Heritage and identity in Azerbaijan

While the large majority (over 90 per cent) of Azerbaijan’s population are Azeris, the country’s heritage is diverse and complex. Like so much of the Eurasian continent, the modern population of the country has been formed by waves of migration, layer upon layer each making its contribution and leaving its mark, often assimilating those that were already there, and in turn being assimilated themselves by the next wave. The Azerbaijani language is part of the Turkic family, and is close to Turkish; the two languages are mutually intelligible. Turkic speakers first migrated into the region during the 11th century. Before then, the territory that now comprises Azerbaijan had been inhabited by people speaking a variety of Caucasian and Indo-European languages, some of whose traces can still be found today. Religious and cultural influences included Zoroastrianism, Christianity and Islam; Persia and Byzantium.

Main street, Lahic

Travelling north-westwards from Baku, I left the main road at Ismailli, and boarded a rickety old marshrutka for the journey up to the mountain village of Lahic (or Lahij). This picturesque little village, nestling among the mountains, has become famous for its handicrafts, notably metalwork and leather, and also for its language, Lahiji, a dialect of Persian. Persian influence in the region goes back millennia. This little outpost of less than one thousand inhabitants in Lahic, plus a few hundred more in surrounding hamlets, has held on for centuries in the remote mountain fastness. But what chance do they have of surviving in the modern world of mass education, television and the internet? My genial host was optimistic. They all speak Azerbaijani (he also spoke Russian and English), and he seemed confident they would continue to speak their own language among themselves. Yet while I stayed there, his wife’s relatives were visiting. The children did not speak Lahiji, and conversation was in Azerbaijani. As people travel and marry outside the community, the already vanishingly small pool of people who speak their native tongue will surely shrink. As to their identity? My host was clear; they were Azeri. They just spoke a different language. I wandered along the stone-paved streets, looking into the workshops, with their pots and pans and leather goods. The houses are built with thin layers of wood in the stone walls, as a protection against earthquakes. The village has become a popular destination for Azeri weekend trippers, who have their photos taken in traditional mountain costumes. Lahic’s isolation is over, and the distinctiveness of its people and language seems unlikely to survive much longer.

Back in Ismailli, I continued my journey north-westwards. There was no bus from there to my next destination, Oguz. My host in Lahic had told me I might be able to flag down a bus coming from Baku, but that I could not count on it. But I was in luck. I asked a man for directions, and he told me that in ten minutes he would be driving to Gabala, a town on the way to Oguz, and he would give me a lift. From Gabala I could pick up a marshrutka for Oguz. So a short journey, trying to communicate in my broken Russian with the cheerful driver. Oguz was perhaps a strange place to choose to stop. There were two or three hotels there, the best of which was fully booked. My main reason for choosing to stay in Oguz was the presence of a well-preserved church, now a museum, which is described in guidebooks as having been Caucasian Albanian.

Among the peoples that make up Azerbaijan’s heritage, the Caucasian Albanians, no relation to the Albanians in the Balkans, are a cause of particular controversy even today. For centuries, prior to the arrival of Islam, they ruled an area encompassing much of present-day Azerbaijan and part of Dagestan, to the north (in the present-day Russian Federation). Gabala was their capital. In a region beset by national conflicts, the heritage of the Caucasian Albanians has been a matter of fierce dispute.

Nic

While staying in Oguz, I made the short trip to the village of Nic (Nij), halfway back along the road to Gabala. Nic is home to the Udi minority, whose language is believed to be a direct descendent of the principal language of the Caucasian Albanians. Just a few thousand strong now, they have retained their linguistic and cultural distinctiveness, as well as their adherence to the Christian religion. I visited a tumbledown church in the centre of the village, with trees sprouting out of the roof. The cavernous interior, with its dirt floor, was evidently little used, but there were some votive candles on the altar, indicating that some continued to pray there. Over the entrance was a plaque, giving the date of the church as 1890. The plaque was in Armenian, indicating the church’s adherence to the Armenian Apostolic Church. Most Caucasian Albanians who had remained Christian after the arrival of Islam gradually assimilated as Armenians. The Udi clung on to their language and heritage, but as the church in Nic bore witness, their religious needs had been met in the Armenian church. Perhaps there had not been an Armenian priest there for many years.

