azerbaijan essay

Azerbaijan’s Economic, Political and Social Features Essay

Introduction, political system, economy of azerbaijan, culture and tourism, works cited.

Azerbaijan is a country located in Southwestern Asia, bordering the Caspian Sea, between Iran and Russia, with a small European portion north of the Caucasus range. The country has three dominant features that dominate its landscape.

To the Eastern part, the country borders the Caspian Sea. This is its natural boundary. To Northern side, the Caucasus mountain ranges characterize its landscape. Third, there are widespread flatlands that are located to the central part of the country.

It is a nation with a majority Turkic and Shia-Muslim population. Azerbaijan was briefly independent (from 1918 to 1920), following the Russian Revolution; it was subsequently incorporated into the Soviet Union for seven decades and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it became a free country.

According to Pipes, the country suffers from a near dictatorial regime that abolished the limit of the terms that an incumbent president ought to serve in 2009 (34). In addition, the country has been typical of massive corruption and graft.

Despite numerous resources that the country has the revenues does not lead to development as Azerbaijanis would wish. This is because of the aforementioned endemic corruption, which has made the energy sector to stagnate. Indeed, the energy sector is highly underdeveloped.

The national language of the country is Azerbaijani. The language has its roots in Turkish native language and is spoken by many countries within the region. Since the language originated from Turkey, it is similar to many Turkish languages including Qashqai and Oghuz.

As such, many inhabitants of the Southwest language suffer from little if any language barrier owing to the close relationship of their languages. This paper is an explorative paper that seeks to utilize available literature to expound on various economic, political and social features of Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijan is situated in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. The coastal town of Baku is the oldest city of the country, which also serves as the capital city. It hosts one of the largest harbors due to its deep waters at the coastline of Caspian Sea.

It is also the central city where all oil industries are located. Azerbaijan occupies an average land of over 86 thousand kilometers squared and is the largest when compared to Georgia, Armenia that are within the same region.

Save for its natural boundary at the shores of Caspian Sea, the rest of the country is typified by mountains that extend to Georgia and Iran to the South. Azerbaijan is ringed by mountains. Owing to its central location, the country borders The Greater Caucasus range in the North. To the south, the country’s mountains reach the Abseron Puninsula.

The mountains also reach the Caspian Sea in the Western part of the country. These ranges reduce as the reach the border with Armenia. Talysh Mountains shapes the country’s landscape to the south forming a border with Iran.

The elevation of the country rises sharply from the coastline and the lowlands towards a high elevation typical of the mountains. As such, Azerbaijan is a mountainous country with the highest peak above sea level reaching almost 4,500 meters above sea level. Bazardyuze Dagi is the highest peak of the country.

There are eight major rivers in the country. They enter the central flatlands and lowlands of Kura Aras. In addition, the rivers also join the low deltas from the Caucasus ranges that are in the Eastern part of the country nearing the shores of Caspian Sea.

MtKvari River is the largest and has several tributaries including Aras and Akchov. All the waters that flow through this river enter the Caspian Sea at the coastal line of the country. There are various water bodies and reservoirs in the country including Mingenchaur.

It is the largest body of water that acts as a reservoir in the country. It occupies over six hundred kilometer squared of land. The reservoir was formed through a dam created at the middle of Kura River and is located in the Western part of the country.

It is among the largest producers of hydroelectric power (HEP) which an alternative source of power from fossil fuel energy. It also serves as a major source of water for irrigation during the dry seasons especially for the country’s plain lands.

The country receives minimal rainfall averaging between 150 and 250 millimeters on an annual basis. The highest elevation areas of the mountainous regions record high rainfall and precipitation. Nonetheless, Lankaran lowlands are also typical of high precipitation.

Slightly above 15% of the entire land is fertile although there is the need for increased irrigation during the dry season. Indeed, over fifteen thousand kilometers squared of land is under irrigation in the country.

The flora and fauna of the country is composed of indigenous and hibiscus vegetation in the mountainous regions and almost bare in other lowlands. Plants that are resistant to drought characterize the country. It is important to notice that the country has few wildlife animals including tigers in the mountainous regions and numerous bird species only comparable to Armenia’s bird diversity.

De Waal articulates that the Eurasian region had inhabitants dating back to 5000BCE (672). Nonetheless, the information that exists is insufficient to ascertain this claim. Archeologists, however, have the conviction that the region was among the most ancient regions where the natives of the Azerbaijan may have lived (De Waal 672).

The first information we have of the Azerbaijan population is following the overthrow of the Median Empire. The Persian King, Cyrus the Great, invaded Azerbaijan in the 6th century BCE. Olukbasi says that empire influenced the local population in many ways (67). This was in terms of early forms of religion and culture. As such, Azerbaijan culture has traces of the Persian Empire.

High rates of migration and consequent settlement of the nomads of this region was typical of the ancient times of the region. The main groups of nomads who migrated to this region include the Eurasians and Asians. This pattern of migration continued throughout the ancient times. Indeed, historians say that the migration was rampant during the Sassanid Empire.

It continued until the late 20th century as the Turkish Azerbaijani sought refuge from increasingly high demand for land. Nonetheless, Sassanid Empire only lasted for a quarter of a century when Alexander the Great led an invasion to the land. This in turn resulted to increased influence of Hellenistic culture throughout the land that was hitherto under the Persian rule in 301BCE.

The dismissal of the empire created once by Alexander around the 2nd century BCE. It gave the chance to allow local Caucasian tribes to establish an independent kingdom for the first time since the Median invasion.

The Albanian empire was crucial in neutralizing the native identity of the Azerbaijanis. It created extensive empires within the region and ensured that it culture dominated over the other cultures. Nonetheless, the Armenians were unable resist the influence of the Albanian rule.

Indeed, they were able to recapture the territories that included Utik and Karabakh. These regions had Albanians as the majority population, and they succumbed to Armenians. This reduced the rule and the influence of the Albanians in a considerable way. Due to the shared border of River Kura, the region became a contentious issue between the Romans and the Parthians.

The rationale is that the two major empires had begun to extend their territories and easily conquered Albania as well as Armenia. They both came under the rule of Romans (Hatcher134). After the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Byzantines entered in the country and managed it.

It did not take long for the Byzantines to suffer defeat under the hands of the Arab Muslims. The country became a Muslim state by the end of the 7th century when Javanshir bowed down. For the next three centuries, the region bordering Kura River and Aras became under the influence of the Arabs.

They acquired land within the region, and their influence remains apparent even in the modern day Azerbaijan. Such dynasties as Salarid and Buyids typified the rule of the country. After that, the Mongols arrived from the east. This meant devastating event for Azerbaijan and most of its neighbors.

Mongols began asking for tributes in the 13th century. By the early 13th century, the Mongols had been in a position to occupy huge tracts of land in Azerbaijan. This was in addition to the lucrative region of Ogedei Khan.

Although Mongols had controlled much of the land, it did not take long before the thriving Ottoman Empire conquered them and chased them out of Azerbaijani land. The Empire was able to occupy strategic cities of Shamakh and Baku among many important cities of the country.

Between late 16th century and 17th century, another sect of the Muslim (Shia Muslims) emerged under the rule of Shah Abbas. The conflicts and the cracks that existed in the Ottoman Empire provided an avenue for Persian Empire to conquer the land of Caucasus. They conquered the region and occupied Azerbaijan in a strong manner.

The Persians only ruled for one century. After that, the Russian Empire defeated them and they had to sign the Treaty of Gulistan of the early 19th century. Azerbaijan became a colony of the Russian Empire. Russians occupied and ruled Azerbaijan until its collapse during the First World War when the Russian revolution happened.

This meant the creation of a democracy and Azerbaijan became a democratic republic. Nevertheless, this only lasted for two years until the Soviets arrived. Azerbaijan became part of the Russian federation in 1920. Alongside Georgia and Armenia, the country became a state within the Soviet Union.

Ebel and Menon articulate that policies of the Soviet Union led to improved standards of living of the Azerbaijanis. Education and basic amenities were provided in a better way by the Soviet Union during the period of de-Stalinization.

This happen as the world, and the Soviet Union were urbanizing and industrializing. However, this period of improved economic and social development did not take long as the structural crises began hitting the union by mid 20th century. Despite its significance in the oil industry, the country lost is significance to the Union. The fall of the Soviet Union was inevitable by the early 1990s.

In 1991, Azerbaijanis voted to secede from the Soviet Union, and it became a sovereign state. This was through a nationwide referendum. The country became indipende3nt after the ruling of the supreme council. Mutalibov became an outright president since he had no opposition.

Consequently, the country formulated its constitution that has guided it through the last two decades. It was at this point that Azerbaijan stopped being part of the Russian Federation and became independent.

Baku City became the headquarters of all official government offices. The city has continued to grow in terms of harbors and tourists since the Ottoman Empire rule. It has served strategic purposes for different empires. As such, the city is the most developed in the country and has over 2 million residents.

It hosts various national museum including the paintings of Baku Wall and is considered among the most attractive city in Asia. The city dates back to the first century. It became crucial after an earthquake devastated Shamakhy in 13 AD. The ruler then chose Baku to be the capital city.

In 18 th century, the Russians conquered the city and ruled it for more than two centuries. It was until the signing of The Treaty of Gulistan that Baku became free again. The city has continued to be known for its rich oil resources and its fierce snowstorms during winter.

From 1991 to 2010, the country has experienced transformations. In 1996, the country reelected Mutalibov for the second term. According to the country’s constitution, this was his last term. It ended in 2001 when he was succeeded by the chair of Yeni Azerbaijan Party who still yields power until now.

In 2009, the parliament voted to amend the clause within the constitution that limits a president to two terms only. Although the move elicited dissenting views from a cross-section of the population, it became law and it is a part of the constitution.

Since 1991, the country has experienced growth due the continued exploitation of natural resources. In 2003, it was among the top five countries in the world that had the highest economic growth rates.

According to King, the Great War now referred to as the World War I lead to radical reshaping of geographical boundaries in Eastern Europe. Such mediaeval empires as Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian became extinct as the violence of the war took the better part of them. King explicates that various national group were quick to declare independence for their respective countries.

In 1918, Azerbaijanis declared their independence and they still celebrate the day as their independence day. Upon independence, the country established a democratic system of government and by 1919; the Allies recognized the autonomy of the country (King 31). Among notable global leaders who enthusiastic about the formation of the new country included US President Wilson Woodrow.

Nonetheless, the independence only lasted for only two years, and the experiment of self-rule and democracy vanished. The reason is that the communist revolution in Russia established a soviet union, which invaded the country and combined it with Georgia and Armenia (King 31). For the next seven decades, the country was under the rule of soviet dictatorship. This was until the break of Soviet Union.

Despite the soviet dictatorship, King says that the country remained largely proud of the liberal and democratic government it had created prior to the invasion by the Soviet dictatorship (31). It is in the 21st century that the country seeks to recreate the type of government it had created almost a century ago.

The government type reflects the structure of Soviet Union. Azerbaijan was among the countries that constituted the Union. Upon its break up in 1991, the country was able to borrow majority of the government structures from Russia. At the outset, the country established a republic and assumed a longer version of its name depicting its nature. The name changed from Azerbaijan to the republic of Azerbaijan.

In 1995, the country managed to complete its structural formation of it political and other systems (Ebel and Menon 89). Indeed, the country formulated and promulgated its new constitution in the same year. According to article twenty-three of the constitution, the national flag became a major symbol of national unity. Other symbols include the national coat of arms in addition to the country’s anthem.

Azerbaijani’s government upholds the principle of separate and autonomous powers between the legislature, judiciary and legislature. This is in line with conventional concepts of power where the constitution dictates the powers of each of the branches.

The president holds the executive power while parliament is the custodian of the legislative power. Independent courts of Azerbaijan hold the judicial power of the country. The parliament in the country is also referred to as the Milli Maljis, which has over 120 deputies. The convocation of Milli Maljis assumes office after every five years after national elections.

During the elections, every person or citizen of the country ought to have attained the age of 25 years to be elected into the parliament as determined by the constitution of the country. Citizens who have more than singular citizenship right or serving in other countries should not seek any form of election into the parliament since the law restricts them to vie only into a position in the executive and judiciary alone (Andreeva 67).

This is in addition to people who hold religious positions or other people engaged in activities that earn them income. They can only vie to become deputies of the Milli Maljis only if the Supreme Court allows them.

As aforementioned, the executive power dwells in the hands of the office of the presidency. To become a president of the republic of Azerbaijan, a person ought to have attained the age of 35 years with a minimum of the first university degree.

Besides, the constitution articulates that a person seeking the position of the presidency ought to have resided within the territory of the country for at least ten years (Swietochowski 615). This is in addition to having an election right and has no any criminal record. He or she should have no vested interests in the states of the republic of Azerbaijan.

Nonetheless, it is important to notice that country’s constitution explicates categorically that an individual with exclusive citizenship has the right to be elected into the office of the presidency. In the country, the presidents serves for a term not exceeding five years which upon completion he or she seeks the mandate of the people at every first of November.

During the elections, secret ballot prevails as every citizen has the right not to reveal his or her preferred candidate. The president has to garner at least two thirds of the total votes cast. Nonetheless, the constitution restricts a president for only two terms upon which he or she shall serve at the capacity.

In addition, the elected president becomes the commander in chief of the armed forces and is mandated by the constitution to authorize any military action. The president of the republic of Azerbaijan has the mandate to appoint a cabinet from the elected deputies of the parliament (Hatcher 84).

The rationale is that the constitution mandates the president to use his executive power in the realization of the country’s goals and objectives (Ebel and Menon 189). The cabinet of ministers within the country acts as a supreme body that is accountable to the national leader of the country.

The cabinet ministers serve as the heads of their respective ministries. Andreeva says that the major ministries in the country include ministry of agriculture, finance, sports and tourism, economic development, health, justice, defense and internal affairs (78).

In addition, the office of the president in the country has the responsibility of ensuring that logistical and financial matters of the president and ensure that his or her administration receives all the support that it might need in the realization of the country’s objectives.

The countries has entrenched democracy in many aspect of its political system. Of particular interest is appreciation of multi party system. Currently, there are over twenty political parties. Under the political party system in the country, every political party has the responsibility of forwarding their political candidates during the elections.

Every political party has to recruit its members in all states and administrative division and achieve a national appeal. During electioneering year, every party should conduct party nominations in a fair and democratic way. No citizens who have ascribed to a specific political party should switch their parties until the elections.

Among the major political parties in the country are Yeni Azerbaijan Party, Musavat Popular Front Party and Azerbaijan Popular Front Party. During the previous elections, Yeni Azerbaijan Party swept almost all political positions during and it currently parliamentary majority.

The other major arm of the government in the country is the judiciary. The supreme courts and other autonomous courts located in various states are the major custodians of the judicial powers. Among the major courts that the constitutional mandates to be the custodians of judicial powers, include the court of the republic, which is the most superior court within the country.

Besides, the court of appeal and economic courts have the mandate to ensure that all organs of the government uphold the judicial powers. The constitution of the country clearly explicate that the judicial, legislative and executive bodies of the country are autonomous, and any decision reached by any of the branch is independent and devoid of any undue interference of any other organ (Çiçek and Kuran 731).

This implies that despite the executive having the authority to ensure that the country runs smoothly, its decisions are not coercive to the parliament or the judiciary of the country.

It is worth mentioning that the parliament of the country is unicameral in the sense that there is no congress and the House of Representatives. The parliament composed of the deputies fulfills all this mandate by ensuring that all laws that it formulates reflects the wishes of the people located in different states of the country. The country under the constitution has different administrative divisions referred to as rayons.

There are 66 rayons in the country. The republic of Azerbaijan has direct control of only eleven rayons. All these rayons are under the control of a governor appointed by the president. The governors represent the rayons in the national politics and are major determinants of the manner of which national revenue is distributed among these states.

They forward their respective issues raised at the state level tow the office of the president who recommends the minister of finance to allocate money according to the needs of each of the rayon. Among the major rayons with the country, include Absheron, Guba-Khachmaz, Aran, Nackchivan, Ganja-Gazakh, Shaki-Zakata and Yukhari Garabakh.

The military in the country is under the helm of the president. The military of the country was founded during the brief period of self-government at the end of the First World War. The national army was created in the same time until the country’s integration into the Soviet Union.

In 1991, the law of the republic of Azerbaijan created the position of the armed forces. Currently, the country has over above a hundred thousand troops composed of the army, air force and navy. The country continues to direct huge sums of money towards the military. According the department of statistics and finance in the country, the total budgetary allocation towards the military by the end of fiscal year of 2011 was 11.2 % of the entire budget.

As such, Çiçek and Kuran assert that the country has invested in the military than many of other department owing to the unending conflicts in the region. The president has the authority to restructure the military and appoint the senior officers within the department. To this end, major decisions of the military especially in the event of war and conflict come from the commander in chief who in this case is the president.

In international politics, the country under the ministry of foreign affairs has maintained a strong relationship with over 156 countries across the world. It is a member of international organizations including the UN and World Trade Organization. In 2006, the country became a permanent member of Human Rights Council due its increased democratic space and freedom for its members (Ernest, Karl and Brysac 372).

To this end, the country has various priorities that it pursues in its foreign relations. They include upholding its sovereignty and territorial integrity, active participation in international affairs through international organizations, maintaining strong multilateral and bilateral relations with other countries in addition to ensuring that it maintains strong military capabilities.

The country also spearheads democratic ideals within and outside its borders by preserving ethnic and national diversity. The republic of Azerbaijan also has strong policies relating to border security and sustainable use of energy to enhance development (Swietochowski 675). Although the country has had innumerable conflicts with other countries, it has been able to resolve them diplomatically.

In particular, the country had a dispute with Armenia regarding its territorial and border integrity which it was able to resolve through mediation of Turkey. Azerbaijan also joins hands with other countries that have committed themselves to fighting international terrorism.

It is worth noting that the country contributed immensely in restoration of peace in Kosovo and Iraq. It collaborates with NATO in matters pertaining to peace and war. Besides, it has maintained strong relationship with European Union.

Azerbaijan’s coats of arms serve as a major symbol of national unity. The constitution is also part of the national heritage and symbol of the country. Above all, the national flag is the paramount aspect of national symbolism in Azerbaijan.

In the middle of the last decade, Azerbaijan had strong economic growth of almost 10%. This was attributed to its increasingly high mineral resources including oil. Other non-mineral sectors also recorded unprecedented growth. Many of these sectors included banking, and construction.

Nonetheless, much of the country’s economic growth resulted from growth in the hydrocarbon sector. The economic growth was however short-lived. The oil deposits of the country had reached depletion level by the end of fiscal year 2011.

In fact, the country’s economy grew marginally by less than 1%. The global financial and economic crises of 2007-08 also contributed significantly to the slowed economy (Tyrrell 673). To this end, the country formulated ways in which new form of resources would act as major economic drivers.

Many projects are underway including increased attempts to boost the country’s gas production and construction. Nonetheless, the country has suffered inabilities of instituting economic reforms to steer the country to development (Ernest, Karl and Brysac 372). Endemic corruption within public and private sectors has played a negative role in the economy.

The country has also suffered from inefficiencies in the ability to attract foreign direct investment. In addition, the country also suffers from dwindling trade relations with the majority of its trade partners in the international market (Batalden 83). Nonetheless, the country still has the potential to reverse the negative economic trend.

