’s hard to believe it’s even possible.

All the scaffolding is customarily made from regular wood boards. It looks no less strange than the bamboo scaffolding in Hong Kong.

Upon closer inspection, it turns out that most of the old buildings in the city have received a remodeling job of incredible quality directly over the old facades.

A report about Azerbaijan would be incomplete without the story of the Armenian-Azerbaijani war. The gist of the conflict is that Baku was once a multi-ethnic city, and all the important posts were occupied by Armenians. In all fairness, we should note that during Soviet times all the cool Armenians felt it was their duty to move to Baku, and Yerevan was considered provincial. Then the war happened, the Armenians took over Nagorno-Karabakh, so they were all kicked out of the country. And the Azerbaijanis had always been these simple shepherds, so they had a hard time facing all their problems on their own. After the war, Azerbaijan remained divided into two parts.

Locals will always tell visitors that Armenia is the least diverse nation in the world and that no one lives there except Armenians. As evidence, they’ll cite the fact that Baku is multi-ethnic and a whole seven Armenians live there, whereas you won’t find a single Azerbaijani in Yerevan.

If you come in through the back courtyards, the buildings present themselves in a whole different light. Every homeowner considers it their duty to add as many square meters to their dwelling as they possibly can. Someone on the fifth floor might decide to build on an extra 50 meters, while the person on the second floor may only have enough money for a 15-meter extension. And so they build, independently of one another.

Every apartment building section with its own entrance is called a block. Block #4.

There’s a variety of payphone half-booths.

Trash dumpsters are all relatively small and placed in rows.

All the traffic lights in Baku look like the ones in La Rochelle, France.

Pocht. A post box.

A bus stop.

A taxi.

The defining national characteristic of all the men in the country is that they sit in the street doing nothing. As soon as an Azerbaijani man achieves something in life, he goes out into the street, sits down and does nothing.

Women sometimes sit around too, but they’re apt to jump up and begin working at any moment.

You can find many buildings with typography dating back to the times of the 26 Baku commissars.

And many other signs dating back to the peak of Soviet power.

Soviet and contemporary street signs.

There are also some classic Soviet Brezhnev-era street signs, like the ones in Moscow and Kiev.

The quality of the asphalt all around the city is incredible.

All the capital cities of the Caucasus are competing for who has the brightest, most jauntily lit up TV tower. Baku isn’t in first place (Tbilisi wins), but the night view from the rooftop terrace of a restaurant in the Old City is the best view and atmosphere you could get in the entire Caucasus.