The absence of Armenians in today’s Azerbaijan, where they had until the break-up of the Soviet Union and the terrible war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh, been a substantial minority, has left a raw wound, as had the expulsion of Azeris from Karabakh and surrounding areas of Azerbaijan occupied by Armenian forces. Signs of the historical presence of Armenians jar with the official version of Azerbaijan’s history promoted by the regime. Yet, as Thomas de Waal pointed out in his excellent book on The Caucasus, Baku had a stronger Armenian heritage than Yerevan before the population upheavals of Russian and Soviet rule. I had visited an Armenian church in central Baku, ringed by a stout fence, its entrance blocked off. There are almost no more Armenians left to use it anyway. Oguz was called Vartashen until 1991, when its name was changed in a bid to eradicate the heritage of the departed Armenian population. The museum church, now labelled as Caucasian Albanian, had surely served the town’s erstwhile Armenians. Oguz does, however, have a handsome, well maintained synagogue.

Kish

From Oguz, I continued north-westwards to Sheki. Close-by Sheki is the mountain village of Kish, which is known especially for its church, which is thought to date from around the 12th century. A beautiful little chapel, it was restored in 2000-03 by a Norwegian-funded project. Azerbaijan has particular links with Norway, notably owing to the rather eccentric claims by the adventurer Thor Heyerdahl, of Kon-Tiki fame, that the roots of the Norwegian people were in Azerbaijan, and that Norwegians and Azeris shared a common ancestry. He based his claims on the similarities between cave paintings in the two countries, as well as Norwegian mythology, which he believed pointed to a Caucasian origin. The church is now a museum, and among the displayed texts about the history of the church, and the links between Kish and Norway, is one expounding Heyerdahl’s theory.

This church also could not escape the controversies about the Caucasian Albanian heritage. I chatted with a lady who runs a café opposite the church and doubles as a tour guide for English speaking visitors. While Armenians had worshipped there in more recent times, she vehemently denied the Armenian heritage of the place. The Armenians had taken it over only in the 19th century, she said, and had trashed the documents demonstrating the Caucasian Albanian origins of this and other churches. This is part of ‘our heritage’ she hotly asserted, meaning Azerbaijan’s, her indignation at the perceived Armenian usurpation of her country’s past boiling over. Some have asserted that there were Udi speakers in Kish when the region was taken over by imperial Russia at the start of the 19th century. Perhaps they were subsequently assimilated as Armenians; perhaps there had been Armenians there already; perhaps other Armenians had migrated there from elsewhere. I did not have enough information to resolve these conundrums. Complicating matters further is the claim that the church had originally been Georgian. Surely the clearest conclusion to all this is that in the shifting sands of Caucasian history, no one people can lay an exclusive claim to the heritage of the Caucasian Albanians or the remains of their once great civilisation.

Sheki palace

Sheki itself also has a notable heritage, and it is in the process of being spruced up, its monuments renovated for the increasing numbers of visitors. Sheki’s origins go back to antiquity, and it had been one of the most important towns of Caucasian Albania. But it was moved to its present position only in the 1770s, following a devastating flood at the nearby earlier site. The town was the capital of the Sheki Khanate, in its day one of the most important of the Caucasian Khanates. Its glory is the Khan’s palace. Built as a summer palace, it was restored in the 1950s and 60s, and again in 2002-04. In size, it is relatively modest, and not particularly palatial. But its splendour is in its décor, placing it among the finest and most beautiful buildings I have visited. Stained-glass windows known as shebake are formed of a delicate lattice work made out of wood, put together without nails or glue, and fitted with coloured glass in geometric patterns. The craftsmanship is superb, and like nothing else I had seen before. The interior walls are decorated with intricate paintings of flowers, birds, hunting scenes and battles. In the palace it is an enchanted world of harmony and beauty, so appealing in the art and architecture of the Islamic world, whose vision of paradise, unlike the pomp and bombast of so much western architecture, is of quiet harmony and simplicity.

Tradition and Modernity in Baku

I arrived in Baku in the morning, tired and dirty after a long day at Kyiv airport and a night-time flight. Flying up from Odessa early the previous day, my onward flight to Baku was cancelled, and I was re-scheduled on a later flight. But then came the news of the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner over eastern Ukraine that afternoon, and all flights heading eastwards were delayed. I sat in the airport departures area, struggling to communicate with the other three Baku-bound transit passengers, and texting my friend in Odessa about the horrifying news. But eventually we got under way. Do you like the airport, my young Azeri travelling companion asked me when we arrived at the shiny modern terminal building? Very nice, I replied. The city too, he added.

The Maiden's Tower, Baku

Baku is indeed a fine looking city, at least in the city centre. Further out, it resembles a vast building site, with clouds of dust whipped up by the strong winds for which the city is notorious. For Baku has been thoroughly revamped and reinvented in recent years, oil money poured into the transformation of the former Soviet town. Swathes of Soviet-era apartment buildings have been cut down. The old city centre has in part survived the changes of the 20th century. Wandering in the old walled city, narrow, shady streets overhung with balconies retain their charm. But it is quite different from so many other old Muslim towns, such as one sees in Central Asia, with the dusty streets of windowless walls hiding the secret lives of the families behind them. In Baku’s old town the houses are open to the world, with windows and balconies. It is an eclectic mixture, reflecting Azerbaijan’s complex history, influenced by east and west. Previously part of Persia, modern-day Azerbaijan was conquered by Imperial Russia in the early 19th century. The city centre also boasts impressive mansions built with the oil wealth of the early 20th century.