This through the ability to negotiate transportation of energy sources from its neighbors since the unstable world oil prices have continued to play a significant part of the economy. The country also could play a huge role in negotiating the trade routes for its increasingly high gas production. The country could also spur its non-mineral sectors to ensure that the country is not solely dependent on minerals.

Major macroeconomic indicators show that the country still lags behind in terms of economic development. Particularly, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by the end of fiscal year 2011 stood at $94.20. The economic growth rate stood at 0.2% by the end of the same year.

This implies that the country’s GDP per capital averaged $10, 302 by 2011. With such an economic growth rate, the Word Bank says that the country is 110th in the world considering all other factors of the economy. Among the major sectors that spur the economic development of the country are agriculture, industry and services constituting 5.5%, 62% and 32.4% respectively.

The country’s labor force is significantly small standing at approximately 6 million people (Houtsma 85). Although the country has among the slowest growing economies in the world, it unemployment rate stands below 1% implying it has managed to offer a majority of its people employment opportunities.

As noted above, energy sector is the main aspect of Azerbaijan’s economy. Over half of the country is rich in oil and gas. Immediately after the country gained independence from the Soviet Union, it contracted over 10 firms to extract and identify oil rich regions within the country. The firms specialize in deepwater drilling of oil that remained unexploited by soviet forces during the union (Baldick 772).

This implies that the country stands to benefit from exportation and exploitation of oil, which will steer its economy considerably. Another sector that ensures that the country continues to develop is the services sector. By the last decade, the country was among the fastest growing countries in terms of GDP growth rates. Nevertheless, the banking sector is relatively diminutive.

This implies that the country has not exploited the potential of the bank in a considerable way. The major reason is that the country’s banking sector remains in the hands of the government although huge strides have allowed the privatization of the banking sector to take root.

Banking sector contributes immensely to the financial system of the country despite its relatively small size. Owing to the increasingly high revenues from minerals as of the year 2003, the country started the efforts to increase the awareness of the need to privatize banking system and carry out reforms within the sector. A weak financial system to enhance transparency within the sector still typifies the banking system.

Nonetheless, banking reforms have continued to show positive signs with the competition within local and foreign banks increasing steadily. As of April 2011, the republic of Azerbaijan had only managed to have only 47 banks including over 600 branches across the country. The country’s official currency is Manat (AZN). By the year 2011, the exchange rate of the currency in relation to the dollar stood at $62.34.

Agriculture is another important sector in the country although it is considerably narrow. Despite the country’s majority of the land being arid, Azerbaijan has the largest arable land within the region. Major agricultural products include woods, livestock, subtropical, plants dairy products, fish, sugar beets and medicinal plants. This is owing to expansive area of land that has been cultivated.

According to the ministry of agriculture, the countries has turned over 5 million hectares of land to farming (Ernest, Karl and Brysac 383). In fact, majority of agricultural products that the country has traditionally imported from other countries have started to typify local products. In fact, agriculture promises to grow with the increase of technological innovation and invention.

To enhance increase in economic development, the country has continued to invest handsomely in science and technology. This through the introduction of institutions devoted to increase research efforts and enhance feasible economic ventures. In addition, the country has continued to embrace technology in communication. By the end of 2010, the country had over 1.3 million telephone lines with over 10 service providers.

In the beginning of this decade, the country has hugely invested in high-speed railway connections allowing movements of people and goods across the country to be effective (Samuel, Gregor and Stutchbury 123). In addition, the country established numerous earthquake and geological stations that allow the country to predict natural catastrophes such as earthquakes and tsunamis in a reliable way.

Houtsma asserts that this has been the most outstanding stations within the region and many other countries depend on the stations to predict and prepare for such eventualities (76). It is imperative to recognize that the country has also invested in expansive sea routes to transport and export crude in addition to an effective air space.

The country plans to have an expansive pipeline to export natural gas to other European nations and the region at large. Azerbaijan boasts of high deposits of natural gas that has continued to shape its economy.

To that end, the country is in the forefront of ensuring that its economic growth stays on course through direct investment and stimulation programs. It is important to notice that Azerbaijan has the potential of stimulating its growth owing to various aspects of economic diversity.

The cultural dimension of Azerbaijan draws many influences from different cultures. The major aspect of globalization that has shaped the culture of Azerbaijanis is consumer trends. Nonetheless, the country has preserved its traditions, customs and values. Among the major aspects of culture in the country include, music, folk lore, cuisine, literary work and art.

There are traditional holidays within the country including the novrus bayram. Owing to the ethnic diversity in the country, it is worth noting that different ethnic groups have different cultures although many of them differ marginally. Diversity in language is also an important aspect of Azerbaijan’s culture with numerous languages present in the country.

At the outset, the country’s music and folk dances have evolved for thousands of years dating back to the ancient era. Lusher asserts a characteristic of the music is monody where rhythms are key aspects of the country’s music (534). To this end, it is important to pin point the major musical instruments of the country that include string instruments.

Percussion and wind instruments also typify Azerbaijan’s musical culture. It combines poetry and music in its performance. Story telling is also a central element of ashiq art where the dancers and vocalists narrate stories of issues that are pertinent to the society (Lusher 543).

Mugham art is also a central aspect of musical culture of the country where singers use emotive tunes and vocals to relay a message about ethics and cultural heritage of Azerbaijanis. It is therefore important to notice that mugham art is performed during national holidays and cultural festivities. Another form of art that incorporates music in the country is meykhana.

Meykhana art is a cultural dance only performed by women during family festivals. It incorporates rhythmical movements and vocals. Unlike the above two, it does not have dramatization and storytelling within and it is performed to as an entertainment item of art.

Azerbaijan has spectacular national features including excellent work of architecture. Among them is the Maiden Tower, which is major characteristic of the country’s skyline. Walled city of Baku is a major tourist attraction. It has survived for over two thousand years and has consequently been entered to UNESCO’s world’s heritage sites.

Of particular interest is the way the architectural designs of the country have been able to incorporate the designs of the East Asia and the West Europe (Minahan 94). In addition, the country boasts of numerous sites including Hirkan National Park, Susha National Reserve and Place of Shaki Khans.

Other archeological sites include Qalagah, Govurqala, Zar Cave, Garapektep, and Taglar Cave. Quadrangular Castle serves as the most outstanding work of architecture that has major monumental aspects. Despite lack of extensive works of architecture in the modern era, the national treasures of the country are major aspects of the country and continue to ensure that tourists flock into the country to see the outstanding work of art.

Indeed, there are plans to build Azerbaijan Tower, which upon completion will be the highest standing building in the world replacing Burj Al Khalifa of Dubai. It will stand at an approximate height of 3,440 feet above sea level.

The country also has a rich folk art culture typical of decoration of clothes, carpets and walls. These types of applied art include metal and wood engraving, handicrafts, knitting and decorative ceramics. Since the ancient trade eras and travels by merchants, Azerbaijan’s applied work of art has remained a major attraction and a focal point of trade among different enthusiasts.

To this end, it is imperative to notice that the Azerbaijan carpet has been a long-standing tradition of the country where hand knit fabrics made an impeccable carpets. Again, UNESCO has recognized Azerbaijan carpet as a major element of modern and medieval art.

The cultural heritage of the country especially in applied work of art has elicited praise across a cross section of the world. Many people cite the country as the mother of all artistic poetry, ceramics and embroider.

Film industry in the country continues to flourish with the increase of investment directed towards cinematography. The industry dates back to the late 19 th century implying that the country was among the pioneers of cinema. Upon the declaration of brief independence of 1919, the country produced a documentary detailing the upheavals it had undergone in the struggle for independence.

The documentary titled, ‘The Celebration of the Anniversary of Azerbaijani Independence’ hit the theaters (Samuel, Gregor and Stutchbury 161). Due to the developments of the country’s cinematography, Azerbaijan’s film industry became a national heritage of the Soviet Union.

Upon the disintegration of the Union, Azerbaijan continued with the expansive industry and was able to increase its popularity among local and international audience. Currently, the country boasts of over ten television channels some of which are owned by the government. Among the outstanding channels that have won international awards include Xazar TV and ANS TV.

The country has a rich cuisine mainly composed of vegetables that are abundant within the country. The traditional foods of the country include cilantro, watercress, potato and marjoram.

The favorable climate of the country coupled with fertile land allows for cultivation of many types of food crops, which typify the country. It is worth mentioning that the country’s cuisine is seasonal depending on the availability of variety of vegetables and grains. During national holidays, specific foods are eaten.

They include wheat bread served with vegetables, fish, and spiced soup. Although every ethnic group within the country has its own cuisine, it is worth noting that they are largely similar since the country’s biodiversity cross cuts across the country. Save for the coastal towns whose major cuisine incorporate seafood, the rest of the country’s ethnic group depend on agricultural food.

Although the country’s constitution declares the country as a secular state, the country’s population is constituted by 94% of Muslims (Lambton and Lewis 67). Of this percentage, only a fraction is Sunni Muslims while the rest is Shia. There are small proportions of Hindus, Christians, Orthodox and Apostolic.

They constitute the minorities although they have the right of worship like everyone else within the country. However, with an increasing influence of the globalization process, secular religions are finding their way into the country. Lambton and Lewis articulate religious festivals and holidays are central elements of the country’s system where each religion has the right to exercise them accordingly (75).

Tourism is a major aspect of the country’s economy. Many tourists across the world visit the country to experience its seasonal climate and cultural diversity. Although many tourists attraction were destroyed during the fall of Soviet Union in early 1990s, the country has been able to bounce back from the destruction and it now sells as a major tourist destination of Eastern Europe.

It has now become a popular tourist destination for its religious diversity, spas and tourism driven by health care (Houtsma 67). The government of the republic of Azerbaijan has now prioritized tourism as a major driver economy and is embarking on ambitious plans to rebuild and refurbish old national museums and create other avenues that may woo more tourists.

As of January 2009, the country surpassed over two million tourists most of whom were from European nations. Besides, the country has embarked on stimulating local tourism as a way of increasing its revenues from the sector.

The planned construction of skyscrapers will also serve as a key aspect of tourism where the country seeks to compete with major countries whose high-rise buildings have continued to add revenue for their respective countries. Preservation of cultural artifacts such as Azerbaijan’s carpet, ashiq art and Quadrangular Castle will ensure that the country’s tourism sector continue to thrive amid dwindling trade with its partners.

Finally, the country has been proactive in participating in a number of sports. While some sports in the country are considered traditional, modern sports such as soccer and rugby have become common. Sports in the country have a rich history with sports such as backgammon and wrestling being preserved for their cultural importance.

Although the country performs dismally at the international stage (Olympics, World Cup and World Club Championship) efforts are on top gear to ensure that the country continue to make developments in the area. Indeed, the country launched a massive project of identifying and nurturing youth talent by inaugurating the youth football academy (Schippmann 97).

This is a major step in enhancing the ability of the country to use sports to create employment as well as to attract sports tourists. To this end, the country has the potential of making an entry into these elements of modern global culture.

Essentially, Azerbaijan is an Asian country located in the Middle East. It was among the states of the Soviet Union until its fall in 1991. It history dates back in the ancient era where major cities such as Baku developed. It has a relatively hot climate and has diversity of flora and fauna.

The country appreciates democracy and practices such democratic processes such as elections and enshrinement of human rights through proactive judicial system. It is a member of international organizations. It has enjoyed strong foreign relations with countries such the US and other 155 countries across the world.

Due to its rich mineral resources and diversity, the country has had a thriving economy until the late 2009 due to oil depletion and global financial and economic crunch. Such sectors as tourism, agriculture, industry and services have been the major driving aspects of the country’s economy.

It is important to notice that the country’s rich cultural diversity continues to attract numerous tourists. They include music and dance, applied art, cuisine, national museums and parks, folk art, cinematography and other artifacts.

This paper has exhaustively analyzed almost every aspect of Azerbaijan. The paper started by exploring geographical and historical aspects of the country.

Further, it explored the political system of the country and government organization. On the part of economy, the paper highlights various economic indicators that include the GDP and unemployment rates among others. The last aspect of the paper is Azerbaijan’s culture and tourism. From the above paper, Azerbaijan is land filled with diversity.

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Other sites

Lonely Planet

Russia and Iran in the Great Game

The Map of Azerbaijan

The Flag of Azerbaijan

Cultural Artifacts

Azerbaijan carpet.

Ashiq Music Instrument

A Portrait of Azeri Village

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• Impact of Regional Azerbaijan-Armenia War on Neighbouring Countries and Foreign Policies
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Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Azerbaijan's Economic, Political and Social Features." April 16, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/azerbaijan/.

• Countries and Their Cultures
• Culture of Azerbaijan

Culture Name

Azerbaijani, Azeri

Alternative Names

Azerbaijani Turkish, Azeri Turkish. The country name also is written Azerbaidzhan, Azerbaydzhan, Adharbadjan, and Azarbaydjan in older sources as a transliteration from Russian. Under the Russian Empire, Azerbaijanis were known collectively as Tatars and/or Muslims, together with the rest of the Turkic population in that area.

Orientation

Identification. Two theories are cited for the etymology of the name "Azerbaijan": First, "land of fire" ( azer , meaning "fire," refers to the natural burning of surface oil deposits or to the oil-fueled fires in temples of the Zoroastrian religion); second, Atropaten is an ancient name of the region (Atropat was a governor of Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C. ). The place name has been used to denote the inhabitants since the late 1930s, during the Soviet period. The northern part of historical Azerbaijan was part of the former Soviet Union until 1991, while the southern part is in Iran. The two Azerbaijans developed under the influence of different political systems, cultures, and languages, but relations are being reestablished.

Location and Geography. The Azerbaijan Republic covers an area of 33,891 square miles (86,600 square kilometers). It includes the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, which is inhabited mostly by Armenians, and the noncontiguous Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, which is separated from Azerbaijan by Armenian territory. Nakhchivan borders on Iran and Turkey to the south and southwest. Azerbaijan is on the western shore of the Caspian Sea. To the north it borders the Russian Federation, in the northwest Georgia, in the west Armenia, and in the south Iran. Half the country is covered by mountains. Eight large rivers flow down from the Caucasus ranges into the Kura-Araz lowland. The climate is dry and semiarid in the steppes in the middle and eastern parts, subtropical in the southeast, cold in the high mountains in the north, and temperate on the Caspian coast. The capital, Baku, is on the Apsheron peninsula on the Caspian and has the largest port.

Demography. The population of the Azerbaijan Republic has been estimated to be 7,855,576 (July 1998). According to the 1989 census, Azeris accounted for 82.7 percent of the population, but that number has increased to roughly 90 percent as a result of a high birthrate and the emigration of non-Azeris. The Azerbaijani population of Nagorno-Karabakh and a large number of Azeris (an estimated 200,000) who had been living in Armenia were driven to Azerbaijan in the late 1980s and early 1990s. There are about one million refugees and displaced persons altogether. It is believed that around thirteen million Azeris live in Iran. In 1989, Russians and Armenians each made up 5.6 percent of the population. However, because of anti-Armenian pogroms in Baku in 1990 and Sumgait in 1988, most Armenians left, and their population (2.3 percent) is now concentrated in Nagorno-Karabakh. Russians, who currently make up of 2.5 percent of the population, began to leave for Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The number of Jews decreased as they left for Russia, Israel, and the United States in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Numerous ethnic groups (up to ninety) of the former Soviet Union are represented in small numbers (Ukrainians, Kurds, Belorussians, Tatars). Other groups with a long history of settlement in Azerbaijan include the Persian-speaking Talysh and the Georgian-speaking Udins. Peoples of Daghestan such as the Lezghis and Avars make up 3.2 percent of the population, with most of them living in the north. Fifty-three percent of the population is urban.

Linguistic Affiliation. Azeri (also referred to as Azeri Turkish) or Azerbaijani is a Turkic language in the Altaic family; it belongs to the southwestern Oguz group, together with Anatolian Turkish, Turkmen, and Gagauz. Speakers of these languages can understand each other to varying degrees, depending on the complexity of the sentences and the number of loan words from other languages. Russian loan words have entered Azeri since the nineteenth century, especially technical terms. Several Azeri dialects (e.g., Baku, Shusha, Lenkaran) are entirely mutually comprehensible. Until 1926, Azeri was written in Arabic script, which then was replaced by the Latin alphabet and in 1939 by Cyrillic. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Azerbaijan and other Turkic-speaking former Soviet republics reintroduced the Latin alphabet. However, the main body of modern Azeri literature and educational material is still in Cyrillic, and the transition to the Latin alphabet is a time-consuming and expensive process. The generations that learned Russian and read Azeri in Cyrillic still feel more comfortable with Cyrillic. During the Soviet period, linguistic Russification was intensive: although people referred to Azeri as their native tongue, the language many people in the cities mastered was Russian. There were both Azeri and Russian schools, and pupils were supposed to learn both languages. Those who went to Russian schools were able to use Azeri in daily encounters but had difficulty expressing themselves in other areas. Russian functioned as the lingua franca of different ethnic groups, and with the exception of rural populations such as the Talysh, others spoke very little Azeri. Roughly thirteen languages are spoken in Azerbaijan, some of which are not written and are used only in everyday family communication. Azeri is the official language and is used in all spheres of public life.

Symbolism. Azerbaijan had a twenty-three-month history of statehood (1918–1920) before the institution of Soviet rule. The new nation-state's symbols after the dissolution of the Soviet Union were heavily influenced by that period. The flag of the earlier republic was adopted as the flag of the new republic. The flag has wide horizontal stripes in blue, red, and green. There is a white crescent and an eight-pointed star in the middle of the red stripe. The national anthem forcefully portrays the country as a land of heroes ready to defend their country with their blood. The sentiments associated with music in Azerbaijan are very strong. Azeris regard themselves as a highly musical nation, and this is reflected in both folk and Western musical traditions.

To show pride in country, Azeris first refer to its natural resources. Oil is at the top of the list, and the nine climatic zones with the vegetables and fruits that grew in them also are mentioned. The rich carpet-weaving tradition is a source of pride which is used to highlight the artistic sensibilities of carpet weavers (most of the time women) and their ability to combine various forms and symbols with natural colors. Hospitality is valued as a national characteristic, as it is in other Caucasus nations. Guests are offered food and shelter at the expense of the host's needs, and this is presented as a typical Azeri characteristic. The use of house metaphors was widespread at the beginning of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict: Armenians were regarded as guests who wanted to take possession of one of the rooms in the host's house. Ideas of territorial integrity and the ownership of territory are very strong. Soil—which in Azeri can refer to soil, territory, and country—is an important symbol. Martyrdom, which has a high value in the Shia Muslim tradition, has come to be associated with martyrdom for the Azeri soil and nation. The tragedy of the events of January 1990, when Russian troops killed nearly two hundred civilians, and grief for those who died in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, have reinforced the ritual activity attached to martyrdom.

Azeri women and their characteristics are among the first ethnic markers (attributed characteristics) that differentiate Azeris as a nation. Their moral values, domestic abilities, and role as mothers are pointed out in many contexts, especially in contrast to Russians.

The recent history of conflict and war, and thus the suffering evoked by those events in the form of deaths, the misery of displaced persons, and orphaned children, has reinforced the idea of the Azeri nation as a collective entity.

