Cultural Heritage Research Journal

It is hard and easy to talk about my hometown Baku when I am abroad. It is something like a fight with internal love and hate to this city. Now I more clearly understand that even if I belong to this city, this city does not belong to me anymore. I feel internal pain and my memory ready to forget my attachment to its smells, sounds, ambiance, and diversity. 

 In the article “Cosmopolitan Baku” Bruce Grant describes and analyzes the interview with Bakuvian about early 70’s Baku: 

‘It was a fantastic time – you can’t imagine it. The jazz, the cinema, the parties. Mainly, we were all together, people of every possible nationality. It was our golden age’. Bruce Grant describes “I have heard this sentiment foremost from persons in their fifties and older who were naturally describing their youth, and I have heard it rehearsed with impressive confidence from teenagers born in the twilight of the Soviet Union.” Considering that this article was written in 2010 when I was 20 years old, I belong to that generation who hardly could tell that lived in the Soviet Union but was influenced by nostalgic memories about it.  

When I want to talk about Baku, I understand that this city will never be the same city of my parents, my childhood, my adulthood, and the future generation. Baku will be the city that was built and destroyed by historical events, political situations, oil boom, cosmopolitanism, and its citizens.  

I started to ask myself how much I know about you (by you I mean Baku), you who built me as a personality and a betrayer who could not make anything to save you from many paths that changed you. Through mentioned above circumstances, I made brief research of how others reflected and defined you in deferent periods of your existence.

In 1905, J.Henry in his book “Baku, an eventful history” describes your important connection to the oil:

“Baku is greater than any other oil city in the world. If the oil is king, Baku it is the throne...I know of no oil city that will compare with it, or leave the commercial for a moment in the wealth of history and traditions, legend and story.” He symbolizes you with the throne full of gold under it, a throne that everyone wishes to overtake.

You also described a lot of times as a cake with many layers; you are not plane surface which is visible to everyone. To know what inside others need to try you. Audrey Altstadt, American historian proves it by the following:

“For over ten centuries Baku had been part of the Muslim world. During much of this time, it was residence and capital for a seven -hundred-year-old local dynasty, the Shirvanshahs. It belts the stamp of Turco-Iranian Islamic cultural belt in which it lays. By the twenty century, Baku had become an industrial and commercial city. The oil industry and trade like the city’s social-political, and cultural life, were dominated by three major ethnoreligious communities -Muslim Turks, Orthodox Russians and Georgian Armenian” 

This diversity was also described by many others:

Baku, “the city of oil “and the quintessential boomtown built around oil wealth, has been known since ancient times for the black gold bubbling just below its surface. Today the city flame built on the oil industry, its militant labor unions and its association with individuals such as Stalin and Alfred Nobel. [1]Sometimes Baku is described as having been the most international city, sometimes the most cosmopolitan city, sometimes ‘of the whole Caucasus’, and sometimes ‘of the whole USSR’.[2]

An array of large-scale international events was attracted to Baku. Iconic architectural projects by prominent international architects and numerous luxury hotels were also opened to reflect the new glamorous image of the city, and to host, the international visitors attracted by mega-events. In preparation for international events, the government also invested billions from public funds into urban infrastructure projects and venues. These efforts also led to the city's beautification campaign, often triggering displacement from central Baku to the peripheries of up to 80 thousand residents located within areas slated for re-development. [3]

Through all your paths I think oil made you rich, wealthy, cosmopolitan city where West and East met each other and continue this route hanging each other by hands. Also, oil killed you, it brought you to the stage when you forgot your personality and changed to the faceless city without strong character.  Should I love you or hate you after this, I still have a strong connection to you and it is hard to be not biased.  

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[1] Stanley, Bruce. "Middle East city networks and the “new urbanism”." Cities 22, no. 3 (2005): 189-199.

[2] Grant, Bruce. "Cosmopolitan Baku." Ethnos 75, no. 2 (2010): 123-147.

[3]Gogishvili, David. "Baku formula 1 city circuit: exploring the temporary spaces of exception." Cities 74 (2018): 169-178.