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WELCOME TO
AZERBAIJAN
AZƏRBAYCAN
Fire that never goes out. A sea that is not a sea. Rock carvings older than the pyramids, silk villages in the mountains, alpine peaks above 4,000 metres — and a capital that has reinvented itself twice in a single century.
Stretched between the wall of the Greater Caucasus and the vast inland waters of the Caspian, Azerbaijan is the country where the South Caucasus changes character. Medieval city walls stand at the foot of glass towers shaped like flames. Semi-desert plains give way, within a few hours' drive, to subtropical tea plantations and then to snow. Fire rises straight out of the hillside at Yanar Dag exactly as travellers described it centuries ago, and three streets away in Baku a jazz trio is playing music built on a thousand-year-old modal system.
Known as Od Yurdu, the Land of Fire, an home to the world's first industrially drilled oil well, Azerbaijan carries a history written in flame, silk, carpet and stone. This is the land of the Shirvanshahs and of Gobustan's ancient carvers; of mugham, the improvised art music UNESCO placed among humanity's living treasures; of villages where copper is still hammered by hand and of one mountain settlement whose thousand inhabitants speak a language related to nothing else on earth.
Original Name
Azərbaycan [ɑzærbajdʒɑn]
Capital City
Area
86,600 km²
Population
10,355,000
Religion
Islam
Language
Alphabet
Latin (extended with ə, ç, ğ, i, ö, ş, ü, ı)
Azerbaijani
Currency
Manat · ₼ · AZN
1 $ ≈ 1.70 ₼
1 € ≈ 1.96 ₼
Time Zone
GMT +4
Visa
Most Western nationalities (EU, US, Canada, UK, etc.) can obtain an e-Visa for up to 30 days.
What Makes Azerbaijan Truly Unique
Most travellers arrive in Azerbaijan with one image in their head: the Flame Towers above Baku, glass and steel, lit up at night. It is a good image. It is also the least interesting thing about the country.
Azerbaijan is where the South Caucasus stops being European and starts being something else. It is the only country in the region that is predominantly Muslim, the only one facing the Caspian, and the only one that spent the twentieth century sitting on the oil that powered other people's wars. Its capital was, in 1900, producing roughly half the world's oil. Its villages, three hours inland, still weave silk on wooden looms and speak languages that belong to no family anyone has fully agreed on.
The name itself is usually traced to the Persian Āzarbāydagān, ultimately from a root meaning "protected by fire" — and fire here is not a metaphor. On the Absheron peninsula, natural gas seeps through porous rock and burns continuously on the hillside at Yanar Dag; a few kilometres away, the Ateshgah temple was a pilgrimage site for Zoroastrians, Hindus and Sikhs who came for the same eternal flames. Long before oil derricks, this ground was already famous for burning.
What defines Azerbaijan most, though, is not fire and not oil. It is the collision of things that shouldn't sit together comfortably and somehow do: a Shia-majority society that is among the most secular in the Muslim world; Soviet-era planning wrapped around a medieval walled city; a mountain village at 2,300 metres whose inhabitants speak Khinalug, a language with roughly 1,000 speakers and no close relatives anywhere on earth; and a national obsession with tea served in a glass shaped like a woman's waist.
This guide does not attempt an exhaustive list of sights. Its purpose is to explain what Azerbaijan actually is — its language, its music, its fire, its mountains and its table — so that by the time you arrive, you already understand a little more than a tourist with a camera.
Azerbaijan contains an estimated 300 to 400 mud volcanoes — by most counts the highest concentration on the planet, and roughly a third of the world total. They erupt cold grey mud rather than lava, and occasionally, when the escaping methane ignites, they throw flames hundreds of metres into the air.
INTERESTING FACT