History and Ethnic Relations

Emergence of the Nation. Azerbaijan was inhabited and invaded by different peoples throughout its history and at different times came under Christian, pre-Islamic, Islamic, Persian, Turkish, and Russian influence. In official presentations, the Christian kingdom of Caucasian Albania (which is not related to Albania in the Balkans) and the state of Atropatena are regarded as the beginnings of the formation of Azerbaijani nationality. As a result of Arab invasions, the eighth and ninth centuries are seen as marking the start of Islamization. The invasions of the Seljuk Turkish dynasty introduced the Turkish language and customs. From the thirteenth century onward, it is possible to find examples of literature and architecture that today are considered important parts of the national heritage. The local dynasty of Shirvan shahs (sixth to sixteenth centuries) left a concretely visible mark in Azeri history in the form of their palace in Baku. Until the eighteenth century, Azerbaijan was controlled by neighboring powers and was invaded repeatedly. In the nineteenth century, Iran, the Ottoman Empire, and Russia took an interest in Azerbaijan. Russia invaded Azerbaijan, and with the 1828 treaty borders (almost identical to the current borders), the country was divided between Iran and Russia. The rich oil fields in Baku that were opened in the midnineteenth century attracted Russians, Armenians, and a few westerners, such as the Nobel brothers. The vast majority of the oil companies were in Armenian hands, and many Azeri rural inhabitants who came to the city as workers joined the socialist movement. Despite international solidarity between the workers during strikes (1903–1914), tension existed between Armenian and Azeri laborers, with the Azeris being less skilled and thus worse paid. This discontent exploded in bloody ethnic conflicts in the period 1905–1918. The fall of the Russian monarchy and the revolutionary atmosphere fed the development of national movements. On 28 May 1918, the Independent Azerbaijan Republic was established. The Red Army subsequently invaded Baku, and in 1922 Azerbaijan became part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In November 1991, Azerbaijan regained its independence; it adopted its first constitution in November 1995.

National Identity. In the early twentieth century, secular Azeri intellectuals tried to create a national community through political action, education, and their writings. Ideas of populism, Turkism, and democracy were prevalent in that period. As a reaction to the colonial regime and exploitation that was expressed in ethnic terms, the formation of Azeri national identity had elements of both Islamic and non-Islamic traditions as well as European ideas such as liberalism and nationalism. The idea of an Azeri nation also was cultivated during the Soviet period. The written cultural inheritance and the various historical figures in the arts and politics reinforced claims to independent nationhood at the end of the Soviet regime. During the decline of the Soviet Union, nationalist sentiment against Soviet rule was coupled with the anti-Armenian feelings that became the main driving force of the popular movements of national reconstruction.

Urbanism, Architecture, and the Use of Space

There are various dwellings in different regions. Traditionally, people in towns lived in quarters ( mahallas ) that developed along ethnic lines. Modern Azerbaijan adopted the Soviet style of architecture; however, Baku retains a Maiden Tower and an old town criscrossed with narrow streets as well as examples of a mixture of European styles in buildings that date back to the beginning of the twentieth century. These edifices usually were built with funds from the oil industry.

Soviet-era governmental buildings are large and solid with no ornamentation. Residential complexes built in that period usually are referred to as "matchbox architecture" because of their plain and anonymous character. Public space in bazaars and shops is crowded, and people stand close to each other in lines.

Food and Economy

Food in Daily Life. There are regional differences in the selection and preparation of food resulting from the availability of agricultural products and membership in different ethnic groups. A mixture of meat and vegetables and various types of white bread constitute the main foods. In rural areas, there is a tradition of baking flat white bread ( churek , lavash , tandyr ). Kufte bozbash (meat and potatoes in a thin sauce) is a popular dish. Filled pepper and grape leaves and soups also are part of daily meals. Different types of green herbs, including coriander, parsley, dill, and spring onions, are served during meals both as a garnish and as salad. Pork is not popular because of Islamic dietary rules, but it was consumed in sausages during the Soviet period. The soup borsch and other Russian dishes are also part of the cuisine. Restaurants offer many varieties of kebabs and, in Baku, an increasingly international cuisine. Some restaurants in the historic buildings of Baku have small rooms for family and private groups.

Basic Economy. Azerbaijan has a rich agricultural and industrial potential as well as extensive oil reserves. However, the economy is heavily dependent on foreign trade. The late 1980s and 1990s saw intensive trade with Russia and other countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States. Turkey and Iran have begun to be important trade partners. About one-third of the population is employed in agriculture (producing half the population's food requirements); however, with 70 percent of agricultural land dependent on poorly developed irrigation systems and as a result of delays in the privatization process, agriculture is still inefficient and is not a major contributor to the economy. People in rural areas grew fruits and vegetables in small private gardens for subsistence and sale during the Soviet period. The major agricultural crops are cotton, tobacco, grapes, sunflowers, tea, pomegranates, and citrus fruits; vegetables, olives, wheat, barley, and rice also are produced. Cattle, goats, and sheep are the major sources of meat and dairy products. Fish, especially sturgeon and black caviar, are produced in the Black Sea region, but severe pollution has weakened this sector.

Land Tenure and Property. In the Soviet period, there was no private land as a result of the presence of state-owned collective farms. As part of the general transition to a market economy, privatization laws for land have been introduced. Houses and apartments also are passing into private ownership.

Commercial Activities. There is a strong carpet-weaving tradition in addition to the traditional manufacturing of jewelry, copper products, and silk. Other major goods for sale include electric motors, cabling, household air conditioners, and refrigerators.

Major Industries. Petroleum and natural gas, petrochemicals (e.g., rubber and tires), chemicals (e.g., sulfuric acid, and caustic soda), oil refining, ferrous and nonferrous metallurgy, building materials, and electrotechnical equipment are the heavy industries that make the greatest contribution to the gross national product. Light industry is dominated by the production of synthetic and natural textiles, food processing (butter, cheese, canning, wine making), silk production, leather, furniture, and wool cleaning.

Trade. Other countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States, Western European countries, Turkey, and Iran are both export and import partners. Oil, gas, chemicals, oil field equipment, textiles, and cotton are the major exports, while machinery, consumer goods, foodstuffs, and textiles are the major imports.

Social Stratification

Symbols of Social Stratification. As in the socialist era, Western dress and urban manners usually have a higher status than does the rural style. During the Soviet period, those who spoke Russian with an Azeri accent were looked down on, since this usually implied being from a rural area or having gone to an Azeri school. By contrast, today the ability to speak "literary" Azeri carries a high value, since it points to a learned family that has not lost its Azeri identity.

Political Life

Government. According to the constitution, Azerbaijan is a democratic, secular unitary republic. Legislative power is implemented by the parliament, Milli Mejlis (National Assembly; 125 deputies are directly elected under a majority and proportional electoral system for a term of five years, most recently 1995–2000). Executive power is vested in a president who is elected by direct popular vote for five years. The current president Heydar Aliyev's term will end in October 2003. The Cabinet of Ministers is headed by the prime minister. Administratively, the republic is divided into sixty-five regions, and there are eleven cities.

Leadership and Political Officials. Since the late 1980s, the attainment of leadership positions has been strongly influenced by social upheaval and opposition to the existing system and its leaders. However, the network based on kin and regional background plays an important role in establishing political alliances. The system of creating mutual benefits through solidarity with persons with common interests persists.

Social Problems and Control. According to the constitution, the judiciary exercises power with complete independence. Citizens' rights are guaranteed by the constitution. However, as a result of the uncertainties of the current transitional period, the legacy of the Soviet judicial system, and the authoritative measures taken by power holders, the implementation of legal rules is in practice a source of tension. This means that state organs can break the law by committing actions such as election fraud, censorship, and the detention of protesters. Given the prevalence of white-collar crime affecting investments, savings funds, and financial institutions, the large number of refugees and displaced persons with limited resources has resulted in various illegal business dealings. For example, recent years have seen considerable drug trafficking to Russia and the smuggling of various goods and materials. Despite improvements, people have little faith that they will receive a fair trial or honest treatment unless they belong to the right circles. The ideas of shame and honor are used in evaluating and hence controlling people's actions. Family and community opinion impose limitations on actions, but this also leads to clandestine dealings.

Military Activity. Azerbaijan has an army, navy, and air force. Defense expenditures for the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict placed a sizable burden on the national budget. The official figures for defense spending were around $132 million in 1994.

Social Welfare and Change Programs

There are laws providing for social security for the disabled, pensions, a guaranteed minimum wage, compensation for low-income families with children, grants for students, and benefits for war veterans and disabled persons (e.g. reduced fares on public transport etc.). However, the level of social benefits is very low. National and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are involved in aid work for displaced persons, especially children.

Nongovernmental Organizations and Other Associations

Most NGOs concentrate on charity, mainly for displaced persons and refugees and focus on human rights, minority issues, and women's problems (e.g., the Human Rights Center of Azerbaijan and the Association for the Defense of Rights of Azerbaijan Women). Depending on their specialties, these organizations collect information and try to collaborate with international organizations to support people financially, politically, and socially.

Gender Roles and Statuses

Division of Labor by Gender. Many women were employed outside the home as a result of Soviet policies, but they have traditionally played a secondary role in supporting the family economically. Men are considered the main breadwinners. There are no restrictions on women's participation in public life, and women are active in politics in the opposition and ruling parties. However, their number is limited. Rural women's participation in public life is less common.

The Relative Status of Women and Men. With few exceptions, socially and politically powerful women at the top levels have male supporters who help them maintain their positions. Although professional achievement is encouraged, women are most respected for their role as mothers. Women in rural areas usually control the organization of domestic and ritual life. There is a higher degree of segregation between female and male activities and between the social spaces where they gather.

Marriage, Family, and Kinship

Marriage. Even in rural areas, marriages increasingly are arranged in accordance with the partners' wishes. In some cases, girls in rural areas may not have the right to oppose a candidate chosen by their parents; it is also not unusual for parents to disapprove of the chosen partner. Marriages between Azeri girls and non-Muslim non-Azeris (Russians, Armenians) in the Soviet period were very rare, but Western non-Muslims apparently now have a different status. Men, by contrast, could marry Russians and Armenians more easily. Both men and women marry to have children and bring up a family, but economic security is another important concern for women. In addition to the civil marriage ceremony, some couples now go to a mosque to get married according to Islamic law.

Domestic Unit. The basic household unit is either a nuclear family or a combination of two generations in one household (patrilocal tendency). In urban areas, mainly as a result of economic difficulties, newlyweds live with the man's parents or, if necessary, the woman's parents. The head of the household is usually the oldest man in the family, although old women are influential in decision making. In rural areas, it is possible for an extended family to live in one compound or house shared by the sons' families and their parents. Women engage in food preparation, child rearing, carpet weaving, and other tasks within the compound, while men take care of the animals and do the physically demanding tasks.

Inheritance. Inheritance is regulated by law; children inherit equally from their parents, although males may inherit the family house if they live with their parents. They then may make arrangements to give some compensation to their sisters.

Kin Groups. Relatives may live nearby in rural areas, but they usually are dispersed in cities. On special occasions such as weddings and funerals, close and distant relatives gather to help with the preparations. It is common for relatives in rural areas to support those in urban areas with agricultural and dairy products, while people in the cities support their rural relatives with goods from the city and by giving them accommodation when they are in city as well as helping them in matters involving the bureaucracy, health care, and children's education.

Socialization

Infant Care. Infant care differs according to location. In rural areas, infants are placed in cradles or beds. They may be carried by the mother or other female family members. In cities, they usually are placed in small beds and are watched by the mother. Parents interact with babies while attending to their daily chores and prefer to keep babies calm and quiet.

Child Rearing and Education. The criteria for judging a child's behavior are gender-dependent. Although children of all ages are expected to be obedient to their parents and older people in general, boys' misbehavior is more likely to be tolerated. Girls are encouraged to help their mothers, stay calm, and have good manners. It is not unusual for genetic makeup and thus a resemblance to the behavior patterns and talents of their parents and close family members to be used to explain children's negative and positive qualities.

Higher Education. Higher education has been important for Azeris both in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. Having higher education makes both boys and girls more attractive as prospective marriage partners. Parents go to great lengths to pay fees for higher education or other informally determined costs associated with admission to schools.

Issues relating to sex and the body usually are not talked about openly in public. Depending on the age of the speaker, some men may refrain from using words such as "pregnant"; if they must use them, they apologize. It is not considered proper for adults to openly mention going to the bathroom; in private homes, people of the same age and gender or children can be asked for directions to the toilet. Women seldom smoke in public or at parties or other gatherings, and an Azeri woman smoking on the street would be looked down on. To show respect for the elderly, it is important not to smoke in front of older people of both genders. Young men and women are circumspect in the way they behave in front of older people. Bodily contact between the same sexes is usual as a part of interaction while talking or in the form of walking arm in arm. Men usually greet each other by shaking hands and also by hugging if they have not seen each other for a while. Depending on the occasion and the degree of closeness, men and women may greet one another by shaking hands or only with words and a nod of the head. In urban settings, it is not unusual for a man to kiss a woman's hand as a sign of reverence. The awareness of space is greater between the sexes; men and women prefer not to stand close to each other in lines or crowded places. However, all these trends depend on age, education, and family background. Activities such as drinking more than a symbolic amount, smoking, and being in male company are associated more with Russian women than with Azeris. Azeri women would be criticized more harshly, since it is accepted that Russians have different values.

Religious Beliefs. Among the total population, 93.4 percent is Muslim (70 percent Shia and 30 percent Sunni). Christians (Russian Orthodox and Armenian Apostolics) make up the second largest group. Other groups exist in small numbers, such as Molokans, Baha'is, and Krishnas. Until recently, Islam was predominantly a cultural system with little organized activity. Funerals were the most persistent religious ritual during the socialist era.

Religious Practitioners. In 1980, the sheikhul-Islam (head of the Muslim board) was appointed. Mullahs were not very active during the Soviet period, since the role of religion and mosques was limited. Even today, mosques are most important for the performance of funeral services. Some female practitioners read passages from the Koran in women's company on those occasions.

Rituals and Holy Places. Ramadan, Ramadan Bayram, and Gurban Bayram (the Feast of Sacrifice) are not widely observed, especially in urban areas. Muharram is the period when there are restrictions on celebrations. Ashure is the day when the killing of the first Shia imam, Huseyin, who is regarded as a martyr, is commemorated by men and boys beating their backs with chains while the people watching them, including women, beat their chests with their fists. This ritual was not introduced until the early 1990s, and it attracts an increasing number of people. People go to the mosque to pray and light candles and also visit the tombs of pir (holy men) to make a wish.

Death and the Afterlife. Although people increasingly follow Islamic tradition, owing to the lack of organized religious education, people's beliefs about the afterlife are not clearly defined. The idea of paradise and hell is prominent, and martyrs are believed to go to heaven. After a death, the first and subsequent four Thursdays as well as the third, seventh, and fortieth days and the one year anniversary are commemorated. When there is too little space, a tent is put up in front of people's homes for the guests. Men and women usually sit in separate rooms, food and tea are served, and the Koran is read.

Medicine and Health Care

Western medicine is very widely used, along with herbal remedies, and people visit psychics ( ekstrasenses ) and healers. The sick may be taken to visit pir to help them recover.

Secular Celebrations

The new year's holiday is celebrated on 1 January, 20 January commemorates the victims killed by Soviet troops in Baku in 1990, 8 March is International Women's Day, and 21–22 March is Novruz (the new year), an old Persian holiday celebrated on the day of the vernal equinox. Novruz is the most distinctive Azeri holiday, accompanied by extensive cleaning and cooking in homes. Most households grow semeni (green wheat seedlings), and children jump over small bonfires; celebrations also are held in public spaces. Other holidays are 9 May, Victory Day (inherited from the Soviet period); 28 May, Day of the Republic; 9 October, Armed Forces Day; 18 October, State Sovereignty Day; 12 November, Constitution Day; 17 November, Day of Renaissance; and 31 December, Day of Solidarity of World Azeris.

The Arts and Humanities

Support for the Arts. State funds during the socialist era provided workshops for painters and other artists. Such funds are now limited, but national and international sponsors encourage artistic activity.

Literature. The book of Dede Korkut and the Zoroastrian Avesta (which date back to earlier centuries but were written down in the fifteenth century) as well as the Köroglu dastan are among the oldest examples of oral literature (dastans are recitations of historical events in a highly ornamented language). Works by poets such as Shirvani, Gancavi, Nasimi, Shah Ismail Savafi, and Fuzuli produced between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries are the most important Persian- and Turkish-language writings. The philosopher and playwriter Mirza Fath Ali Akhunzade (Akhundov), the historical novelist Husein Javid, and the satirist M. A. Sabir all produced works in Azeri in the nineteenth century. Major figures in the twentieth century included Elchin, Yusif Samedoglu, and Anar, and some novelists also wrote in Russian.

Graphic Arts. The tradition of painted miniatures was important in the nineteenth century, while the twentieth century was marked by examples of Soviet social realism and Azeri folklore. Among the widely recognized painters, Sattar Bakhulzade worked mainly with landscapes in a manner reminiscent of "Van Gogh in blue." Tahir Salakhov painted in Western and Soviet styles, and Togrul Narimanbekov made use of figures from traditional Azeri folk tales depicted in very rich colors. Rasim Babayev cultivated his own style of "primitivism" with hidden allegories on the Soviet regime (bright saturated colors, an absence of perspective, and numerous nonhuman characters inspired by folktales and legends).

The State of the Physical and Social Sciences

Universities and institutions of higher education from the Soviet era have been joined by new private universities. The Academy of Sciences has traditionally been the site of basic research in many fields. Social sciences were developed within the Soviet framework, although the directions of study are changing slowly with international involvement. Financial difficulties mean that all research is subject to constraints, but oil-related subjects are given a high priority. State funds are limited, and international funds are obtained by institutions and individual scientists.

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—H ÜLYA D EMIRDIREK

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Avrasya’s Substack

Notes on Azerbaijan: Part I

A small ode to an unsung land..

Introduction

I have to begin by crediting my favorite amateur travel-writer, Matt Lakeman , for establishing the style and tone that inspired this travel essay. I hope that it will not feel shamelessly copied. For those desiring to read about more adventures in some of the roads less traveled by Americans and other westerners, I cannot recommend Lakeman’s blog enough.

This travel essay will be one-part travel log and one part social, political, and ethnological analysis. I spent around three and a half months in Azerbaijan during the fall of 2023. Most of that time was spent living in the capital city of Baku, but I also took excursions to just about every major region of the country, save for the southwestern region of Karabakh, and the exclave of Nakhchivan that is separated by the border with Armenia.

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Some notes on spelling and nomenclature. When I use the term “Azerbaijani”, I am referring to ethnically Turk citizens of Azerbaijan. Evidently some Azerbaijanis just refer to themselves as “Turk”, but for people not from the region this will be incredibly confusing. When I am referring to ethnic minorities or ethnic Azerbaijanis elsewhere, I will try and make that clear. I use “Azerbaijani” instead of “Azeri” because 1) the latter seems to sometimes refer more specifically to people from Iranian Azerbaijan and 2) a very small subsection of Azerbaijani nationalists seem to dislike the word “Azeri” as an Iranian imposition, improperly associating them with the Old Azeri Persian speaking forebears of the region. In most cases you are fine using Azeri, but to be safe I wanted to be particular on this.

