azerbaijan

i arrived the baku airport at 3 am, and promptly fell asleep on top of my backpack. the only reason i had left it this long to visit azerbaijan was because the visas are notoriously tough and expensive to get. i’m sure many azeris and turks would disagree, but azerbaijan is culturally basically turkey version east. they do have their own language and customs, but both are very similar to the turks. unfortunately the most striking thing about azerbaijan is the audacity with which its narcissistic dictator ilham aliyev controls every aspect of civil society and people’s lives. most of the billboards contain just his picture, and anyone who voices dissent pretty quickly disappears. there is a huge, ornate new house of parliament in downtown baku that is never used, a complete sham. the father and now son tag-team have been in charge since the dissolution of the ussr. ilham’s father heydar grew up as a peasant in an exclave of azerbaijan called nakhchivan; i would love to visit that corner of the country someday. azerbaijan has tremendous quantities of oil money. because of the enforced hierarchy and cronyism, it thus also has tremendous economic disparity. there are luxurious glass, futuristically shaped malls that have been built for the oligarchs to buy their $10 000 suits, and there are three buildings shaped evocatively shaped like flames that house the state oil company. much of baku lives interspersed among oil wells, burning flares and reeking trailing ponds in the suburbs. the water of the caspian sea off the coast of baku glimmers with a layer of oil.

another major theme of the azeri national narrative is the conflict with armenia. azerbaijan lays claim to a large swath of land that experienced a secessionist movement in the late 80s and early 90s by its ethnically armenian majority, a movement which was supported by the armenian government. The area is now a de facto independent state called nagorno-karabakh, recognized as independent by no one but armenia. azeris see this as an illegal occupation of their land, and much of the international community passively agrees but is unwilling to do much about it, short of denying recognition of nagorno-karabakh. unfortunately this appears to be a complete obsession of the azeri government in the realm of international relations, such that it is basically the only issue that seems to matter to them. case in point – peruse their official websites for prominently featured diatribes of how terrible armenia is. it is impossible to travel directly between the two countries, indeed individuals who have ever been to armenia are prohibited from entering azerbaijan (two passports comes in handy).

in baku I mostly studied. i also visited the palace of the shivarashas, an ancient palace where the rulers of the area lived during antiquity. there were some very old minimalistic mosques there as well. i rode around on the soviet built subway, which has excessively deep stations and costs just ten cents to enter. each station is a masterpiece of soviet era art, all is coated with a layer of black oil grime, and folks stare at the floor in complete silence. i also visited a restored zoroastrian fire temple called ateshgah, out in the oil well-sprinkled suburbs. thousands of years ago azerbaijan was a hotbed of zoroastrianism (an ancient religion involving the worship of fire, still practiced today mostly in iran and parts of india); it is even postulated that this was where the religion originated, perhaps from burning oil seeping out of the ground. these days the azeri population is officially entirely muslim, but they don’t seem to take it very seriously. women in baku don’t cover their heads, and alcohol flows very liberally. azerbaijan became known to the average european as a place that exists when it played host to the eurovision contest (kinda like europe’s version of american idol) in 2012 – this was held in an opulent purpose-built glass stadium called the crystal palace on reclaimed land in the caspian sea. speaking of reclaimed land in the caspian sea, the richest man in azerbaijan, ibrahim ibrahimov, is planning to build an entire city on an island which is being built as we speak, and the centerpiece is planned to be a tower which will be the tallest in the world. yes, the tallest building in the world is being built in baku, azerbaijan. mind blown, eh?