Baku and Back to

August 23, 2010

We flew to Baku Azerbaijan, a neighbor of Georgia on Saturday Aug.14th and returned Sunday night, Aug 15th. We got up at 3:00 a.m. so it was a short night. We went with our friends Laurie and Jock Conly. Jock works in Baku one week each month so we timed it on a week he would be traveling there. Our flight was a brief one hour and 20 minutes. After checking into our hotel which was quite lovely, we went upstairs to the 20th floor for breakfast in a glass dining area where we could look out over the city and Caspian Sea. Let’s just say, air quality is non existent here. By 1905 Azerbaijan was supplying half the world’s oil. You can see oil derricks everywhere including in the Caspian Sea which was described in my tour book as ‘polluted with raw sewage, oil, pesticides and chemical fertilizers.’ Much of this took place under the Soviet regime. Baku sits on the Caspian Sea surrounded by semi desert. It is a city of four million people, the same as all of Georgia.

Because it is a richer city than Tbilisi, we saw newly paved roads, buildings in good repair, and real sidewalks that were paved, level and didn’t have any open manholes without covers like we have in TBS. Many of the Soviet era apartment houses seemed to have been replaced within the city or upgraded so they didn’t have that Soviet look that is so depressing. After breakfast we walked to the carpet museum. What a treat that was! They had 1000 carpets from all the regions of Azerbaijan as well as some from Iran and Dagestan. So much beauty in one place. It is easy to see how people living in this region can get ‘addicted’ to buying carpet. They cost much less than at home and you have so much variety. More about that later.

After the carpet museum we went to the Historical Museum that was recently restored. This museum is housed in the 1896 former home of one of Baku’s greatest oil barons. It was filled with furnishings from the period and it also an enjoyable experience. Baku was hotter than TBS so we meandered towards the hotel for a rest but stopped at a sidewalk café near the sea for a cold drink. We noticed most Azeris were drinking hot tea while we ordered cold water. Back at the hotel, we napped and showered before ventured out again. The highlight of the trip was the ‘Ali and Nino’ tour. Ali and Nino is a novel written in the 1930’s about a romance between an Azeri Muslim boy and a Orthodox Christian girl from Tbilisi that took place in Baku in 1917-20. The tour guide was fabulous, a passionate man who created this tour because he loved the story so much. So we walked the streets that Ali and Nino walked, we sat in the park where Ali and Nino courted, saw the house where they had their graduation party. All the while, our guide read passages from the book. In addition he had collected over 800 photographs of the area from the turn of the century so we could see how it looked in Ali and Nino’s time. All four of us had read the book shortly after coming to Georgia so we were familiar with the story. It was a two hour tour that started at 6:00 so afterwards we walked to a rooftop restaurant again overlooking the sea and city and had a good meal. We walked back to our hotel and headed to bed.

On Sunday we slept in and after breakfast walked to Old Town where we wandered streets and visited the Palace of the Shirvanshahs. This is a sandstone palace mostly unfurnished that was the seat of northeastern Azerbaijan’s ruling dynasty during the Middle Ages. It was restored in 2003 and is a beautiful complex but it was hotter than hell inside with no air conditioning and very small windows. We didn’t tarry. We sat in the shady courtyard and visited for a while before leaving. Jock suggested stopping in a carpet shop. We ducked into one and it was stifling so I had no interest or energy to even look at the wares. Further along we saw another shop and ‘popped’ in for a look. It was air-conditioned so guess what? We lingered…for three hours! Ron and I bought two carpets and another mafrash. Laurie and Jock once again out spent us and bought three carpets. They swore it is their last carpets. Ron also said this was our last one. We did a similar escapade with them in Istanbul if you remember reading about it in an earlier blog.

Afterwards, we went around the corner to the restaurant we had tried to get into the night before and had a lovely lunch sitting in the shade outside. We meandered back to the hotel to rest before grabbing a bite for dinner and boarding our plane to return to TBS. The Conlys stayed on as Jock was spending the week working there and Laurie was returning to TBS on Tuesday. As it turned out she flew to TBS and the plane had to go back to Baku before landing due to a trerrible rain storm. She spent a few hours at her Baku hotel and they flew back to TBS in the morning. Although it was a short trip we were able to a pack a lot in and see everything we had hoped to see in the two days.

On Saturday Aug 22 we went on a CLO tour (embassy sponsored) of Dmanisi, a town about two hours from TBS that has a wonderful archeological dig. Here they have found four skulls of hominins that are 1.8 million years old. Boy do I ever feel young! These early species of Homo erectus appear to be the first hominins to have left Africa. The site sits on top of a wooded plateau and two rivers flow through deep gorges on either side of the plateau before meeting at its tip ‘where the land rises like a prow over fields and pastures’.

Almost two million years ago a series of volcanic eruptions flooded the site with lava. Later more eruptions dumped tons of ash on top of the rock. Buried by later ash falls, the bones of these early humans lay entombed until the 1990s when archeologists excavating the medieval ruins nearby began finding very old bones beneath the crumbled cellars. We visited the current dig site and the researchers were working on removing a complete bison skull very close to the area where the four skulls were found. Scientists continue to analyze the more than 50 human bones found at the site, which holds the largest cluster of Homo erectus remains ever found in one place. An archeologist from Wellesley College gave us a tour of the site and showed us replicas of the four skulls found there as well as letting us walk down close to the current site where they are working. It was a thrill of a lifetime. Can you tell my undergraduate degree was in anthropology?

After an hour here we walked up to the medieval fortress and 13th century church where a Georgian archeologist gave us a tour of the remains. Dmanisi dates to the 9th century. The site encompasses 32 acres enclosed by fortress walls. An entire city of residential buildings, baths, artisans’ workshops, caravanserais and public buildings once flourished here, of which only a small portion was excavated by archeologists in 1932, again in 1960 and in the years following. This site is located 12 miles from the Armenian border. This city thrived in the 13th century but Tamerlane’s invasions of the 14th century ended its glory days and by the 17th century no one was living here. We were allowed to climb all over the area and go into the building that was once a bath house and see how the water was brought into the building and heated before going into the bath.

Afterwards we boarded our bus and headed to a nice spot by the river for a lovely picnic lunch. Most of us seemed to fall asleep on the way back to TBS. Another great adventure in this beautiful country.