Baku (Baki) History

History

The name Baku might derive from the Persian bad kube (city of winds), fitting given the gale-force xəzri wind that comes howling in off the Caspian once or twice a month. Or perhaps it comes from the ancient Caucasian word bak (sun, or god), hinting at the area’s ancient role as a centre for fire worshippers millennia ago. Either way, Baku’s first burst of glory came when regional rulers, the Shirvanshahs, moved their capital here following an 1191 earthquake that destroyed their main city Şamaxı. Wrecked by Mongol attacks, then vassal to the Timurids, Baku only returned to brilliance under Shirvanshah Khalilullah I (1417–65), who completed his father’s construction of a major palace complex. However, the Şirvan dynasty was ousted in 1501 when Azeri Shah Ismail I (remembered as poet ‘Xatai’ in Azerbaijan) sacked Baku and then forcibly converted the previously Sunni city to Shia Islam.

When Peter the Great captured the city in 1723, its population was less than 10, 000, its growth hamstrung by a lack of trade and drinking water. For the next century Baku changed hands several times between Persia and Russia, before being definitively ceded to the Russians with agreements in 1806, 1813 and 1828.

Oil had been scooped from surface diggings around Baku since at least the 10th century. However, when commercial extraction was deregulated in 1872 the city rapidly became a boomtown. Workers and entrepreneurs arrived from all over the Russian Empire, swelling the population by 1200% in under 30 years.

Baku’s thirst was slaked by an ambitious new water-canal bringing potable mountain water all the way from the Russian border, and the city’s desert image was softened by parks nurtured using specially imported soil. By 1905 Baku was producing around 50% of the world’s petroleum and immensely rich ‘oil barons’ built luxurious mansions outside the walls of the increasingly irrelevant Old City. Meanwhile, most oil workers lived in appalling conditions, making Baku a hotbed of labour unrest and revolutionary talk. Following a general strike in 1904, the Baku oil workers negotiated Russia’s first-ever worker-management contract. But tensions continued to grow.

In the wake of the two Russian revolutions Baku’s history became complex and very bloody with a series of brutal massacres between formerly neighbourly Armenian and Azeri communities. When the three south Caucasus nations declared their independence in 1918, Bolshevik-led Baku refused to join Azerbaijan’s Democratic Republic. In response Turkish and Azeri troops marched (very slowly) towards Baku. Before they arrived, Baku’s leadership was toppled by pro-Russian (but anti-Bolshevik) Mensheviks and a secret British force sailed in from Iran to help them ‘defend’ the city (well, OK, the oilfields) against the Turks (Britain’s WWI enemies). On 20 September 1918, 26 of the former Bolshevik leaders (the ‘26 Commissars’) were rounded up in Baku and shipped across the Caspian to Turkmenistan, where they were taken into the desert and shot. Russia held the British responsible for their deaths and later communist propaganda portrayed the Commissars as great Soviet martyrs, their monuments appearing all across the USSR (there’s still one in Baku’s Sahil Gardens).

Whatever the reality, Baku’s Anglo-Menshevik defence crumbled and the British withdrew ignominiously, their ships slipping away in darkness. However, in the end-game of WWI, the Turks were forced to evacuate too. Less than two years later, on 28 April 1920, the Red Army marched into Baku.

In 1935 the search for oil moved into the shallow coastal waters of the Caspian. A forest of offshore platforms and derricks joined the tangle of wells and pipelines on land. Investment dwindled after WWII and only really resumed in earnest after independence in 1991. Since 1994, however, foreign oil consortia have spent billions exploring these resources and for reasons as much political as economic the world’s second-longest oil pipeline, BTC, was built to Ceyhan in Turkey, ensuring that Azeri oil could be exported safely and quickly to the West without transiting Russia or Iran. Especially since BTC went online in 2005, Baku has been booming. As property prices head for London-style highs, the skyline has been transformed by hundreds of new multistorey towers. But get-rich-quick attitudes have meant a shabby disregard for planning standards. Engineers warned that poor construction techniques, corrupt practices and cost-cutting would make many new buildings unsafe, especially given Baku’s seismic activity. These fears came horrifyingly true in summer 2007, when a half-finished 16-storey tower collapsed, trapping and killing dozens of people.

More positively, boom money has also paid for the cleaning and attractive lighting of many grand old buildings in the city centre along with the construction of a series of seasonal musical fountains.