Three spectacular ancient cities.
Each on the crossroads of cultures.
I'm Janina Ramirez.
And I'm Alastair Sooke.
In this series, we'll be discovering the artistic influences that shaped the stories of
Beirut, Lisbon and Baku.
Helping make them some of the world's most exciting destinations.
Hi!
We'll delve into centuries of rich culture and tradition.
This place tells us a story that goes back two millennia.
And experience how art is reinvigorating the cities today.
We'll encounter breathtaking sights...
It's quite overblown, isn't it? It's totally overblown.
..and discover hidden gems.
Wow!
In this film, we'll be exploring the art and culture of Baku,
capital of Azerbaijan, the land of fire.
Home to the oldest oilfields on Earth.
And to musical traditions that reach back into the Persian past.
It's a former Soviet republic, independent since 1991.
And it's modernising at breakneck speed,
with towers made to look like flames.
And structures that resemble nothing else on Earth.
In Baku, Europe meets Asia.
The 19th-century oilmen of Baku spent their fortunes on buildings so
European that Baku was known as the Paris of the Caucasus.
But we'll also see medieval Islamic arches,
art that riffs on the Asian traditions of carpet making.
Art that reflects the grim realities of Soviet life.
It feels so special to see this up close.
Cemeteries that seems strangely joyful.
He could just jump off that plinth and start singing any second.
And art that criticises the current state of the nation.
I don't want to make people happy by my art. It's not my duty.
Because Azerbaijan is an authoritarian state
where cultural life is tightly controlled.
So, not our regular city break.
But Baku is a city keen to be noticed.
It wants to be a part of Europe.
It wants to be a tourist destination. In fact,
sometimes you could be forgiven for thinking that it wants to be London.
Well, we are in a London cab.
This is totally, totally surreal.
I mean, I really wasn't expecting this.
I think they are called here eggplants,
that is the nickname because of the aubergine colour on the outside.
And, apparently, the city authorities here bought a job lot
of these London taxis back in 2012.
Yeah, they bought a thousand of them for the Eurovision Song Contest
because they wanted to be able to drive all their visitors,
all their guests and dignitaries around in luxury.
Cheers! Thanks so much. Bye, then. Bye, now. Bye!
Wow, look at these stairs!
Incredibly grand staircase.
Now, it is, I hear it is many, many steps, more than it looks.
Right. So we have got a long walk up.
It's not as though Baku's lacking in luxury anyway.
These stairs feel like something from a Hollywood epic.
OK, getting closer!
Oh, you can start to see the Caspian.
Yes! Ooh, views of the sea!
Baku sits on the western edge of the Caspian Sea.
In Azerbaijan, Asia meets Europe.
It shares borders with Russia, Armenia and Iran.
In fact, until 1828, it was part of Iran, or Persia, as it was then known.
We're here. Uh-huh. My legs hurt.
So, loads of high-rises, lots of kind of gleaming, new architecture.
That's what I was expecting to see.
Really? You know, money flowing into the country, the whole oil boom,
a lot of building. I mean, the Flame Towers.
But I was looking forward to see... Oh, there it is. There's the medieval old town.
Where? Ah. You see, I'm excited about that. The higgledy-piggledy bit. Yes!
Your favourite part to any city.
SHE LAUGHS Find the medieval.
Yeah, but you can see how it's grown out from there and spread.
Yeah. It's quite the gleaming metropolis now, isn't it?
But there's one very important reason we've come up here -
to see what's been removed from this magnificent viewpoint.
This is going to surprise you, I've actually done some homework.
No way! On the net, I found some footage, which is incredible,
this. Look, there you go. So, here's the statue. Oh, God, it's enormous!
Yeah.
And you have to imagine this enormous statue, this massive,
massive granite plinth,
and then on top, this bronze, very overly heroic,
probably he didn't look anything like this at all,
man gesturing out, and, of course, it's not here any more.
The statue was of a man called Sergey Kirov,
one of the Soviet leaders responsible for annexing Azerbaijan for the Soviet Union in 1920.