The tension between Baku’s eastern roots and western influences was poignantly portrayed in Kurban Said’s marvellous novel ‘Ali and Nino’. Coming from a wealthy Baku Jewish family, the author moved to Germany at the time of the Bolshevik revolution, and converted to Islam. The hero of the novel, Ali, is a sophisticated product of Russian education, speaking French and English, and with a modern, educated bride, Nino. But Ali is also the scion of a notable Persian Azeri family, and is drawn to his eastern heritage.

Old town and flame towers, Baku

Baku also boasts interesting modern architecture. Beyond the old city, the wavy, pointy tips of the flame towers shimmer and flick at the sky. But the iconic building of Baku is the mysterious, bewildering Maiden’s tower. No one knows for sure for what purpose it was built? Only that its shape, with the long projection jutting out from its cylindrical core, is unique and unfathomable. It appears to have been built in the 12th century, although its foundations may date back several centuries earlier. Popular legend attributes its name to the story of a King’s daughter who threw herself to her death from the tower rather than marry an unloved suitor. Another explanation links the name ‘virgin’ to its never having been taken by force. Some experts think it may have been designed as an astronomical observatory, although it also for a time formed part of the city’s defences.

Baku’s story for the past 150 years has been dominated by oil. Vast fortunes were made here, for the Nobel brothers and the Rothschilds among others. The young Stalin cut his revolutionary teeth as an agitator among the oil workers. Hitler’s drive against Stalingrad was aimed towards the oil wells of Baku, which he considered critical to the German war effort. In the middle of the 20th century almost half the world’s oil production came from Baku. While the city’s wells contribute far less proportionately nowadays, oil has again been central to the country’s efforts to rebuild itself since independence and the disastrous war with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh in the early 1990s.

Absheron peninsula

Much of today’s production is offshore, from rigs in the Caspian. But the land around Baku, on the Absheron peninsula, is cluttered with wells, the derricks like some kind of giant, demented birds bobbing their heads up and down, stretching for miles across the flat, dust-blown landscape, pecking away at the oil-soaked earth. It is a forlorn and hideous scene.

For thousands of years oil has oozed, and gas has seeped out of the ground on the Absheron peninsula. In places, once ignited, the ground literally burns. At Yanar Dag (Burning Mountain), a short bus ride out of Baku, flames lick the blackened sandstone of a ten-metre long strip of hillside. It is said it was accidentally ignited by the dropped cigarette of a careless shepherd in the 1950s. Not far away, at the Baku suburb of Surakhani, is the temple of fire, or ‘Ateshgah’. Thought to have been built in the 17th century, it consists of a courtyard, with an altar in the middle, and cells around the perimeter where holy men once lived. On the altar, a fire burns. The shrine was once a Hindu place of worship, and has also been a place of pilgrimage for Zoroastrians, followers of the pre-Islamic religion of Persia. Some have speculated that the site may have been a Zoroastrian place of worship much earlier. The fires at the shrine used to be fuelled by natural gas vents of the type that proliferated around the Absheron peninsula. But the commercial exploitation of the gas wells caused the flames to go out. They are now fuelled by the Baku mains supply.

Ateshgah temple

As in the time of Ali and Nino, modern Baku still has a face to the west and a face to the east. The city centre, outside the old-town walls, has a modern brash feel. On the central square, a statue of a sassy young woman in jeans and a skimpy top holds an umbrella in one hand and a mobile phone in the other. In cafes and bars around the square perimeter evening revellers sip cold beer and tuck into kebabs and pizza. Yet it was Ramadan when I visited, and at restaurants away from the city centre tables were prepared well in advance for the diners who would sit in front of their plates waiting for the signal that it was time to break the day’s fast. Conservatism and modernity exist side by side.

Zaporizhian Cossacks

I travelled down from Dnipropetrovsk to Zaporizhia by bus, the route roughly following the course of the Dnieper River. It was wartime in Eastern Ukraine. A couple of hundred kilometres east of here, battle was raging in the city of Donetsk. I had spent two months in Dnipropetrovsk eight years earlier, in the winter of 2006. This was a Russian-speaking region, but everything I had learned about Dnipro during that earlier stay told me that most of its people would stand with Ukraine. And it proved to be so. Blue and yellow Ukrainian flags flew from buildings. They adorned cars. An electronic billboard in the city centre displayed a fluttering flag, while the national anthem blared across the square. Most striking of all, a whole tower block on the Dnieper riverbank had been faced with a vast yellow on blue trident symbol of Ukraine.