In the case there is one, I will default to using the most standard English-language place names for the ease of my mostly-Anglophone audience, and only in the cases that there is not a commonly used English word will I use the standard Azerbaijani names (so Karabakh instead of Qarabağ, and Baku instead of Bakı, etc.).

I have tried to place appropriate “epistemic guideposts” on things I say that were merely purported to me, that I learned from observation, or that I learned from reading sources. This is so you know to what degree you should put trust in any particular claim I make. I am not a professional academic and this won’t read like it, for the present I am just a dilettante with a keyboard and some cool interests.

Elephant in the room time . I was in Azerbaijan for the end of the long-running Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict that is one of the few things many people in the west might know about the country. I had initially planned to do a brief explainer on it here, but since I’m too much of a nerd to cover history with any brevity, I decided to do it more justice in an upcoming Part II: A Short Long History of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Conflict. If you would be especially interested in a deep dive on the history, ethnography, politics, and culture of the Middle East and Caucasus, Part II is for you.

Overview of Azerbaijan

Most of this information is from the CIA World Factbook , with links to elsewhere if it is not.

Capital - Baku

Population - 10,420,515

Land Area - 82,629 sq km (a little smaller than the US State of Maine)

Real GDP - $146.305 billion (2021 est.)

Real GDP Growth Rate - 5.6% (2021 est.)

Real GDP Per Capita - $14,400 (2021 est.)

Median Age - 33.8 years

Life Expectancy - 74.9 years

Human Development Index - 0.745

Total Fertility Rate - 1.993 children per woman

Independence - 28 May, 1918 (from Transcaucasian Federative Democratic Republic/Russian Empire), 18 October, 1991 (from the Soviet Union)

Religion - Muslim 97.3% (predominantly Shia), Christian 2.6%, other <0.1, unaffiliated <0.1 (2020 est.)

Language - Azerbaijani/Azeri/Azerbaijan Turkish (92%).

(Note - Azerbaijan is a very bilingual country, with many people also being fluent in Russian or a regional ethnic language.)

Ethnicity - Azerbaijani 91.6%, Lezgin 2%, Russian 1.3%, Armenian 1.3%, Talysh 1.3%, other 2.4% (2009 est.)

(Note - Azerbaijan recently experienced a mass exodus of the Armenian population in the formerly disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region with the conclusion of the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict. In addition, the age of this census means that the ethnic ratios have likely shifted in the last decade and a half. There are claims that minority numbers are significantly underestimated. I simply do not know how to assess these claims, but I will discuss Azerbaijan’s various minorities later.)

On the Ground in Baku

I would describe Azerbaijan’s culture and “feel” as a perfect blend of Soviet and Middle Eastern (especially Persian and Turkish). When one arrives in downtown Baku, one of the first things to notice is the mixed architectural influence. The more chic locales near the Caspian Sea strive for a belle-epoque Parisian look, mixing wide boulevards for cars with walkable touristy areas with western brands and tourist trap shops underneath some gorgeous neoclassical facades. Some of these buildings are remnants of the days of German businessmen and the Russian Empire, or from Soviet high culture, but I got the feeling that most of the construction was rather new. Downtown Baku also shows many of the touchstones of a modernizing Middle Eastern petrostate, with the enormous glass colossi of the Deniz Mall, Flame Towers, and Port of Baku showcasing a more modernist, futuristic side of the city.

The further you move away from the bougie city center, the more you will encounter cramped alleys and commieblock-style constructions - the sort of dismal grey brutalist apartment blocks you might stereotypically associate with the Soviet Union. In the intermediate Baku neighborhoods of Nasimi, Ağ Şeher, and Yasamal, many older constructions are hidden by modern glass apartment developments. As you move into the more working class neighborhoods further east on the Absheron Peninsula or the northern suburbs like Xırdalan, the more you might feel like the Soviet Union had never ended, with their lines of old Khrushchevka apartments and Ladas parked on the street. I personally lived in an 80s Khrushchevka and found it to be quite charming (aside from the stairwell climb, the enormous door with its rusty lock, and the claustrophobic Soviet elevator that I studiously avoided for fear of getting trapped in a brown-out). I was told by locals that much of the time Soviet constructions are preferred and more expensive compared to modern luxury apartments, because they are seen as safer in the case of fires, earthquakes, and the like.

Baku’s traffic is one of the other things you will quickly notice. It is also one of the things Bakuvians like to bitch about the most. Baku drivers somehow manage to perfectly combine aggression and reactivity, constantly trying to force their way around traffic (sometimes onto sidewalks or shoulders or parking lots) and having to stop for other cars and the odd-pedestrian trying to navigate the deathtrap boulevards. In the many places where there aren’t well-marked traffic crossings or underpasses, you will simply have to wait for a lull in traffic or make firm eye contact with the approaching drivers in each lane as you boldly cross. Crossing the street is a constant balancing act of asserting your dominance, and weighing how likely it is a given driver will assert theirs and choose death for this particular foreigner. That said, these are the rules of the road and people will generally stop for a pedestrian whose purpose is clear.

I can’t imagine having to commute by car in Baku. The metro network in the city is pretty clean and well-maintained, and many stations try to follow the example of the Moscow metro with its ornate decoration, but there are only two main metro lines (really one that splits into two) with a couple of places it branches off. This means that it is usually packed, as from Həzi Aslanov to 28 May stations everyone has to take the same train, and most people continuing would stay on that train all the way to Dərnəgül station.

Most places any visitor would want to see are pretty walkable from the train stations, but there are exceptions, and when you’ve been walking for half an hour and braved three death-trap avenues by shadowing locals, you start to wish there were more stations. I was told by Bakuvians that the Baku metro is the way it is because a lot of the underground space below the city is taken up by oil pipelines and related infrastructure.

Another option for public transportation is the bus, but other than the regular route to and from my place of residence I never bothered to learn the bus routes. I also usually found it more convenient to walk, because buses suffer from the malaise of Baku traffic. Nonetheless, they are clean, and the people very well-behaved by American standards. Both the bus and metro are very cheap options, and you can get a public transport card at any metro station. For a last comment on public transportation, note also that if you are a young man, like myself, you will find that you will rarely be able to sit down on a bus or train. This is because it is socially expected for you to give up your seat to women (of any age) and older folks. I suppose you could also play the stupid foreigner card and keep the seat, but be prepared for some dirty looks.

For taxis, download the Bolt app. Bolt is an Estonian ride-sharing app that is popular in the Caucasus, taking up most of the market share over the likes of Uber and Yandex. It is very cheap and pretty reliable, but be prepared for communications issues if you aren’t at an easily locatable place and you don’t know Russian or Azerbaijani. Avoid the Yango taxis - they have a bad reputation for drivers, including some being drunks.

In Baku, a westerner will find most of the creature comforts they are used to at home. Some things are considerably cheaper than in a western city, especially food and rent, while others cost around the same when converted across currencies, especially coffee and clothing. Many foreign items are only available in the markets in Port of Baku, and for considerably marked-up prices. Most young people in Baku buy their clothing second hand off of a Turkish app called Trendyol that blew up during COVID, since clothing stores are so expensive. Shipping internationally is expensive and generally you would have to ship to a drop-off point rather than having a personal apartment mailbox.

Brown-outs happen in Baku, but are not frequent. The water is pumped in from the Caucasus into a reservoir outside the city, but is not potable despite it not being from the (filthy) Caspian Sea. People either have water purifiers or buy enormous jugs of purified water. Something I noticed in my apartment block is that some neighbors would leave out water containers to be filled by other neighbors who had water purifiers, implying that their possession was not universal but also showing the still-present communal qualities of Soviet apartment blocks.

As far as the areas outside of Baku go, they all have their own local flavors. Many of them were shaped by various local ethnic groups, which we will discuss in more depth later. During the Soviet period, most everywhere in the countryside was organized as a kolkhoz collective farm. Nonetheless many of the villages in the mountains feel decidedly ancient, with barely any Soviet touches, while many of the larger cities like Ganja look very Soviet. Sumgait in particular was once the picture of a Soviet cosmopolitan workers’ city (if also a polluted, deracinated industrial zone, whose economic basis disappeared in the flames of ethnic conflict and logistical collapse). Some like Quba are very intermediate, with medieval or Safavid era structures mixed with Soviet monuments.

For travel between cities, your best option is probably taking the bus from the bus station in Baku near the 20 Yanvar metro station. To get out to smaller towns, though, you will need a driver. Tour groups exist to a lot of the desirable-to-visit towns in the countryside, which I would recommend looking into. You can also find personal drivers or guides willing to take you into the country, if you can get a contact. The train from Baku isn’t really useful for getting around the country, it is mostly for freight rather than passengers. I think it can get you to Ganja and Lankaran, but lacks the versatility of other options.

The old, inner city of Baku, İçerişeher , is a beautiful and quaint place that showcases some of what Baku used to be, as well as providing some revealing pictures of the ways it has changed. In the eastern bloc, İçerişeher was famously showcased in the 1969 Leonid Gaidai comedy movie The Diamond Arm , where a hapless Russian tourist is accidentally given a cast containing valuable diamonds by some smugglers operating from an İçerişeher pharmacy. In the film, the (even-then touristy) district looks considerably dustier and run-down, with prostitutes and groups of dirtily-clad children running about the streets. Much of this was exaggerated by the movie, of course, whose setting was not explicitly Baku but some vague eastern city the tourist was traveling to, and I doubt it had poverty at the level portrayed by the film, but nonetheless the simple look of the streets has changed significantly.

İçerişeher today is manicured cobblestones and rows of parked Mercedes (with some very fashionable rugs sometimes thrown over to keep the interior cooled), and sizeable groups of Russian and South Asian tourists being carefully led by their guides up the Maiden Tower and about the porticoes of the Shirvanshah Palace. The famous pharmacy from The Diamond Arm is now a cafe, and street merchants near the (rebuilt in the 20th century) gates will heckle you to take pictures wearing Caucasus shepherds’ hats or Soviet ushankas, or to buy pricey oriental textiles.

All this said, İçerişeher was my favorite place in Baku. It still gave me a calm, authentic vibe when I went to sit there at night watching the bay and hearing the call to prayer ring from its antique mosques, when I escaped the tourists’ haunts by walking around the maze of alleys petting cats and sitting in gardens as I felt the cool winds blow off the Caspian, and while sipping tea and eating baklava watching the sun set on the walls. However much it might try and exploit and commercialize its oriental mystique, I still found that İçerişeher was a meeting point for past and future. Its ancient monuments and modern hotels demonstrate Azerbaijan’s growing sense of self-esteem in holding the symbolic connections to an idealized past, as well as a magnet for the world outside to find something of worthwhile interest in it.

The main monuments in İçerişeher require tickets that can be bought around the neighborhood at kiosks. Prices are significantly higher for foreigners.

The Baku Maiden Tower is old, but no one knows exactly how old, with some legends painting it as a remnant of a Sassanid-era Zoroastrian shrine, or a medieval Shirvanshah fortification. The other monuments include caravanserais and the Shirvanshah Palace , which has gorgeous grounds and a small museum, and a cute miniature book museum. There is also supposedly a section of castle at the bottom of the bay in front of the district, but I didn’t bring my snorkling gear and the Caspian Sea south of the Absheron is an ecological disaster zone.

I was also told the still-running ancient hamam, or Turkish bath, in İçerişeher was very high quality. Hamams function kind of like spas in the west but with hot and cold rooms and with a big Turkish guy who beats the crap out of your back instead of a masseuse. I was too chicken to go, unfortunately.

Post-Soviet Politics of Azerbaijan

I will cover some of this in more detail in Part II, but I will quickly run down the political situation in Azerbaijan post-independence here. Most of the information here comes from Thomas de Waal’s excellent book Black Garden .

Meet the Aliyevs

Azerbaijan is in many ways a typical post-Soviet autocracy, with the heart of politics being found in the influence of the Aliyev family and their courtiers. I do not think that it is flippant to describe Azerbaijan’s presidency as dynastic. Prior to independence from the Soviet Union, most of the Azerbaijani state apparatus was already in the formal or informal control of Heydar Aliyev , who would become the man to shape its post-independence future. During the late USSR, Heydar was a KGB major general who developed some smart connections and ended up appointed as First Secretary of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan, later serving as the only Azerbaijani member of the Politburo throughout the 80s. After falling afoul of Gorbachev during the latter’s perestroika and anti-corruption campaigns, Heydar was removed from the Politburo in 1987 on alleged health reasons. Heydar’s informal connections in Azerbaijan, which he had left in the hands of his capable lieutenant Abdurrahman Vezirov when he left for Moscow, began to find themselves challenged by nationalist independence activists and the conflict with the Armenians.

Heydar Aliyev returned to Azerbaijan in 1990, where he soon established a fiefdom for himself in his native Nakhchivan to hole up for the coming storm. The Baku governments of Gorbachev-implant Ayaz Mutallibov , and then pan-Turkic nationalist and dissident ideologue Abulfaz Elchibey , successively foundered under the conditions of complete systemic collapse and military defeat that faced Azerbaijan in the early ‘90s, while the USSR crumbled around them and the Armenians invaded Karabakh. In 1993, Elchibey was overthrown in a coup after he botched the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict and failed to tame separatism, corruption, and the economy. Afterward, the military turned to Heydar Aliyev as the logical choice to take over the reigns of the state.

Aliyev Sr. began stabilizing Azerbaijan’s situation by purging Elchibey’s people from the government and military, winning an election against a couple nobodies, admitting defeat to the Armenians and signing a ceasefire in 1994, and surviving an attempted counter-coup in 1995. Aliyev began playing a diplomatic game of getting all the major world powers to recognize de jure Azerbaijani suzerainty over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh, with conditions to be worked out…eventually. This would end up paying dividends to the Azerbaijanis, as it permitted them to play the long game on the disputed territories.

On the home front, Aliyev put together a commission that wrote a new constitution that solidified the country as a unitary presidential state with a parliament and judiciary he could control. This established the legitimacy of his new regime, after which he could tackle corruption and deal with the huge refugee influx coming off the conflict by establishing state subsidies for all Azerbaijanis from the occupied territories. Internationally, he maintained warm relations with both Russia and the United States, establishing a route for oil export through the Russian port of Novorossiysk that allowed him to finally start bringing in some revenue. Heydar Aliyev died in office in 2003, passing the reigns off to his son, Ilham Aliyev, who ran in the elections for that year.

Ilham’s first election was seen by outside observers as full of irregularities , including ballot-stuffing, arresting the opposition, controlling the media and obstructing election monitors, all the good stuff. He won in a landslide, of course. This is all pretty predictive of how Azerbaijani elections would continue to go over the next twenty years, just with less required coercion as Ilham’s presidency became a simple fact of life. Ilham just won another election this year by another landslide margin.

I also would be remiss if I did not point out that Ilham really doesn’t pull off the militaristic irridentist dictator look. While he is tall and has the beefy Caucasus wrestler build, he has a heavy slouch, has low energy in his speeches, and overall projects his personality like a limp noodle. Definitely a backroom micromanaging workhorse kind of autocrat, rather than flairy African strongman or passionate interwar European irridentist. Please just watch him give this one rousing speech attempting to exult in his Karabakh victory - he is truly trying. Compare this to a high-energy post-Soviet leader like Lukashenko …

He doesn’t need to be that kind of leader, though. Ilham is a smart man - effectively the scion of Soviet nobility, he received a doctorate of history and taught at Moscow State Institute of International Relations , which is something of the IR school of Russia’s Grand Ecole while also serving as their equivalent of the Foreign Service Institute. He got the benefit of an influx of western expertise and the first generation of newly foreign educated Azerbaijanis to run his system, permitting him to dispense with many of the old Soviet apparatchiks. I would highly recommend this Palladium article which goes more into detail on Ilham’s role in creating today’s Azerbaijan.

Under his dad, Ilham served as vice-president of the state oil company SOCAR and brokered the deal with the western oil companies that brought them, with their markets and expertise, into the Azerbaijani oil industry He later also secured the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline through Georgia and Turkey, which permitted significantly higher exports of Azerbaijani fuel to global markets. Ilham used the growing oil wealth to create a massive international slush fund and engage in “ caviar diplomacy ” outreach efforts to secure international recognition for Azerbaijan’s claims on Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as isolating the Armenians. Aliyev critically managed to butter up the United States in the wake of 9/11 by making Azerbaijan indispensible to the American logistics network in Afghanistan. He secured significant arms deals with Turkey and Israel . The latter is also a close intelligence partner and market for oil, making Azerbaijan unique among majority-Muslim countries in its coziness with the Israelis. All of this culminated in an increase of tensions with the Armenians over the 2010s and finally the long-awaited Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020, which ended indisputably in an Azerbaijani victory, and then the final reclamation of the whole region in 2023.

Ilham is also known for…taking care of his friends. He has cultivated a small group of oligarchic families who control large portions of the economy and receive a nice cut of the country’s oil wealth, by his graces. Some of the most famous examples include the Pashayevs , the family of his wife Mehriban, who dominate the country’s banking industry with the help of the state’s antitrust authorities, as well as the family of Ziya Mammadov , who used his position as Minister of Transportation to rack up massive construction contracts for his companies. Much of the proceeds from these contracts ended up in the Azerbaijan Laundromat corruption scandal that served as an important arm of the country’s caviar diplomacy initiatives.

One fascinating story I heard about while in Azerbaijan was that of Trump Tower Baku . Seemingly, Donald Trump’s construction company may have failed to do its due diligence in choosing local construction partners, one of Ziya Mammadov’s companies, and ended up lending their brand to a luxury hotel in a very un-luxurious area of Baku and from which the money invested may have been embezzled and gone into the hands of Iranian intelligence assets. Oops. I tried to find the location of the Trump Tower site as recorded on Google, but when I got there I discovered only a fish restaurant and some apartments, and ended up getting lost in Narimanov.

Ilham and Mehriban have three children - Leyla, Arzu, and Heydar. Leyla and Arzu jointly own the telecom Azerfon, as well as their grandfather’s holding company PASHA Holding, and a number of Panamanian offshore companies. They are both married to prominent Azerbaijani/Russian socialites of oligarchic families, and also own tens of millions of dollars in property in Dubai and Moscow.

Heydar Jr. is remarkable in that he may be the heir apparent (with the constitution being amended in 2016 to remove the age requirements for the presidency to make way), while also having comparatively far less media spotlight than his sisters. He also owns millions of dollars worth of property , but information on him personally seems to be rather sparse - his mother soft launched his wedding on Instagram to some mysterious unnamed bride, the identity of which is assuredly the subject of much Azerbaijani gossip that I am not particularly privy to. What rumors I’ve been able to find on the Azerbaijani internet speculate about the wife being Ukrainian, and also the possibility of Heydar Jr. being kept out of the public eye because of some kind of cognitive impairment.

