Baku is the jewel of the Caspian. It is a sparkling, modern metropolis - steel, glass and marble stretching upwards. It has also in recent years hosted a number of international events such as the Eurovision Song Contest and the Champions League final. The shorefront is decorated with new ultra-modernist developments such as the multipurpose Heydar Aliev Center and the three Flaming Towers, whose facades at night are illuminated in turn with licks of flames, the flag of Azerbaijan, and a soldier with a shouldered rifle, looking over the land of Nagorno-Karabakh, for which the blood of so many has been spilt. Such is the branding that Azerbaijan has presented to the world.
The city is itself forged from another kind of treasure, hidden deep beneath the barren, windswept and otherwise inauspicious earth of the Absheron peninsula. Large reserves of oil and natural gas have greatly enriched Azerbaijan, particularly in the years since the fall of the Soviet Union, as deepwater extraction has become profitable.
However, not far from the faux Parisian boulevards of downtown Baku, it is possible to find a quite different city. A capital usually misrepresents its country, and the centre usually misrepresents the city entire. Baku is one of the more extreme examples.
Join me, then, on a quest to the 12th century Shirvanshah fortress of Ramana, and the desolate petrochemical wasteland over which is keeps watch, like a silent ancient witness to the cost of Azerbaijan’s new-found oil wealth.
NB: Baku is not known as “the city of winds” for nothing. Apologies for some of the wind interference in certain scenes. I’ve added some subtitles to my own speech where the wind obscures the audio.
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