Dnipropetrovsk

The regional governor, Igor Kolomoisky, one of Ukraine’s wealthy oligarchs, had taken on the defence of the city, recruiting his own militia, the Dnipro Battalion. My bus passed through one of its checkpoints as we drove into the city. It had also seen action further east. Kolomoisky is Jewish, surely giving the lie to Russian slurs that the authorities in Ukraine are fascist. Dnipro boasts the biggest Jewish community in the country. Kolomoisky had built the huge Menorah Jewish community centre in the city (I stayed in a hotel in the building).

During my earlier stay in Dnipropetrovsk, people had more than once spoken of their pride in the Cossack heritage of the region. The centre of that heritage was in Zaporizhia, a little way south down the Dnieper, and I had long wanted to go there. Zaporizhia itself is a non-descript Soviet-era city. It has no real centre of any note, just an avenue, many kilometres long, with other avenues leading off it. Its most noteworthy construction is the vast Dnieper dam, built in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and once the pride, the showcase of Stalin’s first five year plan. Before the construction of the dam, and the flooding it caused, this section of the river was known for its rapids, from which Zaporizhia, ‘beyond the rapids’, takes its name.

Dnieper dam, Zaporizhia

Looking across from the dam, in the middle of the broad Dnieper, is the long island of Khortytsia, famous as a centre of the Zaporizhian Cossacks. From the 16th through to the 18th centuries, the Cossacks held sway over a large territory known as the Zaporizhian Sich, or sometimes as the Cossack Republic. The word ‘sich’ was derived from the Ukrainian word for ‘to chop’, referring to the clearance of forest to make room for an encampment, and the use of the wood to build a fortification. It was this fortified camp that formed the heart of the Zaporizhian Cossack world. The term was used to refer to the fortification itself, and also to the wider territory it controlled. The Sich enjoyed varying degrees of autonomy, at times coming under the formal sovereignty of both the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and of Muscovy. Some believe its origin was as a defence against the raids of Crimean Tartar slavers, the so-called ‘harvesting of the Steppe’, which carried off hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and others into bondage. The Sich was destroyed several times, by the Tartars among others, only to be rebuilt at a different spot. It was finally abolished by Catherine the Great in 1775. For today’s Ukrainians, the Zaporizhian Sich was one of the antecedents of the modern Ukrainian state.

Like Cossacks elsewhere, the Zaporizhian host was made up of men who had sought freedom from the strictures of organised states and from the serfdom prevalent in Poland and Russia. The value they placed on freedom was reflected in their model of government, which included elements of democracy. Authority was exercised by an assembly, the ‘Sich Rada’, and the ‘Hetman’, or leader. The island of Khortytsia, the centre of the Zaporizhian Cossacks’ realm, was strictly male only. The Cossacks had a code of behaviour and a judicial system to enforce it.

Replica Sich, Khortytsia island

There is nothing left of the original Sich on Khortytsia, all trace having been erased on the order of Catherine. But there is a museum, including exhibits from the period of the Sich, as well as pictures depicting the Cossacks’ rebellion against Poland-Lithuania, the Khemelnytsky uprising, in 1648. The Cossacks look splendid and terrifying in their extravagant costumes and outsized moustaches. Other pictures of assemblies in the Sich show them raucous and wild, as they would be expected to be. Close-by the museum is a reconstruction of the Sich, including walls made of wooden stakes, as well as houses and, at the centre, a tall, wooden Orthodox Church. But it is difficult to conjure up the atmosphere of former times, especially with the dam nearby, as well as massive electricity pylons a short distance away.

There is something ineffably glamorous about the Cossacks. But their image is also tainted by a reputation for violence. In later periods, in the service of the Russian Tsars, they were often seen as the sharp edge of Tsarist oppression against subject peoples. They have tended to be regarded as a part of the Russian heritage, and indeed, until recently, much of the world barely distinguished Ukraine from Russia. In the present conflict, there have been reports of Cossacks fighting on the side of the Russian invaders, and abducting international monitors. But many Ukrainians also draw inspiration from their Cossack past. In the sprawling camps in central Kyiv in the aftermath of the Maidan revolution, several of the men hanging around in military fatigues, practicing martial arts and swilling hard liquor, had adopted the styles of the Cossacks, with the profuse moustaches and shaven heads, with just a small wisp of hair swept forward from the top of their sculls, over their foreheads. But these were not the ones fighting in the east to recover Ukraine’s occupied territory.