I think the picture we get of Ilham Aliyev is ultimately that of a pragmatic Machiavellian prince. I heard it said on one occasion that he governs the country like a CEO - if Aliyev is a CEO, he is a very corrupt one who would have had a lot of problems with the SEC. He might also be a war criminal because of the 2022-23 Karabakh blockade and ultimate departure of over 100,000 Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh. But I get the analogy. He is unideological, certainly not like Elchibey was, but he tactically deploys nationalism to drum up popular support, while ensuring the loyalty of Azerbaijan’s elite through personal patronage. The return of Karabakh is a wave he will ride for years. He cuts a very fine line in international diplomacy by making deals with whomever he needs to fend off threats like Iran, without any permanent commitments being made to anyone save perhaps Turkey . He is a hard man, but you can’t say he doesn’t know how to distribute the bread to his advantage. I expect to see him remain in power in Azerbaijan for years to come.

The Personality Cult of Heydar Aliyev

Despite the current long-lasting presidency of Ilham, there is something of a personality cult around Heydar Aliyev as the man who saved the nation in the 1990s. I don’t know if it is a conscious imitation of Ataturk in Turkey, but I feel like there are some similar notes and I wonder if the Ataturk cult of personality felt as weird in, say, the 1960s. Heydar’s image was everywhere in Azerbaijan - you saw a bust to him in every office building and school, half the public buildings in the country seemed to be named after him, and 2023 was declared the “Heydar Aliyev Year” by his son Ilham to celebrate Heydar’s 100th birthday. Enjoy a small selection of Heydar-ography that I have collected over my months in Azerbaijan:

I don’t want to put too fine of a point on this, but Heydar is important to the state mythology of Azerbaijan. I think it was also prudent of Ilham to make his father the foundational figure of the Azerbaijani state. It helps anchor his regime in place and time, helps the country build a national myth, and dead men don’t make mistakes. There’s also the matter that Ilham himself cuts a poor figure for being the object of a personality cult.

Nationalism, the War, Irridentism, and the Cult of the Martyrs

On September 19, 2023, the news was suddenly all abuzz about a jeep being blown up by a mine along the Nagorno-Karabakh line of contact. This kind of crap happened there every week since the ceasefire in 2020, with sporadic gunfire or the odd shelling or mine detonation, but all of a sudden the Azerbaijani government and media was making a big ruckus about this jeep. It was self-evidently a seized casus belli for an operation that had likely been in the planning for quite a while. Azerbaijani forces began saturating the remaining territory of the Artsakh Republic/Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast with artillery and advancing their infantry. The Karabakh Armenians, cut off by the Yerevan government of Nikol Pashinyan after the war in 2020 ended in an Armenian defeat, were forced to sue for peace. The terms were the complete surrender of arms and the total dissolution of the Republic’s government. The so-called Third Nagorno-Karabakh War barely lasted two days.

It is estimated that 800,000 Azerbaijanis were evicted from the territory occupied by the Armenians after a cycle of brutal and mutual pogroms and ethnic cleansings in the First Nagorno-Karabakh War of 1988-1994, which had ended in an Armenian victory. Most of those refugees or “Internally Displaced Persons” (IDPs - a term for refugees who did not take shelter in the borders of a foreign state) had ended up in Baku, where vast refugee camps formed on the periphery in the ‘90s. I met several IDPs in my time in Baku, most now moved on into big city professional life. Some refugees got apartments subsidized by the government, some of these claimed from those of Armenian families who had been killed or fled in the 1990 Baku Pogrom. I will delve more into detail on all of this in Part II.

All of this is to say that the conflict was omnipresent in Azerbaijan. The Nagorno-Karabakh War is the national trauma. And the Azerbaijanis, much like their Turkish cousins next door, are a nationalistic people in the best of times. Every neighborhood or village in the country displays the pictures of their şehidler , or “martyrs” - veterans who had given their lives in the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict. I believe that civilian casualties are also counted as şehid . Localities see the number of şehidler they produce as a matter of pride - in Ganja, I saw thousands of memorials lining the main boulevard as I came in. I am told Sumgait has something similar.

Nothing tops the Şehidler Xiyabanı , or Alley of the Martyrs, though. This is the national cemetery, comparable to Arlington Cemetery in the United States. There are rows and rows of Azerbaijani officers and war heroes, as well as some civilians, covered in flowers in the shadow of the Flame Towers. Funeral custom in this part of the world is to put a portrait of the dead on all gravestones, meaning their faces are all staring at you while you walk by. At the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the President of Azerbaijan also likes to give speeches to stand with the martyrs behind him when trying to drum up patriotism. School groups frequently visit to lay flowers at the graves, often with the children wearing military uniforms.

The presence of the war pervaded in other ways, too. Many Azerbaijanis insist that this was not an ethnic conflict, but merely a legal and territorial dispute over the status of an autonomous province in the hands of rebels. The general attitude towards Armenians hinted somewhat otherwise. Antipathy to Armenians was omnipresent - Baku once had a large and thriving Armenian community, but most of their monuments had been erased. The only things left were the abandoned church in the Fountain Square, now denuded of all Christian imagery, as well as some now-defaced cemeteries noted by Thomas de Waal in Black Garden . In 1990, the Baku Pogrom took place, during which dozens of Armenians were killed and the vast majority fled into exile. Local ethnographic work always contained a serious hard line about the Armenians as foreign to Azerbaijan. People were distrustful of European countries in understanding the conflict, assuming that majority Christian states would always side with their brethren and that Azerbaijan could only trust countries like Pakistan and Turkey who supported it for identitarian reasons.

The symbolism of Karabakh is everywhere, too. Maps of the lost territory are omnipresent, from carpets to construction tarps. An orchid called called the xarıbülbül , which only grows in the historically Azerbaijani city of Shusha in Karabakh, became a symbol of the martyrs and soldiers who had fought to retake the city in 2020, and sits on the corner of most newscasts as well as on items from advertisements to lapel pins to tissue boxes.

After the Artsakh Armenians surrendered, the Azerbaijani military began a slow march towards the regional capital of Stepanakert, which the Azerbaijanis know as Khankendi. During this march, a panic swelled through the Armenian population while the Azerbaijanis conveniently reopened the Lachin Corridor that gave access to Armenia. A mass exodus of 100,000 people ensued, for fear of retribution from the Azerbaijanis. The official government line was that all Karabakh Armenians would receive equal citizenship under the law. In the light of the bloodshed of the ‘90s, the long-running cyclic violence, and general atmosphere of hatred, I think that the flight of the Karabakh Armenians was a reasonable response to a credible fear of violence from the Azerbaijanis. I do not think the assurances of safety from the Azerbaijani government were credible - the Armenians of Sumgait and Baku had full legal equality as well, which did not save them when the mobs came and the police looked away. After all I’ve seen and heard, if I was an Armenian, I at least would never be able to feel safe in Azerbaijan. For better or worse, the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict is finally over.

I was also in the country for Victory Day, which in Azerbaijan is no longer celebrated over Soviet victory in WWII. It is now in honor of the Karabakh Conflict and was moved to the 8th of November - two days before the ceasefire that ended the second war in 2020 was concluded, so as not to conflict with the anniversary of the death of Ataturk in Turkey (something that points to the close spiritual relationship shared by the two countries). I would argue that the Cult of the Martyrs of Karabakh in Azerbaijan has largely replaced the Soviet Victory Cult you still see in places like Russia or parts of Central Asia.

The Victory Day parade for 2023 took place in recently-retaken Khankendi, so unfortunately I was unable to go. Nonetheless there were pretty vibrant celebrations in Baku as well. I took a stroll along the Seaside Park where they had massive screens up showing the parade and festivities in Khankendi, while all the men who had completed their mandatory military service were out wearing their old uniforms, and people draped themselves in Azerbaijani (and Turkish) flags while watching the fireworks kick off. Some old timers were out drinking with their units reminiscing on the first war, back in the ‘90s.

As a last note - Azerbaijanis and Turks are stridently nationalistic peoples, and have a curious relationship to each other. Azerbaijani flags lined the streets in Baku, and I would say that around half the time they were twinned with Turkish flags. Heydar Aliyev came up with this formulation of relations between the two countries of “One Nation, Two States” and people take this very seriously in Azerbaijan. The Turkish embassy is huge, Turkey’s president Erdoğan visited for Victory Day in 2020 while Turkish military units joined the parade, many Azerbaijanis have work or family ties in Istanbul, they have a bilateral military alliance…it is kind of hard to understate how close Azerbaijan and Turkey are. I would compare the relationship to Russia and Belarus.

Political Culture in Azerbaijan

Azerbaijan has elections, a legislature, a judiciary, all that good stuff, but most of it is pretty centrally controlled by the political establishment. Civil Society in Azerbaijan is functionally nonexistent . Nonetheless, I think Aliyev has some amount of fear of a Color Revolution like Ukraine’s Euromaidan. Towards the end of my time in Azerbaijan, Samantha Power had made the government angry after questioning the conduct of the Azerbaijani military in the war, after which the government began putting pressure on USAID and embassy programs in the country while cracking down on journalists. I think part of this also may have been in preparation for the snap elections Aliyev had called.

Street corruption isn’t really a thing in Azerbaijan, and neither is street crime. I never had to pay a bribe in the country, and had heard no stories of other people having to. Police are very common, and every street is under surveillance - actually, most businesses, schools, and office buildings have cameras as well. The police seem perhaps a little more personable than in the US - I heard a story from a friend about their observations of a Baku traffic stop, which involved the guy getting out of his car and an hour long conversation ensuing with the cop that ended in them hugging it out and them both driving off with no tickets involved. On one corner I passed frequently there was always a tough-looking policeman carrying a submachine gun, who nonetheless one day I observed picking flowers in the bushes to give to a little girl. It was an odd vibe.

Every expat I spoke to about it also reported how remarkably safe they felt on the streets of Baku - some of this from people who had been in dozens of countries. Bakuvians all pretty much completely dismissed the threat of street crimes in the country. Police are pretty omnipresent, and fights are taken care of very quickly. To my knowledge, owning guns and carrying knives are illegal, and in a country as small as Azerbaijan that is probably pretty enforceable. Before going into a train station or government building, all bags have to go through an x-ray like you would see in airport security in the US. I don’t know if it’s Japan-level “leave your bag on a bench and return to find it the next day” level of social trust, but the chances of you getting mugged are very low. Through street violence is rare, domestic violence seems much more likely to be frequent and also harder to go to the law for. Capital punishment isn’t used in Azerbaijan, but I got the impression that incarcerations are frequent and harsh. Prison radicalization seems to be a problem in Azerbaijan - I suppose that will happen when you throw all the radical mullahs in with the convicts…

Drugs are very, very illegal in Azerbaijan. Nonetheless, the Baku metro stations have a bunch of anti-drug ads, which implies that it is an extant problem. Drug addiction and homelessness is rarely visible on the streets (I saw one man visibly strung out on the subway, and later saw him again passed out by the Philharmonie about 20 minutes later - the police were on it quick). I think it can be presumed that most such people are incarcerated. I smelled marijuana once at a semi-isolated restaurant in a town south of Baku on the Caspian, but on no other instance. If you do ever smell drugs, immediately start moving in the opposite direction because the police can ring you in for being nearby as well.

While street-level corruption may not be much of a thing, Azerbaijan is infamous for its high level corruption. I have already gestured about the power of Aliyev’s oligarch allies, and while you may never have to pay a bribe to a policeman or bureaucrat on the daily, my instinct was that if you actually found yourself in the legal system that could change remarkably quickly. I also took it that it is not easy to succeed in business beyond owning a small corner shop if you do not have the right friends and butter up the right officials.

Azerbaijan’s economy is very oil dependent, and has been for a very long time - oil and natural gas made up around 60% of the government budget and 90% of export revenue as of 2021. This means the Azerbaijani economy is very vulnerable to shifts in global commodity prices, and also that it is vulnerable to the resource curse wherein a country remains impoverished because its state infrastructure becomes focused around exploiting resources to the detriment of other parts of the economy. Since Azerbaijan’s oil is in oligarchic possession, this means a lot of the oil wealth remains in the hands of the rich and foreign companies, and out of the hands of working-class Azerbaijanis.

I was listening to gossip from some of the British oil expats in Baku, and learned that Azerbaijan is pushing localization policies on the UK oil companies. Basically they were saying that they were having to train their own replacements, who would be native Azerbaijanis, and that they would be leaving in a year or two. In any case, it seems the government is cognizant about the issues of the distribution of the windfall from the country’s oil industry. There has also been some noise made about the necessity of economic diversification in the country. Interestingly, Azerbaijan is hosting the COP29 climate conference this year, which struck me as either wildly hypocritical, purely diplomatic, or a sign of the necessity of change in the way energy and economics works in Azerbaijan. Maybe some of each.

Young people in Baku seemed to be pessimistic, overall. Many of the ones I talked to wanted to move to Germany, or America, or maybe Turkey or Russia if their ambitions were less high (though these countries also have pretty abysmal opportunities for zoomers these days). They often dislike the Aliyev regime because it doesn’t provide much in the way of economic opportunity and saps away most of the oil wealth for pensioners and corrupt oligarchs, while the young receive basically nothing. Meanwhile, the job market in Baku isn’t terrific. Unskilled labor costs are very low because of how glutted the market for labor supply is. I noticed a ridiculous amount of beauticians in particular, given the lack of much else to do and women in Baku desiring their services so much. Many pretty well-degreed people (by the country’s standards) end up stuck in the service economy.

This mostly seemed to manifest in an apolitical cynicism and a desire to leave. Political dissent is basically a pointless endeavor there, Aliyev has support where it counts and I won’t even bother litanizing the times that the government has suppressed opposition - just go google “Azerbaijan arrested journalist” or “Azerbaijan arrested dissident” and you will get a picture. There is an opposition but it has to toe a very fine line or find itself being suppressed. Elections are obviously shams. For disaffected people, there’s a depressive feeling that change isn’t going to be coming any time soon and they will just have to live with the hand they’ve been dealt or move.

Azerbaijanis seemed pretty mixed on the Soviet legacy, all things considered. Some of the older folks certainly exhibited some more “ sovok ” tendencies, but it was not as strong as you might find in Belarus, Russia, or Kyrgyzstan. When I asked one older person whether things were better back then, I got a shrug, and some discussion on how the Soviets took better care of poor people overall but there was more wealth in the country all-around and more freedom. With Heydar Aliyev in charge so soon after independence, whose influence had been the guiding hand of Azerbaijan through most of living memory, I’d imagine for many people Aliyev’s return felt like a return to normalcy, coming with a feel of continuity and a sense of “the more things change, the more they stay the same”. The touch of Soviet culture and politics runs deep in Azerbaijani society, but people don’t seem to look back on the USSR with much in the way of explicit nostalgia. Most of the old Victory Cult monuments over the Great Patriotic War have been repurposed around the Cult of the Karabakh Martyrs, with many renamings and alterations of monuments.

Older folks also tended to be apolitical, but generally more positively disposed to the regime. In one case, I was told “I hope you enjoy Baku - it wasn’t always like this…”. I presume this was referring to the modernized neighborhoods and luxury goods and services, with a hint of undertone about the really dark things that happened there at the close of the Soviet Union. I think most of those who were of age during the 1990s are appreciative of the stability brought to the country by the Aliyev regime, as well as their handling of the Karabakh issue and the increasing outward signs of development. They tended to not talk about domestic politics much, instead preferring to project a lot of that energy into talking about foreign affairs and the Armenians.

Speaking of which, the future of the Armenia-Azerbaijan question is still very much open. Now that Karabakh is settled, Aliyev seems to be pushing on the Zangezur corridor to link Nakhchivan with the rest of Azerbaijani territory by land. There has already been some fighting that is a bad portent for the future, since Azerbaijani troops violated Armenia’s internationally recognized territory in 2021. Nikol Pashinyan, the pro-western Armenian president, has basically reacted by being a wet noodle for the Turks and Azerbaijanis and capitulating on whatever he can, lacking firm support from Moscow or elsewhere to stand on.

There have been ongoing talks about giving Azerbaijan land access through Syunik/Zangezur, or to permit land access to Nakhchivan through Iran. The Azerbaijanis I spoke with seemed to be happy that the conflict was over and didn’t favor a reopening of war with Armenia. This one would also look a lot different globally considering Syunik is internationally recognized as part of Armenia. The time of more or less inviolable international borders may be coming to an end, however…we’ll see. At least in the short term, it looks to me like Aliyev can get what he wants in terms of securing Nakhchivan’s logistics through a combination of bluster and negotiation. Hopefully an agreement will be reached and the two countries can start to consider what a normal relationship will look like in the future.

Azerbaijanis, their Culture, their Social Norms

Azerbaijan is, at one time, both a very secular and very conservative country. Much like many of the other majority Muslim areas that were formerly part of the Soviet Union, religious practice is seen largely as a private thing in Azerbaijan. Laicite is strong, proselytism is illegal. Nonetheless, most people profess Shia Islam, and cultural norms are heavily influenced by it.

Despite there being legal gender equality, many places in Azerbaijan have a kind of soft gender segregation. The best illustration of this is in the concept of the çay evi or çayhane - tea houses. To a western ear, a tea house might sound like a vaguely effeminate or archaic environment for old ladies to tastefully discuss gossip. I assure you that in the Middle East it is nothing of the kind. The çay evi is like the pub, there is one on nearly every street, and it is a place for the boys to go hang out, smoke, play tavla or dominos, and sip on tea and eat candy bars. Some even have video game systems you can pay to play, and have what might be considered e-sports tournaments. It is actually a remarkably relaxed environment, and interesting considering that in the US it is hard to find a place to hang out after around 9:00 that isn’t a bar. Perhaps another part of the appeal is that women basically aren’t permitted in them - to my knowledge, there is no law saying this, it would simply be a break of social protocol.

A lot of the businesses like cafes and restaurants also have a soft gender coding, but not nearly so clear or strong as at a çay evi . Sometimes coffee shops and cafes will cater to a more female clientele, or there will be two restaurants of very similar type right across the street from each other that have more male or female customer bases. This is something you will just have to “vibe” when you get there, and consider where gets you weird looks and where doesn’t. Gender-coded businesses are a thing in the US too, of course, but not ones where the clientele is entirely men older than 40 who will give rude glares if you have a woman at your table, as well as nearby cafes to meet the female market.

If you look at groups of grade-school and university-aged students, it is remarkable how they all seem to cling to mono-gendered cliques and almost form a straight line across a courtyard between them, in a way evincing much more than the easily recognizable nerves of adolescence. Friendships between single men and women are also less common than in the west, both from observation and from what was attested to me. I was told by some women I knew that Azerbaijani men will almost always make a pass at them after a first meeting out of pride, but if rebuffed in the right way could become platonic friends.

I would say that roughly a quarter of Azerbaijani women regularly wear headscarves outside of the mosque. Most people are generally lax in their prayers, and the call to prayer cannot be heard or is difficult to hear in much of the city. Unmarried women generally live with their parents, and often have strict curfews or might be expected to be accompanied by a male family member if they are out late. Alcohol is legal in Azerbaijan and highly available (vodka is absurdly cheap), and the streets have a constant scent of tobacco smoke from the qaqalar chilling with their bros smoking on the street. Use of both alcohol and tobacco is seen as a marker of promiscuity in women, however, and so at least publicly it is usually only consumed by men. At one private dinner I went to, I found myself doing shots of straight vodka in the Russian style (with a long toast before every shot, Caucasus-style…) with all the men of the family on one side of a long dinner table, while the women and children clustered on the opposite end of the table consuming more innocent drinks and having a separate conversation.

