Baku, the Hot City

the tomb of the Shirvanshahs

Baku is hot in every possible way. The sun baked me in the sandstone alleys of the old town like I was bread in an oven. Restaurants are open until one or two in the morning and bars are open even later and packed with young, very cool-looking people who speak two or three languages, minimum. The money generates its own kind of heat, money from Azerbaijan’s immense oil reserves. The buildings outside of Icherisheher, the old town, are a mix of Parisian-style neoclassicism, Soviet brutalism, and metal-and-glass futurism. The most famous of these buildings are three towers shaped like flames (so cleverly called the “Flame Towers”) that light up at night with the colors of the Azerbaijiani flag.

the Flame Towers

Right now, it’s 3:30 in the afternoon and it’s much too hot to do anything except sit on a bench in the shade overlooking the Caspian while drinking a cold bottle of water from the grocery store behind me. I’m meaning to go to the carpet museum to my left, a building shaped and decorated like a rolled-up carpet, but I have a blister on my foot, and I was out until 2:30am last night with a few of the aforementioned cool-looking people and I just feel like sitting for a while. Plus, today I already went to the Museum of Miniature Books and made friends with a kitten, so I’ve accomplished plenty. I will continue writing this in the notes app on my phone.

a Bakuvian kitten

I didn’t know what to expect from Baku. That’s been a theme for this trip—less research beforehand, less planning. The trip’s skeleton is put into place (flights, trains, and hotels), but the soft tissue appears as I go, day by day. It’s a sign of maturity, folks.

Do you know where Azerbaijan is? Go look up Baku on Google Maps, I’ll wait here and watch the pigeons. Well, to be entirely candid, I’m in my hotel room now and it’s 9:30pm and I’m debating whether to keep writing or stop and hope the hotel WiFi is working well enough for me to watch an episode of Law & Order. The heat really takes it out of you.

Okay, you’re back. You saw that Baku sits, almost a hundred feet below sea level, on a peninsula that juts out into the Caspian Sea. That peninsula is not naturally a very hospitable place. It’s dry, arid, windy, and hot. The soil and the water are salty. There’s a hillside that spontaneously caught fire fifty years ago and has been burning ever since. My walking tour guide called the city a “hell hole.” The old town is a knot of twisty alleys barely wide enough for two people to walk side-by-side.

When I was waiting to board my flight to Baku from Aktau, Kazakhstan, I was talking to my dad on the phone, and he said the only other time he’s ever heard of Baku was in a James Bond novel he read as a kid. Deplaning at Heydar Aliyev International Airport, walking down the stairs onto the dusty tarmac, I did feel a little bit like James Bond. An adventurer, going where no Doan has gone before. The world’s lowest-lying capital. A mere three-hour drive from the Iranian border. Iraq and Syria are closer to Baku than Dallas is to Chapel Hill.

But Baku isn’t scary, or dangerous, or sinister in any way, really. Because with the growth of the oil industry, the town boomed—and bloomed—into a rather lovely place. Now, fresh water channeled in from the mountains nurtures trees and grass, so there's plenty of shade for the many benches scattered around the city. Fountains everywhere make you forget that you’re in a desert. There’s garden after garden with manicured hedges, marble steps, and statues of Azerbaijani writers and artists. Cats and their kittens are everywhere, and people keep cat food in their bags to hand out to the next cat that they see napping in the sun. The food is delicious, a Persian-Turkish mashup.

The new city is western, the clothes young people wear are western, the alphabet is western, the coffee is western, but the old city, the tea, the language, the culture, the kindness are eastern.

There is a reason for that, of course. Like every other country in this region, the history of Azerbaijan is long and quite complicated, and at a risk of doing a disservice to the country in an attempt to do a service to you, dear reader, I’m going to try to explain the last couple hundred years to you.

Azerbaijan is only a piece of a much-larger group of Azerbaijani people and culture, like a single cookie cut out of a much-larger disk of dough. Azerbaijan’s population is ten million people, most are ethnically Turkish and at least nominally Shia Muslim, and they speak a dialect of Turkish. But there are over thirty million people in northern Iran who share the same language and ethnicity. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei himself, is Azerbaijani Turkish.

That’s because modern-day Azerbaijan was a part of Iran since the sixteenth century, when the Safavids conquered…stuff. But then, imperial Russia came in, tussled with Iran, and there was a treaty that forced Iran to cede Azerbaijan to Russia. As my dear boyfriend said, “fucking Russia.”

But when Russia became the Soviet Union and separated its territories into constituent Soviet Socialist Republics, the Christian Armenians, the Georgians, and the Muslim Azerbaijanis each got their own SSR, and then gained independence when the Soviet Union went kaput. Meanwhile, the Azerbaijani-populated provinces of East Azerbaijan, West Azerbaijan, Ardabil, and Zanjan are still part of the Islamic Republic of Iran. President Raisi’s helicopter crashed in East Azerbaijan province, near Tabriz.

I’ll leave it up to you to decide who got the worse end of the stick. Because Azerbaijan is still very much a dictatorship, but unlike Iran, it’s a secular one. Women can wear shorts, nobody goes to mosque, and you can buy vodka in the grocery stores. Who do you want as your leader, a dictator pretending to be a mullah or a dictator pretending to be a president?

This brings us to another way that Baku is quite hot: it’s surrounded by what I learned in college to call hot wars. Or maybe lukewarm wars. Wars where people are actively killing each other. Unless you live under a rock, you should know that Russia is in a very hot war with Ukraine. Iran is in a lukewarm war with Israel, and Georgia is in one with Russia. And Azerbajian itself has been at war with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh for thirty years. Azerbaijan retook the region in September of 2023, and the entirety of Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenian population fled in January of this year.

a "victory carpet" commemorating the retaking of Nagorno-Karabakh

I realize that all this history doesn’t exactly make you want to come visit Baku. In fact, it probably makes you pretty nervous.

But, everywhere has its problems. Very few of us live in a world of complete safety and security. Only around 12 to 15% of the world’s population lives in what we would call the “west” (Europe, the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). And even in the west, there is unrest, violence, instability, uncertainty. Don’t be stupid—I heard a guy in my hostel in Almaty talking about his upcoming trip to Afghanistan in October, what an idiot—but don’t be so scared that you stop yourself from experiencing life outside of the “western bubble.”

Baku is a safe place. Nagorno-Karabakh is a on the other side of the country. For better or worse, police are omnipresent. And the music is loud, the fountains are rarely turned off, the tea flows freely, the bars and the supermarkets never close, the people are friendly. A new friend and I walked the streets until one in the morning, eating sour green plums.

If you are a longtime reader (hi Mama and Didi), you probably think I sound like a broken record, because I love almost everywhere I go. I have a whole collection of places I really enjoyed (Istanbul, Paris, Bergen, Plovdiv), and a handful of cities where I would move for a few years if I got the chance (Vienna, Athens, Almaty, and honestly, Baku). I like Baku a lot. You should come here. Just bring sunscreen.

a Gothic palace built by one of Azerbaijan's twentieth century oil barons; it's now called the "Palace of Happiness"