Carpets, Cats & the Caspian Sea – 48 hrs in Baku

So exciting… after five visits to Georgia and a weekend in Armenia, we finally had the opportunity to visit our last remaining country in the Caucasian trifecta – Azerbaijan. Only a weekend but we were determined to make the most of it!

Azerbaijan is nestled into the eastern wedge of the Greater and Lesser Caucasus mountains, sharing borders with Russia, Georgia, Armenia, Iran and just a squidge – 15km – of Turkey (at its westernmost exclave) which has made for an interesting mix of culture and history. On the eastern side, the country is bound by the mighty Caspian Sea, which itself is not actually a sea but the world’s largest inland (salty) lake. To touch the Caspian (or the Capsicum as it is affectionately known in our family) has long been on my bucket list – and yes I finally got to tick this one… although I must admit it wasn’t that inviting on a grey day and with little slicks of oil floating here and there…

Following decades of occupation, notably Ottoman, Persian and of course Russian, Azerbaijan finally claimed its modern independence in 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, just in time to capitalise on the nation’s (modern) oil bonanza of the 2000s, evidence of which you can see all around you in the capital Baku, with expensive wacky looking skyscrapers jostling up against Soviet blocks, grand oil boom villas of the early 1900s, and medieval monuments – themselves sat atop previous historic settlements. I say “modern oil boom” as oil has been pumped out of the Caspian since the 1870s, and apparently by 1905 Baku was producing around 50% of the world’s petroleum supply! It’s an interesting mix of ancient, old, new and very new, and often referred to as the lovechild of Paris and Dubai…. of that we shall see…

What I love most about the new builds however, is that all the new towers are all being finished in the same blue glass, which really makes for a cohesive and visually pleasing city – Auckland city, take note!

One other interesting fact we learnt about the country is that it is the world’s first secular Muslim republic, which goes some way to explaining the fact that it produces some very good wines indeed (more on that later…)

Sharing the eastern end of the fertile valley which runs through central Georgia we figured the food (and wine) was bound to be good, and we were not disappointed. I don’t think there was one moment of our weekend when we actually felt hungry. And let’s not get started on the bread!

Here is breakfast, Azerbaijani style…

And the culinary winner of the weekend… halloumi wrapped in veal, who would have thought of that?

And the wine wasn’t bad either, once we had a chance to decipher the wine list…

The Azeris like their wine “medium sweet” eek, but lucky for us we found a hip little wine bar with young and very enthusiastic staff ready to help us on our Azeri oenological journey.

And the tea! We can’t forget the tea, as it is the national drink of Azerbaijan, and unbeknownst to us they actually grow it there. You will frequently see a giant silver samovar steaming away outside a cafe or restaurant, with boiling water ready to be poured into the pot. And a dish of giant hunks of sugar ready to be added to your glass. They like it sweet here. Very sweet.

So the one thing we did know about the country was carpets. Well, what we would actually call rugs but there you go. Being the proud owners of more than one Georgian carpet it would only be fair to add an Azerbaijani to our collection. You can’t go far in the old town without stumbling across a carpet gallery – these guys are especially proud of their carpets, more so given that the art of Azerbaijani carpet making has been granted UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of the World status.

They even have a museum dedicated to carpets, and in keeping with their modernist architectural craze it is shaped as, you guessed it… a roll of carpet.

Inside it displayed many different carpets representing the seven different schools (regions) of carpet making.

…and a most awesome live demonstration where we could watch a skilled carpet making artisan in the actual process….

She was as fast a ninja – how she worked so unbelievably fast was beyond our comprehension. And how she could follow an actual pattern was beyond us too… Each strand is individually hand knotted…

But what is even more unbelievable is the amount of time taken to weave these things…. in a month you may manage to have woven a mere one square meter! In the past, every young girl was given a spinning wheel and other tools of the trade around their 12/13^th birthday and it was their duty to then learn the art of weaving in order to create a carpet for their own dowry. Lucky they didn’t have any digital devices to distract them.

So revered are these carpets, that tourists must get a permit to buy any carpet sized over 2 sqm, and carpets aged over 50 years cannot be taken out of the country at all!

Unlike our experiences of carpet buying elsewhere in the world, the whole process was lovely and super chilled. Once we had schooled ourselves up at the museum, we went back to visit our favourite carpet in our favourite carpet store complete with a polite, honest salesman – no hassle, no pressure. How could we not take one home?

The one that got away…

The most fun to be had on our weekend though was just mooching around the old town and soaking up the sites (and the wine and the food of course), much of which are UNESCO heritage buildings such as the Maiden Tower, which dates from the 12^th century, although it sits on top of a previous temple which they believe is a Zoroastrian fire temple from the 4-6^th century

The 15^th century Palace of the Shirvanshahs who were the rulers at that time

And the 12^th century fortress walls which encircle the old town of Icherisheher

My absolute favourite however, was to visit an actual real life Caravanserai – an olden days roadside inn with room to park your camels. Even if this one was fully restored into a hotel, it still provided me a little shiver of Silk Road excitement

…and the cats! Baku is a cat lover’s paradise… all around the old town we encountered numerous lovely, healthy looking kitties, with their floofy winter coats on – we counted 57 during our two days (and that’s a new record for our Country Cat Count).

And they are obviously well looked after kitties for almost everywhere we found a cat, we found a lovingly prepared “cat kennel”…

This one even had its own hand knotted carpeted cushion!   

It is so wonderful and refreshing to be in a city where cats are held in such high esteem.

They even weave them into their carpets!

Azerbaijan literally translates to the ‘Land of Fire’ and there are various places around the country where “eternal” fires continuously burn from the earth, fed by leaks from the gas reserves which sit under the land. Many became the sites of Zoroastrian fire temples in pre-Islamic times, and were even mentioned by Marco Polo when he came visiting in the 13^th century.

Although we didn’t find a Zoroastrian fire temple, we did come across our own eternal flame, in the form of a monument dedicated to the civilians who lost their lives during ‘Black January’ – a Soviet crackdown on Azerbaijani nationalism in 1990 which preceded their eventual independence in 1991.

The adjacent ‘Martyrs Lane’ only added to the sombriety of the park. I must say I’ve never been a fan of photographs on graves, but I found these particularly poignant.

But the most famous flames in the Land of Fires certainly must be the aptly named ‘Flame Towers’ – a trio of sinuous, blue glass towers built in 2012 to symbolize the eternally burning fires that give the nation their name. And of course to serve as a proud monument to their recent oil riches. They have been built on a hill above the city centre, with the intention to be seen from far and wide.

Not only are they a feat of modern architecture and engineering, but wait for it, they are completely covered in more than 10,000 high-power LED screens, onto which the flickering flames of a fire are projected every night…

Ok, then Baku, if you insist, perhaps you do have a little Dubai! But I prefer to think of you as your own beautiful little architectural microcosm : )