Arranged marriages are still basically regular in Azerbaijan, though they are subtler than you might think from stereotypes Americans have about them in e.g. India. To be unmarried is a sign of being defective the more you age, with concern starting to show after around age 25. Usually in your upper 20s if you have not found a spouse yet, your family members will start intervening to find you one. When you meet a married woman in Azerbaijan, usually her first question after “what’s your name?” and “where are you from?” is “are you married?”, after which she may start gesturing about a niece or cousin you ought to meet...on one occasion, I was asked if I would convert to Islam to marry an Azerbaijani woman in what I took to be a not-entirely hypothetical question. The first meeting between two older women might include an exchange of information about single male and female relatives for consultation among the Azerbaijani grandmother network. For a man with male friends, they may offer to set you up with their friends’ sisters or female friends, but very rarely a female family member of their own.

I was told that bride kidnapping ( qız qaçırmaq ) is still a thing in parts of the countryside, but also that in actuality it is mostly symbolic and really looks a lot more like what we would call elopement. In these cases it is more a staged situation where the bride is “in on it” and has agreed to a marriage, and the kidnapping is acted out for traditional or financial reasons. In any case, it seems to have been declared illegal under Azerbaijani law, which implies that it is not seen as an entirely innocent practice.

I’m still not entirely sure how most courtships (and they are usually courtships, casual dating still seems to be frequently frowned upon) in Azerbaijan come about, considering that I did not do any dating while in the country to know firsthand and there is so much social distance between men and women. I guess from an introduction through this second-hand relationship networking thing that goes on? In any case, life finds a way, and virtually every park bench in the country during warm weather is occupied by a canoodling teenage couple, presumably trying to liaise outside the eyes of their overzealous relatives. A courtship in Azerbaijan usually is pretty short by most American standards, with about three or four months going by before the girl’s male relatives start coming by and making progressively less subtle gestures about putting a ring on it. Cohabitation is basically unheard of.

Azerbaijani women tend to be very well-done up. From what I understand, going out without a coat of makeup is seen as a sign of sloppiness and liable to get a lady some mean glares from the xanımlar on the street. They also tend to be well-dressed, usually with the shoulders covered. Norms for clothing are less conservative in the bougie parts of Baku, as these areas are more western in all respects. This includes the practical non-existence of the soft gender segregation for most establishments there.

Women can be seen in full face veils in Azerbaijan, but I have been told that these are more often foreigners from the Gulf or Iran or the Subcontinent visiting with their husbands. One of the most jarring things I saw was a man wearing a ratty t-shirt and jeans next to his wife, who was completely covered head-to-toe in a niqab - they looked possibly to be from Pakistan.

I was told before coming to Azerbaijan that women tended to only wear heeled shoes, but I think this was a changing norm, as sneakers were worn with pretty much anything. I never saw women wearing athleisure, and gender-segregated gyms are very common - this time, for the women’s convenience. Women often wore beautiful scarves that variously served to keep them warm, to be a headscarf if they were to enter a mosque or church, and simply as a fashion statement.

Baku women have something of a reputation for being mean. I personally only encountered this when a barista laughed at some of my early attempts at Azerbaijani. Some of the western women I knew reported that some of the female solidarity they were accustomed to in the west did not exist to the same level in Azerbaijan, and that women in Baku had a habit of viciously tearing each other down beyond the standard limits of western intrasexual competition. I heard some young Azerbaijani women in Baku who had experienced life elsewhere complain of this as well.

One thing Azerbaijanis like to remark on is that the first Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, which was briefly independent from 1918-1920, was the first majority Muslim country with constitutional democracy and legal equality for women, and that it also gave women the right to vote before the United States did. I find that countries in which women’s rights (as well as other forms of civil rights) were instituted by the decree of a modernizing regime, as opposed to by civil agitation, tend to have a very different way of operationalizing those rights and baking them into the social fabric. The activist energy isn’t nearly so constant - certainly in part because activist energy in general will not do you any favors with the authorities.

Men in Azerbaijan tend to wear all neutral colors (usually black, grey, or blue), with jeans or slacks. One individual I knew from Turkey liked to call the groups of Azerbaijani men who sat around talking on the street “penguins” for their clothing, which was generally pretty on the nose. Their hair is always short, often-times with the stereotypical Middle-Eastern/South Asian dude fade and sweepback. While beards are common enough, they are short and well-trimmed so as not to make you look like a hyper-religious hodja. Older men love their mustaches. There was one older Azerbaijani dude I knew who, whenever he would see me, would interrogate me as to when I intended to get a haircut. Usually letting my hair grow out a little bit, and not wanting to have to explain how to cut my hair to a barber in a way that would not have me come out looking like Hasan Piker, I had been neglecting this. This is evidently a cardinal mistake in Azerbaijan.

Azerbros also tend to use pretty copious amounts of cologne, which mixes in with the smell of the cigarette smoke throughout the day. On that note, this is a phenomenon - on every street and most porches, you can see groups of Azerbaijani men just chilling, having a smoke and shooting the shit, at all hours of the day. I don’t know if they just don’t work? The word for “bro” in Azerbaijani is qaqa , pronounced “gaga”, which is supposedly a corruption of the word for brother through some really lazy enunciation ( qardaş→qahdagh→ qaqa ). The Russian brat might also be used.

Women also frequently seemed to be more educated than men were. I encountered numerous anecdotes of well-degreed women who worked as engineers or bureaucrats or librarians or what have you that also did the traditional housewife stuff on the homefront, while the husband worked as a taxi driver or did Bolt food deliveries or chilled with his qaqalar smoking at the çay evi all day.

Traditional clothing in Azerbaijan is very beautiful. Today it is most commonly worn in traditional weddings, in which the bride wears a red sash to symbolize her virginity (something that is supposedly becoming controversial in some feminist circles, as the norms around pre-marital sex have started to shift?), and the bridesmaids and groomsmen generally wear versions of the traditional garb. I unfortunately did not have the opportunity to go to an Azerbaijani wedding while I was there, but I hear that they are quite the blast where the family rents out a giant ballroom, there is virtually infinite food, and nearly as much dancing. I’ll attach a video of one below, as well as a video made by a government-funded media center with Azerbaijan traditional dance and clothing.

Gender norms for foreigners are a bit different - especially for women. For whatever reason, foreign women in Azerbaijan have a reputation as being more promiscuous, and visibly foreign women (especially blonde Russians) tend to attract more attention on the street than an Azerbaijani woman would. My take on this is that it is because foreign women don’t have male relatives around, so who will come kick your teeth in if you look at her the wrong way? In any case, one recommendation commonly given to foreign women to avoid this is to wear a fake wedding ring. I guess it proves there’s someone there to provide the ass-kick, and the bond of marriage is seen as pretty inviolable in Azerbaijan (though divorce is a common malaise here as in much of the post-Soviet world).

For foreigners of both sexes, the judgment for violation of clothing norms is less harsh. One thing I have noticed is that in many parts of the world wearing shorts can be remarkably contentious, and can often be the signal that most loudly screams “I am a foreigner”. It is said of Russians that, once you put them in warmer weather, they will indulge in it to the maximum of their ability and bring out the flip flops and shorts even if it isn’t that balmy to those of more southerly climes. In Baku this manifested in the often humorous phenomenon of spotting Russian guys by the enormous baggy jorts they would wear around.

Homosexuality is decriminalized in Azerbaijan, but the social censure is at such a degree that “out” individuals are practically unheard of. The word on the street (among western liberal expats) was that there is a small gay community that tends to cluster around international bars in the westernized areas of Baku. Civil society in Azerbaijan being as weak as it is, there is little serious push for gay issues.

Azerbaijanis very frequently have a sense of exoticism about people from other races, especially east Asians and black people. From what I understand, in most of the Soviet world the “n-word” was considered to be a neutral term of description for black Africans, but nonetheless you can tell the contexts in which there is ill-feeling in the use. Black people in Baku will find themselves stared at a lot, and people will often marvel and ask if they can take a selfie if they encounter a black person. Azerbaijanis who are more clued into western social discourse have started to adopt the use of “ qara insan”, which literally translates as “black person”.

Azerbaijani women (and women especially, for some reason), if you ever brought up China, Korea, or any of the people or countries from that region, would almost on cue light up with a huge smile and pull their eyelids out to make a squinty face. I had to stifle a laugh at this a couple of times. I actually think Azerbaijanis tend to really like people of other races, but the contact is infrequent and they have some ways of expressing it that wouldn’t be permissible in the west.

Though many Azerbaijanis aren’t necessarily religiously pious, quite a few (especially rural) people maintain an interesting array of traditions and superstitions. One particularly common belief is that exposure to the cold will literally make you sick - the older women of the household will micromanage their family members’ clothing choices in cool weather. I have heard that even doctors in Azerbaijan will subscribe to this. Many older women will keep sage around the household to provide the family with spiritual protection. Some people maintain an interest in traditional Caucasian or Turkic folk traditions. The ancient Persian/Zoroastrian new year holiday of Nowruz is still huge in Azerbaijan. This wiki article on Azerbaijani folklore you can translate is an interesting window onto some traditional myths. Azerbaijani folklore is very regional, and people from one village on one face of a mountain might tell very different legends than those of the opposite face.

One last note on Azerbaijani social norms is that their society makes considerably more room for children than American society does. Kids are a constant presence in Azerbaijan in a way they no longer are in cities in the United States. People are walking with their kids along the streets, playing with them in the parks, there are entire blocks of park dedicated entirely to entertaining children, and many restaurants have play areas for children. Children play football in the street and sometimes walk to school unsupervised. A lot of the sorts of things we hear “back in my day…” about in the US feel significantly more common in Azerbaijan.

I think people have considerably less neuroticism about something happening to their kids in a country like Azerbaijan where violent street crime is virtually unheard of, there are cameras everywhere, police are always within a couple blocks, and where there’s more of a village mentality around raising kids. Extended family and neighbors are very frequently involved in the lives of each others’ kids, visiting each others’ households, inviting each other to meals and celebrations, and the like. Coming back to the United States, I feel that there is probably something pathological about American society that children are so often considered to be a nuisance to be excluded from public spaces, rather than a natural and necessary part of the social body.

Ethnic and Religious Minorities in Azerbaijan

Post-soviet remnants.

Baku once was a picture of Soviet cosmopolitanism - one neighborhood still bears the name Xalqlar Dostluğu, or “ Friendship of Peoples ”. A lot of that legacy is gone now - the end of the Soviet Union saw massive population repatriation movements all over, and in Baku this process was accelerated by the chilling effects of the Baku Pogrom on the city’s Armenian population .

Baku Armenians once inhabited an unofficial “Ermenikend” that stretched across most of Nasimi Raion in central Baku, and which in fact left them living alongside Azerbaijanis and others. Thomas de Waal paints Baku’s Armenians as urbane and Russophone. They were known for producing chess grandmasters like Gary Kasparov , who once identified himself as a “Bakinets”, or Bakuvian, when asked his nationality. As I mentioned earlier, not much is left of Armenian Baku save some bashed up cemeteries and a shuttered church. Sumgait and Ganja also used to have substantial Armenian populations that were similarly driven out once the 1988 hostilities started.

The other big, and this time still extant, Soviet community in Baku is the city’s Russian population. I am not conversational in Russian, so my few interactions with Ruslar were short and formulaic. From what I understand Baku Russians tend to live in their own majority-Russian apartment buildings. Baku Azerbaijanis seemed to have a mild sense of dislike towards Russians, some more overt than others. I sometimes felt that Azerbaijanis, particularly more nationalistic types, can have an inferiority complex with respect to Russians - Soviet high culture was normatively Russian, Azerbaijanis effectively lived under Russian rule for around two centuries, and Russians still walk around Baku insisting only on using the Russian language, which remains something of the international language people default to when speaking with foreigners. Much of higher education in the best schools is still exclusively in Russian. I heard a couple of zoomers express a nationalistic sentiment when they said that they did not know Russian. It is also not hard to stumble upon Azerbaijanis and Central Asians on the internet complaining (often in English) about how Russians are misperceived as a high-class culture, when they should be perceived as brutal and barbaric conquerors like we tend to stereotype Russians in the west.

I think much of the antipathy is informed by history and geopolitics, perhaps more than personal negative interactions per se. Azerbaijanis tend to support Ukraine in the Russo-Ukrainian War, seeing comity with Ukrainians in slipping the grip of Moscow and sympathy over a neighbor utilizing separatist sentiment to carve away an integral region of the country. Azerbaijanis and Armenians also have a (frankly kind of amusing) habit of accusing each other of being the real Russian puppet state - the former on the basis of the Russian peacekeepers that intervened in 2020 that kept the Azerbaijanis from taking Stepanakert during the second war, and the latter because they think Putin sold them out after the anti-Russian Pashinyan took power, developing some kind of gentleman’s agreement with Aliyev to let him take Karabakh.

Russians have three Orthodox churches in Baku - I visited two of them. Both were incredibly beautiful and seemed well-attended. They seem to function partially as community centers for the Russians (much as many such diaspora churches do in the US), who would often sit outside for several hours chatting. I got some suspicious gazes from some babushkas when I attended Divine Liturgy once, but I do not think visitors were necessarily a weird phenomenon as I saw some curious Azerbaijanis come in that day as well.

I was told that there are some communities of Russian Old Believers in Quba and Ivanovka, the latter being a Molokan colony. I did not encounter them in Quba and never got to visit Ivanovka.

I never figured out what Russians tended to do for work in Azerbaijan. I never encountered any working anywhere. Many of them seemed to be retired older people - I would imagine many of these are simply people who were here in the Soviet times that never left. I was asked for directions once by two lost-looking younger Russian guys that I thought might have been draft dodgers. The Russian oil behemoth Lukoil was founded by ethnic Azerbaijani Vagit Alekperov, and was one of the few non-Azerbaijani oil companies that seemed to sell fuel in Azerbaijan, which may be part of the story here. Perhaps there is an entirely parallel social ecosystem for Russian oil expats?

Other post-Soviet ethnicities were represented in Baku as well. There were some Georgians who seemed to be there entirely to run restaurants. Georgian food is very popular in the former USSR, though the Georgians and the Azerbaijanis have some classic culinary feuds over things like “who invented khinkali/hengel”. There are a couple of ethnic Georgian villages in the far northwest of Azerbaijan, as well.

There is one Catholic Church in Baku that was built out of an old Soviet warehouse, where Polish workers used to hide in order to pray away from the prying eyes of the authorities. The story I heard was that it was established with funding from Ilham Aliyev since he and the priest there were old school friends. Pope John Paul II visited at one point, there are some Polish Catholic icons and historical memorabilia. I did not attend a service here so I can’t say whether there are many church-attending Polish Catholics in Baku. I would wager a lot of the current parishioners are western expatriates.

Jews come in two kinds in Azerbaijan - European Ashkenazis and Mountain Jews. Mountain Jews are a fascinating group that I will cover in a moment. Baku Ashkenazis, to my knowledge, arrived during the Russian Empire. You see some Hasidim walking around in Baku occasionally, but their community is by no means large. Both Jewish communities have their own synagogues, which were under heavy guard by police and synagogue-members as I visited the week after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel - I had to get a pat-down before going into the Ashkenazi synagogue, and there were very visible police all around the block. Somewhat to my surprise, the rabbi there spoke fluent English and was educated in the United States.

Other Foreigners and Expats

Baku had a notable population from the Indian Subcontinent. Azerbaijan has a big fan in Pakistan - a really big fan. Pakistan loves Azerbaijan to an extent that even starts to feel weird and unreciprocated - for instance, Pakistan does not even recognize the Republic of Armenia as a state. Not Artsakh, Armenia itself, which even Turkey and Azerbaijan recognize. What?

In any case, there are some restaurants owned by Pakistanis that I was informed were not bad. Pakistani flags flown next to an Azerbaijani and Turkish one were not uncommon, either to express some gratitude for Pakistani moral support or by Pakistanis showing their love for their adopted home. There are also quite a few Indian and Pakistani medical students in Azerbaijan. I was told by one Indian med student that this was because it was cheaper and easier to get in, since India has a weird system based on its states for getting into medical schools. Some Pakistanis are also in Azerbaijan as a stopover on a longer trip towards Europe.

The biggest non-Eastern Bloc group of expatriates in Azerbaijan seemed to be from the British Commonwealth. A lot of Scots and Africans, in particular. Most of these were people who worked for British oil companies, in various capacities. Due to localization measures I mentioned earlier, I expect this population to decline with time. Many of the non-oil company expatriates worked in things like IT or education. I met several Americans as well - usually working in education or the like, though I’d heard some Texans were kicking around in the oil trade.

Western Protestants will find little to serve their spiritual needs in Azerbaijan, as Protestantism’s history in the country is almost entirely the story of insular German Lutherans who are long gone, and proselytizing in the country is illegal. They have interestingly developed a house church system in some of the expat areas to accommodate this.

I never felt uncomfortable as an American in Azerbaijan. People generally were just very surprised to encounter an American in daily life. Some people were kind of bewildered why I was over there, when so many of them wanted to be over here. Sometimes they were just excited to have someone to practice English on. Some people also had some amusingly misshapen beliefs about America - one person asked me whether I knew any celebrities, and also seemed to think that Black Lives Matter came about because Donald Trump was literally, personally sending policemen to murder unarmed black people. One person I met who had visited America commented that, for living in such a rich country, Americans really dress and eat like shit.

People would often enough ask me my opinion on politics, sometimes just random people on the street coming up and saying “you’re American? Biden or Trump?”, or about some arbitrary foreign conflict like Serbia vs. Albania or Russia vs. Ukraine. It was rare anyone would ask me about Karabakh directly. There was one occasion someone tried to extract a “Qarabağ Azerbaycandır!” out of me, but I think most people were happy to assume that if you were there, you were on team Azerbaijan. I would highly recommend that you not signal otherwise.

I got the feeling that many expats interact minimally with local Azerbaijanis in a substantive manner. Few of the foreigners I’d met had put any effort into learning Azerbaijani - they generally seemed to subsist entirely in the Anglophone expat bubble around Port of Baku, had some Russian, or would learn the minimal amount of Azerbaijani necessary to complete mundane errands.

Someone told me they hung out with a bunch of Colombians living in Baku. I have absolutely no idea what a bunch of Colombians would be doing living in Baku, and I never personally encountered them.

Tourists often came to Azerbaijan from Russia, as well as the Indian Subcontinent and occasionally Europe. I met one American retiree who was there on a group to see the whole Caucasus region. There were a lot of Germans on my flight over going for a cheap tourist destination, but I never encountered them or any other Germans in Baku again - though there are a lot of artifacts left from the time when German industrialists and businessmen were involved in the Baku oil industry, like the Lutheran church, now long a concert hall long without a parish. The town of Mingachevir was also founded in part by German WWII POWs. I met a lovely Italian couple in İçerişeher who were passing through on a business trip and trying to catch as much of the sights as they could, and a couple more older Italians touring Sheki.

Minority Native Ethnics in Azerbaijan

The Caucasus is something of an ethnic freezer - it becomes very clear why this is once you’ve gone on your first road trip in the Greater Caucasus. The roads in the mountains very frequently feel like deathtraps in their own way, with roads that turn to gravel and rock on 60 degree inclines, careening cliffs around every corner, and other cars invisible behind the next bend - some people up here even managed to live driving BMW sedans, which was absolutely baffling to me. In addition to the danger factor, though, it is not hard to see how an ethnic group could remain up here relatively unbothered for much of history, preserving isolated languages and ethnicities while the tumult of history largely passed in the lowlands below. My contact with many of these groups was limited, but I’ll give a short roundup on some of what I find to be Azerbaijan’s most notable and interesting ethnic minorities.

I mentioned the Mountain Jews a bit earlier - they are the autochthonous Jewish population of Azerbaijan that is purported to have been in the South Caucasus since the 5th or 6th century, when they fled north fleeing persecution in the ancient Sassanid Persian Empire. They speak a Persian language called Judeo-Tat, which is a branch of the Persian Tat languages in Azerbaijan that is influenced by Hebrew and Aramaic. They are classed as a branch of Mizrahi Jews. The Mountain Jews tend to cluster in the north, on the eastern most slopes of the Greater Caucasus. Their most notable settlement is the village of Qırmızı Qəsəbə, which is purported to be the last shtetl (majority ethnic Jewish settlement) in Europe. They also have a community in Baku, with its own synagogue.

I think that a large part of the generally positive attitude Azerbaijanis have towards Jews stems from their positive experience with the Mountain Jews. Having been separated from the Jewish mainstream for so long, they tend to resemble their neighbors as much as they do European Ashkenazis, and have a healthy dose of the Caucasus martial spirit. Some prominent şehidler who died fighting the Armenians were Mountain Jews, which earned the community some street cred in Azerbaijan. Memorials to these şehid are very prominent in their synagogue in Baku.

The existence of Judeo-Tats implies other Tats as well, and indeed there are other speakers of Persian Tats languages in Azerbaijan. Tats communities are spread throughout the northeastern mountains of Azerbaijan. There is another subdivision between Armeno-Tats and Muslim Tats, with the former being Tat speakers that practiced Armenian Apostolic Christianity, but they by-and-large have all gone to Armenia or Russia, where their remnants are rapidly assimilating in exile. The Armeno-Tats, already very small and on the way out in the 19th and 20th centuries, is now on the door to being extinct as an identifiable community.

Muslim Tats are also rapidly assimilating into the mainstream of Azerbaijani society, linguistically and culturally, with the numbers of people self-identifying as Tats rapidly decreasing over the 20th century. Nonetheless, the community is still extant. I almost visited the village of Lahıc , which has a substantial Tat population, but the roads conditions were difficult.

I would surmise that the necessary communitarian conservatism and insularity of Jewish diasporas has enabled the Mountain Jews to hang onto their traditions and identity with a higher degree of success than the other Tats-speaking groups of the Caucasus, but nonetheless a large amount of Mountain Jews upped sticks to Israel during the large waves of aliyahs from the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1990s . There appears to have been some Israeli outreach to this community, with some plaques I noticed in Qırmızı Qəsəbə commemorating visits from Israeli officials. Wikipedia at least estimates their population in Israel to be much higher than in Azerbaijan, but I do not know where they pulled their numbers. I would also be curious to learn about the extent to which they are continuing as an identifiable community in Israel. In any case, the Mountain Jews seem to have the highest profile of all Tat-speaking groups in Azerbaijan.

There is another large community of speakers of a Persian language in the south of Azerbaijan: the Talysh , who span the Iran-Azerbaijan border region and are reputed to descend from the ancient Iranian tribe of the Cadusii . In Azerbaijan, they cluster in the towns of Lankaran, Lerik, and Astara. They have much healthier population numbers than their distant cousins the Tats, with estimates ranging in the hundreds of thousands rather than the single or tens of thousands. Azerbaijan Talysh are also Muslim, and majority Shia, much like the rest of the Azerbaijani population.

They inhabit the most fertile region of Azerbaijan - most of Azerbaijan’s tea is grown in the southern mountains along the border with Iran, and its more Mediterranean climate is good for the cultivation of fruits like oranges, kiwis, feijoa, and quinces. These culinary and climatic factors, as well as its picturesque Hyrcanian forests and Talysh Mountains , a sub-range of the Iranian Alborz, makes the territory popular for tourism.

During the tumult of the collapsing Soviet Union and power struggles over the future of Azerbaijan, a Talysh movement briefly attempted to assert autonomy from Baku and create the Talysh-Mughan Autonomous Republic , which was quickly suppressed when Heydar Aliyev took the reigns. A Talysh National Movement is still active abroad, campaigning for Talysh autonomy. They seem to have had some progress influencing international institutions like the Council of Europe (setting up in the Hague was a smart move), managing to get the leader of the 1993 movement, the late Alikram Hummatov , freed from Azerbaijani jail in 2004. Their voice isn’t particular loud, though, especially in comparison to the Armenians with their organized diaspora, and Azerbaijan isn’t really on good terms with the Council of Europe these days, so it remains to be seen what the Talysh movement could hope to achieve. The Talysh seem to perceive a policy of pressure to assimilate from the Azerbaijani government, which I can’t really comment on not knowing much of the situation with education policies or the like in the southeast. I will caution that this page reads like it was written by Talysh activists.

This is as good a time to talk about this as any - Azerbaijanis have an interesting relationship with their cousins they’ve been long-separated from across the border. By some estimates, more ethnic Azerbaijanis live in Iran than do in Azerbaijan. One person I asked compared it to a North-South Korea situation, with Azerbaijanis/Azeris in Iran being subject to racism and discrimination by Persian Iranians. This is a situation I don’t think I ever quite developed a full understanding of, and probably never will unless I spend any time in Iranian Azerbaijan, but the perception of this on the southern part of the border seems to be very different, with many using Farsi in addition to Azerbaijani inside of Iran and having dual ethnic and national identities. Many Iranian Azeris have contributed highly to Iran’s culture and society in Farsi as well as Azerbaijani, and the Ayatollah himself has an Azeri father. Regionalist, Pan-Turkist, and “Iranist” tendencies all seem to be in competition in Iranian Azerbaijan, and the clarity of a cut between a Persian and Azeri Iranian is not always obvious.

The Soviets attempted to set up a puppet government in South/Iranian Azerbaijan but it quickly collapsed without Soviet troops to maintain it because of a lack of local support. Azerbaijanis and Persians also have a bunch of cultural flashpoints such as whether the poet Nizami is Azerbaijani or not . Also, there is contention on whether the northwestern region of Iran where there is an Azeri/Azerbaijani majority population should be regarded as “South Azerbaijan” or “Iranian Azerbaijan”, with some being nervous about the former designation being used to bolster nationalistic claims by Azerbaijanis. Some Azerbaijani nationalists, notably the late former-president Abulfaz Elchibey, were and are big proponents of supporting movements in Iran for the ethnic rights of Azerbaijanis if not outright union or independence.

Azerbaijan and Iran share a lot of culture and history, but there is also a lot of mutual mistrust. Once independence came about, the Iranians rubbed their hands a bit at the possibility of extending the Islamic Revolution to their Shia brethren in Azerbaijan, but the wind did not shift this way and there is now a lot of concern about Iranian meddling in Azerbaijan. It was alleged to me that the IRGC funds a lot of Shia imams, who also periodically have to be locked up when the government considers them too threatening. The IRGC, with Qasem Soleimani having a personal hand, set up an Azerbaijani Islamist radical movement among some students who were studying in Iran that has been declared a terrorist group in Azerbaijan. The government pretty clearly considers Shia radicalism to be a primary threat to its stability, and takes measures to keep it under lock.

For its side, Iran is also afraid of Turk nationalist movements in its northwest, as well as Turkey and Azerbaijan sharing a contiguous border to threaten that region. For this reason Iran does a lot of cooperation with Armenia, and likely considers Azerbaijani moves against Zangezur to be a red line. There was a brief scare when Iranian troops mobilized for war games along the Azerbaijani border in 2021, at the same time as Azerbaijan had violated Armenia’s borders in the region. Azerbaijan’s close relations with Israel do not soothe this situation.

Moving onto the non-Persian minorities in Iran, a small but prominent place is occupied by the Udi people , who speak a Northeastern Caucasian language . Before the coming of the Arabs and even the Sassanids were the Caucasian Albanians (no relation to the Balkan Albanians), an ancient Caucasian people group which had an autochthonous branch of Apostolic Orthodox Christianity much like their Armenian and Georgian neighbors. After progressive waves of Islamization, Persification, and then Turkification from cycles of conquest and settlement, the Albanian identity of the region had been heavily diminished. Many communities that maintained their Christian religion became associated with Georgians and Armenians, assimilating into those groups with time.

The exception to this is the Udi, purportedly a remainder from the 26 original Albanian tribes. The last community they maintain in Azerbaijan is the village of Nij, near the town Gabala in the Greater Caucasus. While I did not get the opportunity to visit Nij, the Caucasian Albanians have left behind a number of churches in the North Caucasus, which have a bit of a haunting feel about them. They were simple but stunningly beautiful against the backdrop of their natural surroundings.

The Udi did not have a good 20th century, often being associated with the Armenians by Azerbaijanis for their religious identity and many moving to Georgia or Armenia. There are only a couple thousand Udi left in Azerbaijan. Their community occupies a weird position, as the Caucasian Albanian historical legacy is constantly appropriated by Armenians and Azerbaijanis seeking to bolster their historical claims to certain regions. If I was ever to return to Azerbaijan, seeing Nij would be near the top of my list of destinations.

Another prominent Northeastern Caucasian-speaking people in Azerbaijan are the Lezgi or Lezgins, who are split between northern Azerbaijan and the Dagestan Republic in the Russian Federation. The Lezgins stand out as primarily Sunni, and maintain many cultural traditions of the North Caucasus that stand them out as similar to some of their Northeastern Caucasian-speaking cousins like the Chechens and Ingush, such as their tribal and honor norms. The Lezginka folk dance is the general Russian term for all Caucasian traditional dances, but the name was taken from the Lezgins.

During the breakup of the Soviet Union, a Lezgi cultural movement called the Sadval came about that attempted to assert more cultural rights for their community and possibly create a Lezgi homeland . The Azerbaijani government, always suspicious of ethnic separatists movements, banned and suppressed it. Lezgi radicals were responsible for a terrorist attack in 1994 on the Baku metro, which did not earn their movement a significant deal of good will in Azerbaijan. The number of Lezgis in Azerbaijan is disputed, with claims that many identify as Azerbaijani to avoid persecution. I did not notice Lezgis as having a very high profile in Azerbaijan, but it may be that I simply didn’t know what to look for. During the brief time I spent going through Lezgi territory in the mountains, the Azerbaijani flags seemed to fly as prominently as anywhere else. Maybe there were a couple fewer şehid memorials.

There are a number of other, smaller Northeast Caucasian people groups in Azerbaijan, many tracing their descent likely back to the Caucasian Albanians. Another notable group are the Khinalug /Xınalıq. They number in the single thousands and inhabit a small, very ancient, very isolated village in the Caucasus where a number of the country’s oldest traditions survive. I unfortunately was not able to visit, but it is also near the top of my list if I should ever be able to return.

One last mention are the Kurds of Azerbaijan . Having been only in the tens of thousands, and living primarily in the regions around Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan’s Kurds were in a terrible position when the Armenian army marched in during the first Nagorno-Karabakh War. Nearly the entire Kurdish population was uprooted and found themselves in IDP camps in other parts of Azerbaijan. Some nationalists had briefly tried to start an independent Kurdish state in Lachin , but they were doing so on competing territory with the Armenians and it was not to come to fruition. The participants of that little venture went into a farther-flung exile.

The number of Kurds in Azerbaijan, as for many minority groups, ranges heavily. Many have no doubt more or less assimilated, and the 2009 census claimed only around 6,100 Kurds. Unless most Kurds went into exile in the Kurdish diaspora, that seems like a decidedly low number to me. Nonetheless, assimilation will only have increased in the intervening time period.

Another thing I feel compelled to discuss is the history of Zoroastrianism in Azerbaijan. As a former satrapy of the Sassanid Empire and integrated for most of its history into the cultural ecosystem of the Persian world, Zoroastrianism’s roots go very deep in Azerbaijan. In fact, the oil wells of Azerbaijan, the tapping of which is now the lifeblood of the national economy, once made it a holy site for fire-worshipping Zoroastrians due to the natural flames which bloom straight out of stone. This phenomenon still occurs.

Unlike in Iran or India, Zoroastrianism is not an extant religion in Azerbaijan. Nonetheless Zoroastrianism and the fire which is so prominent an element is still a very visible influence. The long etymology of Azerbaijan connects it to fire, and fire is the national symbol. The Zoroastrian Nowruz holiday is still highly prominent, as I remarked earlier.

The most recognizable “Zoroastrian” fire temple in Azerbaijan, the Ateshgah northwest of Baku, was actually built by Hindu merchants during the Safavid Empire. However, Zoroastrians and Hindus devoted to Agni still visit and perform rituals there from time to time. The Maiden Tower in Baku is alleged to have once been part of a Zoroastrian religious shrine. Supposedly the shrine in Xınalıq is original, but was restored by the World Zoroastrian Organization in the 2010s.

Cats and Other Animals

Baku has many, many stray cats. Every neighborhood has them, and they often function as community pets for which everyone provides food. Older ladies especially tend to dote on their block cats, leaving out treats or meat or kitchen scraps. Sometimes, cats will wander into restaurants and stare up at you until you grace them with some of your meal, for which they might give you a brush and let you pet them in return. They also tend to be filthy, and for this reason I tended to limit myself from petting every street cat. I could not always resist this, though. In any case, I will simply provide you with a gallery of some of my favorites:

There were some stray dogs as well, but they were fewer in number and tended to be quite chill, loafing around in shadowy corners and lazily sleeping or watching passersby. In the countryside they were more numerous and aggressive and were purported to carry rabies, so I generally kept away.

I got the feeling that pets were not incredibly common in Azerbaijan, at least not to the level they are in the US. Nonetheless, some people had house cats or dogs. Usually these seemed to be wealthier people. For some reason most of the people I saw out walking dogs in the park were Russians. Some stores seemed to have pet birds in the back room - parrots, parakeets, etc.

When I was in Quba I saw some people horseback-riding along the road. I would be unsurprised if horses were actually more commodious than driving in many areas in the mountains. As I mentioned, the roads up in the Greater Caucasus are wild.

Azerbaijani food, much like the architecture, mixes many influences from north and south. Kebab restaurants with several variations make up most eateries and are usually very cheap. Plovs consisting of rice, meat and various herbs, as well as dolma made of stuffed vegetables are common. Azerbaijanis make a lot of hearty stews like bozartma, a simple but very tasty stew from meat, potatoes, spices, and various vegetables. The national dish is a fatty stew called piti made of mutton, potatoes, vegetables, and saffron cooked in a clay pot. A lot of Russian-style dishes like borscht (I will not wade into the Russo-Ukrainian culinary wars here) are common, as well as influences like higher deployment of the potato than you might see in Turkey or Iran. Azerbaijanis also tend to eat their food on bread, scooping pilav or meat and potatoes onto the bread and using it like a utensil. Store-bought Azerbaijani çörek blows out the bread you can find in a grocery store in the US. Azerbaijanis also take dairy seriously, their savory yogurt goes well on everything.

Azerbaijanis also very much like their sweets. Most restaurants have a sizeable dessert cabinet, containing cheesecakes, baklavas, and assorted pastries. Baklava is very common and there’s something of a regional competition between different styles of baklava - I must report that, in my honest opinion, the best is from Quba. Lokum, better known in the US as Turkish Delight, is also very common and comes in many variations.

People will drink coffee in Azerbaijan, but tea is cheaper, more common, locally grown in the south of the country, and frankly reaches the level of national addiction. Tea is generally taken either sweetened with sugar or with some other form of dessert like baklava or jam on the side. I will tolerate no criticism of southern sweet tea in the US after seeing the copious amounts of sugar Azerbaijanis like to drink tea with. Other drinks of choice include limonad, which despite its name and any etymological connections is nothing like what Americans think of when we say “lemonade” and is more of a carbonated juice, usually from pears. Compotes from cranberries, melons, and various other fruits are common. Pomegranates, something of the national fruit, are also drank as a (surprisingly savory) juice. Azerbaijanis also have this drink common in many Turkic countries called ayran, which is a salty and sometimes carbonated liquid yogurt - I found it to be better than I thought I would.

Azerbaijani wine culture is a thing, though not as expansive as it is in Georgia . They make a number of good pomegranate wines, which are plentiful around the fall harvest festivals when the pomegranates come in. They make beer too, mostly in Xırdalan, but generally the drink of choice for most Azerbaijani men is Russian vodka.

Foreign cuisines have some representation in Baku, but more limited than in the United States for certain and even more limited outside of Baku. The best non-Azerbaijani cuisines are usually from other Soviet republics, often because the restaurants are owned by people from those republics. There are a number of quality Georgian restaurants, especially, as well as some good Ukrainian ones. There were bold attempts at Mexican and Italian restaurants that did not, in my experience, give you the same thing you would find in Italy or an ethnic restaurant in the US. It was a valiant effort, though. Turkish kebab restaurants are common and range in about the same quality as standard Azerbaijani restaurants. I have heard that the Japanese and Chinese food in Baku is not bad but I never tried it. I think I mentioned the same of the Indian restaurants, but I never had heard some critique of the cleanliness of a few of their establishments. At many fast food places you can get “American food” consisting of pizza or burgers. Once again you may be surprised at what you get, as a “burger” I ordered once came out as a chicken sandwich.

The fast food brands you would recognize are McDonalds, Starbucks, and KFC - there is no reason to ever go to Starbucks since it is as expensive as it is stateside and you can get better and cheaper at a local cafe. The KFC was pretty good, I never went to the McDonalds but people interestingly seemed to consider it as a far higher status establishment than we would in the US. Beyond what I’ve mentioned, foreign options are pretty scarce - but in my opinion, Azerbaijani food is tasty and diverse enough to keep you moving.

Miscellaneous

When I was in Ganja, I attended an Azerbaijani pro-basketball game. This was one of the most surreal experiences I had in the country. About half of the players were African Americans, presumably who played D1 in college and wanted to go pro, but couldn’t in the US. I unfortunately did not get the opportunity to chat with any of the players and see what the hell brought them all to Azerbaijan. Basketball teams in Azerbaijan are usually affiliated with local football clubs.

• Azerbaijan pro basketball. The crowd started chanting their favorite word for black people on a number of occasions, which they also pronounced with a j instead of a g and with a strong Azerbaijani accent. I can only imagine how pleased the players were with that, and I’d also reckon that they have to deal with it a lot. Surreal.

On the subject of football clubs, the biggest one in Azerbaijan is Qarabağ FK, but most people seemed to also have a favorite Turkish team, usually either Fenerbahçe or Galatasaray. I never met a fan of Beşiktaş, the other big Istanbul football club, of any of the people I asked in Azerbaijan. Beşiktaş has a reputation for its fans who are into acting rebellious, and who are sometimes seen as vaguely leftist, so I found it interesting there seemed to be so few in Azerbaijan. At least, of the people I had met.

There was this weird tendency for businesses of the same kind to be located very close to each other in Baku. For instance - one street near the bazaar in Baku had around six car repair places on it, while another stretch of road had a number of confectionaries like chocolate and künefe places. This presumably makes these sorts of businesses hyper-competitive with each other, while also being inconvenient for people who have to travel farther to get their car looked at or the like. Is this some kind of weird central planning thing to cluster businesses of a single type, maybe to spur competition, or did it just spontaneously happen this way? The economics student in me found this odd.

I also think nearly every street block in Baku had a pharmacy on it. Sometimes this led to a situation where two or three pharmacies were facing each other on the same intersection. Another weird central planning quirk?

This monument to Richard Zorge , a spy from Baku who worked for the German Empire and then the Soviet Union, goes extremely hard:

English has a reputation as a prestige language in Azerbaijan. This led to a lot of businesses trying to sound fancy with English-language names that sometimes stuck out and did not land right to a native speaker. Some pricier restaurants in Baku would do things like name their dishes after randomly chosen places in New York, like the “Greenwich Village Chicken Sandwich” or the like. In other instances, English terms were transliterated wholesale in a (funnily) very forced manner. My favorite example of this is “business lunch” as “bıznes lanç”.

There is a town built entirely on the Caspian Sea to facilitate oil exploration called Neft Daşları - this would have been cool to visit, but it is only reachable by helicopter and you need special permission to go.

I do not think that there is a single leaf blower in the whole country of Azerbaijan. Instead, Baku has a small army of street sweepers who almost universally seemed to be very traditional-looking old women in elaborate headscarves, who cleaned the streets in brooms made of branches. Is this some kind of state jobs program?

The James Bond movie The World is Not Enough is set in Azerbaijan. The femme fatale, oil company girlboss antagonist is also presented as a princess of a vague local ethnicity that is depicted as Oriental Orthodox, maybe Udi or Armenian? She only speaks Russian with the villagers. There is also a scene with the other antagonist in a circle of natural oil fires testing his minions. I was a little disappointed to see that the Yanar Dağ was not quite as epic-looking.

• James Bond’s take on the natural flames.

When driving between cities in Azerbaijan, you will inevitably encounter rest stops, especially if you are traveling with Azerbaijanis who will insist on a stop for tea every two hours or so. Azerbaijani rest stops usually are pretty sizeable affairs with a number of restaurants of various quality, where you can get tea or baklava or börek. I was told that the meat at some of these establishments might be untrustworthy. One rest stop also had a small zoo, which contained some very sad-looking monkeys and several camels. Some other stops will also contain police officers who will make you stop and present papers. I was worried about being shaken down for a bribe at one of these stops when the officers seemed like they were taking a minute, which thankfully did not occur. I was informed that, if you were to drive into Karabakh, you would be met by a military checkpoint instead of a police stop which would instruct you to turn the hell around unless you were going on an authorized tourist group.

I visited this very bizarre Azerbaijani take on a tourist resort in the Caucasus, which contained an obscene number of kitschy statues depicting everything under the sun, a zip-line (of questionable trustworthiness?) that ran over a chasm, and a bunch of Western memorabilia. I think this was the most surreal place I encountered in my entire time in the country.

Many thanks for reading - this is my first independent long-form writing, and I hope there will be much more to come. Part II: A Short History of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Conflict is in the works. As the government’s rhetoric on that front heats up again, it may turn out timelier than I thought…

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• The 11 Most Beautiful Places...

The 24 Most Beautiful Places in Azerbaijan

Combine mountains and semi-arid plains stretching endlessly towards the horizon with historic towns. Now add in wildlife, fire and hundreds of kilometres of coastline to get an idea of the real beauty of Azerbaijan . Here’s our roundup of the most beautiful spots in the Land of Fire.

Architectural Landmark

2. Absheron National Park

Nestled at the foot of the southern Greater Caucasus Mountains is a place called Sheki . The town of 60,000 people dates back 2,500 years, making it one of the oldest Caucasus settlements. Sheki’s claim to fame for millennia was silk, textiles and embroidery, which made it a significant point on the Silk Road . Today, the historical region with ancient mosques, castles and the 18th-century Palace of Sheki Khans forms the foreground against the majestic green mountains.

Natural Feature

The former capital of the Caucasus Albanians in northern Azerbaijan blends historical and natural beauty. Nearby archaeological sites dating back almost 2,500 years sit near the craggy Caucasus Mountains to the north. Valleys, canyons and waterfalls, as well as ski resorts, make Qabala one of the top places in Azerbaijan.

6. Shamakhi

Another hotspot for history connoisseurs: Shamakhi. Boasting a history of two and a half millennia and housing the former Shirvan Empire’s capital, the small town is worth the two-hour drive from Baku. Medieval archaeological ruins and the crumbling Gulistan Fortress that dates back almost a thousand years make interesting sites. The region is historically a hotspot for carpet weaving as well as being the birthplace of several Azeri poets.

7. The Caucasus Mountains

Two mountain ranges stretching from the Caspian to the Black Sea and splitting Azerbaijan and Armenia, form the Greater and Lesser Caucasus Mountains. According to experts, the mountains are some of the most culturally and linguistically diverse regions on the planet. Various ethnic groups and languages different to Azeri are found in these isolated communities contributing to their diversity. Hiking through uncharted wilderness and following the trails on the ambitious Transcaucasian Trail are highlights.

8. The mountain villages

Head to the opposite side of the Qudailchay River traversing Quba and stroll through Qirmizi Qesebe (Red Town). This 2,500-year-old settlement houses a community of mountain Jews living in an enclave said to be the largest all-Jewish settlement outside of Israel . Other near villages include the remote Khinalug, Qusar, Lahij and Saribash.

9. Gobustan National Park

Gobustan (or Qobustan) is one of the most visited national parks in Azerbaijan. Located 60 kilometres (37.3 miles) to the southwest of Baku, the UNESCO-listed site combines petroglyphs with mud volcanoes and musical rocks. Some rock carvings decorating the walls date back 40,000 years and depict various shapes from human figures to animals. Most intriguing out of the 6,000 carvings are those portraying whales and dolphins, which aren’t believed to be in the Caspian Sea. Gaval Dash, the symphonic rock, resembles a tambourine when struck. Azerbaijan’s mud volcanoes are nearby too. Gobustan is one of the more popular day trips from Baku which can often be arranged by the hotel .

According to locals, historical Astara tops the list of beautiful places in Azerbaijan. Mountains surround the town, which sits on the border with Iran , while lush green virgin rainforest and a variety of plant and animal life – including the Caucasus leopard – live in the nearby Hirkan National Park.

11. The Caspian Sea

The Caspian Sea, the largest lake in the world, makes for one of the best places to visit in Azerbaijan. The Azerbaijani coastline stretches for more than 500km (310mi) from the southern border with Iran to Dagestan in the north. Despite some of the coast and beaches near Baku suffering from pollution, you can find beautiful resorts in Sumgait in the northern part of the Absheron Peninsula. Lankaran, four hours south of Baku, near the Iranian border, has some nice resorts too.

The second city and birthplace of famous 12th-century poet, Nizami Ganjavi, attracts relatively few tourists compared to Baku. But make the 370-kilometres trip (230 miles) journey from the capital, taking approximately four and a half hours, to experience this historical city. Ganja as the name might suggest doesn’t refer to marijuana . Instead, a rich history dating back to the 6th-century along with ancient mosques, caravanserai, churches and a house constructed from bottles awaits.

13. Lankaran

Heading south from Baku along the Caspian Sea towards Iran reveals the sleepy resort town of Lankaran . With Neolithic origins and a long stretch of coastline, Lankaran is one of the local’s favourite places to visit in Azerbaijan. Stroll through the town and visit the Lighthouse, Lankaran Fortress, Heydar Aliyev Memorial Park and the Old Prison. Beach lovers are recommended to head a few kilometres south to Kanarmesha while fans of the outdoors can take a day trip to the Ghizil-Agaj State Reserve. The second houses more than 200 species of birds, wolves and boars.

14. Shirvan National Park

This semi-desert national park, just over 100km (62mi) southwest of Baku, combines wildlife, dunes and a short stretch of coastline. Visitors can enjoy landscapes and a diversity of fauna with large populations of gazelles, jungle cats and turtles. More than 200 species of birds also live inside Shirvan National Park, including flamingos and 32 rare species. Bungalows and camping sites are available for overnight stays.

15. Agh Gol National Park

Lake Aggol, the second-largest lake in Azerbaijan, sits inside the Agh Gol National Park in the Kur-Araz lowlands. The arid landscape creates a nesting spot for migratory birds, while the lake is full of fish. And the views are spectacular. Imagine a blue-green lake surrounded by a band of trees with mountains in the distance. Despite the beauty, travelling can be challenging because of language barriers. Learn a few phrases of Azerbaijani first.

16. Goyazan Mountain

A short distance to the northwest of Qazakh District in northern Azerbaijan stands the 857m (2,812ft) Goyazan Mountain. Goyazan stands alone against a flat background of rolling fields and plains, giving it a prominent appearance in the landscape. The strange beauty of the mountain ensures its inclusion on the list of places to visit in Azerbaijan. Check out the nearby reservoir for views of the villages and border with Armenia too.

17. Lake Goygol

Lake Goygol is one of the most beautiful places in Azerbaijan. The name means the Blue Lake, and it sits in the Murovdag foothills. Formed after an earthquake almost 1,000 years ago, Goygol has become a favourite tourist destination near Ganja. A total of 19 lakes lie in the Greater Goygol region, with eight at an altitude of more than 1,500m (4,921ft). The hour-long journey from Ganja passes through the mountains, providing plenty of spots for photographs.

18. Ghizil-Agaj State Reserve

The colossal nature reserve occupying the Ghizil-Agaj Bay sits to the north of Lankaran. Stretching more than 70 kilometres (43.5 miles) from the Caspian Sea and encircling the bay, Ghizil-Agaj State Reserves is a haven for migratory birds. Birds from Northern Europe and Siberia make their way during the winter, forming just a fraction of the 250 species of bird who call the area home. On top of this, expect to see wolves, wild cats and almost 50 types of fish. Ghizil-Agaj along with Agh Gol are the only national parks in Azerbaijan featured on the World Heritage List of Ramsar Wetlands .

19. Lake Sarysu

Lake Sarysu holds the title as Azerbaijan’s largest lake. Located in the Kur-Araz Lowlands and stretching a total length of 22 kilometres (13.7 miles), the freshwater lake offers both incredible views and a plethora of wildlife. Travelling here can be a challenge for even the most adventurous visitor, but the views and unspoilt terrain are worth the effort.

20. Mingachevir Reservoir

Look at a map and see a large body of water located near Ganja. Stretching for 70 kilometres (43.5 miles) with a maximum width of 18 kilometres (11.2 miles), a visitor might assume it’s a huge lake. After all, it dwarfs both Sarysu and Agh Gol, the largest and second largest lakes in Azerbaijan. But it’s not. The water in Mingachevir contains a vast reservoir and Azerbaijan’s most important hydroelectric station. Known by locals as ‘the sea’ and with small sections of ‘beach’ along the shores, Mingachevir Reservoir might be worth visiting for a non-touristy day trip in Central Azerbaijan.

21. Kura River

The Kura River begins in Eastern Turkey’s Lesser Caucasus before traversing through Georgia . Entering Azerbaijan from the north and passing through Mingachevir Reservoir, the meandering waterway eventually drains into the Caspian Sea. Not only is the Kura the longest river in Azerbaijan but at 1515 kilometres (941 miles) it holds the title as the biggest in Transcaucasia. Throughout history, the Kura provided a lifeline for several villages and communities for irrigation, especially during the long dry summers. Today, it’s the primary water source in Azerbaijan.

22. Araz River

With a length of 1072 kilometres (666 miles), the Araz River ranks among the longest in the Caucasus. Formerly entering the Caspian Sea and now joining to the Kura, the Araz plays an integral role in regional history. Traders and armies used the river as a highway, and it later marked the territorial border between Russia and Persian. But most intriguing is the association with the biblical River Gihon first mentioned in Genesis. The rich biodiversity with almost 70,000 birds from more than 200 species live along the Araz’s shores and wetlands.

23. Samur River

Beginning in Dagestan among springs and glaciers in the Greater Caucasus Mountains, Samur flows south before discharging into the Caspian Sea. The river itself only has a small portion in Azerbaijan forming part of the east-west border with Russia for more than 30 kilometres (18.7 miles). Two tributaries stretch south into Azerbaijan providing water for the Samur-Absheron Channel used for irrigation. Visiting the river and enjoying the views is possible on a day trip from Quba.

24. Naftalan

Not typically included in the guidebook’s top places to visit in Azerbaijan but worth a special mention. The small town of Naftalan near Ganja offers a weird type of spa treatment. Believed to date back more than 1,000 years and popularised by the Soviets, Azerbaijanis today visit the spa to bath in crude oil . Some believe bathing in this special grade of oil has health benefits including treating skin disorders and neurological problems. Adventurous tourists can try this experience for themselves.

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Our Homeland

The Homeland is a native land where we are born and grow up.  Our Homeland is Azerbaijan.  Regardless of what part of the world we live, we all should love and defend our Homeland. 

Our state is called the Republic of Azerbaijan. In Latin, “Republic” means “people’s business”.  Those ruling the state in such countries are elected by the people.  The people participates in managing their state.

The Republic of Azerbaijan was established on 28 May 1918.  Each year, we celebrate this day.  Ruled for long years by a state called USSR, our  country regained its independence on 18 October 1991.  Therefore, each year, 18th of October is celebrated as the Independence Day.

Our state is ruled by a president.  President is elected by the people. The President represents the state of Azerbaijan.  He is the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of our Armed Forces formed to defend our Homeland against the enemy.

President of the Republic of Azerbaijan is Ilham Aliyev. 

Laws of the state are passed by the National Assembly (Milli Majlis). The National Assembly has 125 members. They are elected by the people. Therefore, they are called also “national representatives”.

Azerbaijan is a democratic state. In a democratic state, rights of people are protected. People have a right to live, study, express their opinion, rest, acquire a flat, marry, and a number of other rights.  These rights are called human rights and protected by the state.   

Courts supervise protection of rights, and observation of rules.   Everyone is equal before law. 

Protection of children is the most important issue all over the world.  Taking care of children, protection of their rights is a duty of parents.  Our state takes control of how these duties are performed  by our parents.  And children too, should study well and assist, in the future, the state in  developing our Homeland further. 

Our state has been working on making sure that every human, a member of  our society, lives in peace, have sound  health, and is advantaged. Our state has been providing support for the development of our culture, education and healthcare, and protecting our nature and  people. 

The main legislation of our state is the Constitution of the Republic of Azerbaijan.  Our state language is Azerbaijani. Our national currency is the Azerbaijani Manat.

The capital of the Republic of Azerbaijan is the city of Baku.

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Guest Essay

The West Doesn’t Understand How Much Russia Has Changed

By Alexander Gabuev

Mr. Gabuev, the director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, wrote from Berlin.

Vladimir Putin’s trip to Beijing this week, where he will meet with Xi Jinping and top Chinese officials, is another clear demonstration of the current closeness between Russia and China.

Yet many in the West still want to believe that their alliance is an aberration, driven by Mr. Putin’s emotional anti-Americanism and his toxic fixation on Ukraine. Once Mr. Putin and his dark obsessions are out of the picture, the thinking goes , Moscow will seek to rebuild ties with the West — not least because the bonds between Russia and China are shallow, while the country has centuries of economic and cultural dependence on Europe.

This wishful view, however appealing, overlooks the transformation of Russia’s economy and society. Never since the fall of the Soviet Union has Russia been so distant from Europe, and never in its entire history has it been so entwined with China. The truth is that after two years of war in Ukraine and painful Western sanctions, it’s not just Mr. Putin who needs China — Russia does, too.

China has emerged as Russia’s single most important partner, providing a lifeline not only for Mr. Putin’s war machine but also for the entire embattled economy. In 2023, Russia’s trade with China hit a record $240.1 billion, up by more than 60 percent from prewar levels, as China accounted for 30 percent of Russia’s exports and nearly 40 percent of its imports.

Before the war, Russia’s trade with the European Union was double that with China; now it’s less than half. The Chinese yuan, not the dollar or the euro, is now the main currency used for trade between the two countries, making it the most traded currency on the Moscow stock exchange and the go-to instrument for savings.

This economic dependence is filtering into everyday life. Chinese products are ubiquitous and over half of the million cars sold in Russia last year were made in China. Tellingly, the top six foreign car brands in Russia are now all Chinese, thanks to the exodus of once dominant Western companies. It’s a similar story in the smartphone market, where China’s Xiaomi and Tecno have eclipsed Apple and Samsung, and with home appliances and many other everyday items.

These shifts are tectonic. Even in czarist times, Russia shipped its commodities to Europe and relied on imports from the West of manufactured goods. Russia’s oligarchs, blacklisted by most Western countries, have had to adapt to the new reality. Last month, the businessman Vladimir Potanin, whose fortune is estimated at $23.7 billion, announced that his copper and nickel empire would reorient toward China, including by moving production facilities into the country. “If we’re more integrated into the Chinese economy,” he said, “we’ll be more protected.”

From the economy, education follows. Members of the Russian elite are scrambling to find Mandarin tutors for their kids, and some of my Russian contacts are thinking about sending their children to universities in Hong Kong or mainland China now that Western universities are much harder to reach. This development is more than anecdotal. Last year, as China opened up after the pandemic, 12,000 Russian students went to study there — nearly four times as many than to the United States.

This reorientation from West to East is also visible among the middle class, most notably in travel. There are now, for example, five flights a day connecting Moscow and Beijing in under eight hours, with a return ticket costing about $500. By contrast, getting to Berlin — one of many frequent European weekend destinations for middle-class Russians before the war — can now take an entire day and cost up to twice as much.

What’s more, European cities are being replaced as Russian tourist destinations by Dubai, Baku in Azerbaijan and Istanbul, while business trips are increasingly to China, Central Asia or the Gulf . Locked out of much of the West, which scrapped direct flights to Russia and significantly reduced the availability of visas for Russians, middle-class Russians are going elsewhere.

Intellectuals are turning toward China, too. Russian scientists are beginning to work with and for Chinese companies, especially in fields such as space exploration, artificial intelligence and biotech . Chinese cultural influence is also growing inside Russia. With Western writers like Stephen King and Neil Gaiman withdrawing the rights to publish their work in Russia, publishers are expanding their rosters of Chinese works. Supported by lavish grants for translators from the Chinese government, this effort is set to bring about a boom in Chinese books.

Chinese culture will not replace Western culture as Russians’ main reference point any time soon. But a profound change has taken place. From the other side of the Iron Curtain, Europe was seen as a beacon of human rights, prosperity and technological development, a space that many Soviet citizens aspired to be part of.

Now a growing number of educated Russians, on top of feeling bitterness toward Europe for its punitive sanctions, see China as a technologically advanced and economically superior power to which Russia is ever more connected. With no easy way back to normal ties with the West, that’s unlikely to change anytime soon.

In his dystopian novel “ Day of the Oprichnik ,” Vladimir Sorokin describes a deeply anti-Western Russia of 2028 that survives on Chinese technology while cosplaying the medieval brutality of Ivan the Terrible’s era. With every passing day, this unsettling and foresighted novel — published in 2006 as a warning to Russia about the direction of travel under Mr. Putin — reads more and more like the news.

Alexander Gabuev ( @AlexGabuev ) is the director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin.

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