But by 1934, he'd become too popular.
In the election for general secretary of that year,
he got more votes than Stalin.
Big mistake.
Stalin felt quite threatened, so this guy, Kirov,
ends up in Leningrad and he gets shot in the back of the neck,
he's killed. And then Stalin attends his funeral.
Five days later. I mean, it's a hypocrisy.
A quintessential Soviet story.
And then the final irony,
Moscow orders the construction of the statue for the man they had
assassinated.
When Azerbaijan wins its independence in the early '90s,
of course, that statue, this emblem of the Soviet state, dismantled.
Oh, my goodness, the head's coming off. So, decapitated.
This is the moment of Azerbaijani self-expression,
in a sense, isn't it?
I think it was a huge moment when they got their independence,
and this is very symbolic, to deconstruct it like this.
This is almost surreal.
This reminds me of sort of Monty Python animation with his head
bobbing around against the backdrop of the city.
In Baku, we're going to see evidence of what isn't here,
or what has been removed, or what has been adapted, or what's been changed.
We're going to have to look for traces of things.
The stories aren't always going to be as self-evident,
so I think we need to kind of keep on top of what we might find hidden.
One thing, though, isn't hidden at all. The Soviets came here in 1920,
seeking just one essential resource - oil.
And that's what we are going to explore first.
The oilfields are so central to Baku's history that I have to see them.
They're just ten minutes' drive from the heart of the city.
Oil money has transformed Baku twice.
The world's first true oil well was sunk here in 1846.
So Baku was ready for the invention of the petrol engine and the motor car.
There was this international thirst for oil,
and it became a sort of black, oozing liquid money
that was just everywhere.
You could dig and it would start to spurt up.
It was something that could be marketed,
that was the beginning of this great industrialised landscape that you still see in Baku today.
It was an economic miracle and an ecological disaster,
but the extraordinary profits created a new class in Baku -
the oil barons. And without those oil barons, I'd be underwater now.
That's how incredibly ambitious they were.
When they discovered there was oil beneath this part of the Caspian,
they reclaimed several square kilometres from the sea.
The amazing thing is, you can really smell the oil as it's being drilled
and produced and brought out of the ground.
Today, the nodding donkeys run unsupervised.
But in the early days, it was donkeys made of flesh and blood that
drew the oil to the surface, and there was always the risk of fire.
There's something quite surreal about this.
Next to this nodding donkey,
there is a slightly battered metal drum containing the stuff itself.
This is all oil.
Like a great big vat of balsamic vinegar. Look at this.
The early oil barons of Baku had become immensely wealthy.
To find out what they did with their money, I've been told that
historian and TV presenter Fuad Akhundov is the man to meet.
Fuad, how lovely to see you!
Good to see you, Nina. Welcome to Baku. Good to see you. Thank you! I am...
Looking at this building now behind us, it is absolutely beautiful, but,
to me, it looks pretty incongruous.
It looks different. Why?
Well, in fact, it is a little replica of Monte Carlo in Baku,
that was a local casino.
Oh, right. And this is the famous casino in Monte Carlo.
Oh, yes! The time it was built was the period of oil boom,
when the city of Baku was making, gosh,
half of the world's output in oil in 1901.
Amazing. And oil barons were kind of crazy guys.
They really wanted to make the city not only rich but flamboyant!
Right. They were really two towns in one in Baku, like kernel in a nut.
Right. So, outside the old wall,
you had a typical European city with a beautifully made grid,
with its streets straight and wide, with its houses nice and tall,
with its people noisy and greedy for money, like today.
The oil barons spent their money on mansions based on European models.
Baku became known as the Paris of the Caucasus,
but not all of the buildings they drew from were actually Parisian.
Ah! We're in Venice.
You really are, Nina. Yeah! I like your orientation sense because
this is a kind of Bakuvian Venice.
This is the building of the Muslim Charitable Society,
which now is the headquarters of the Academy of Sciences.
Yet, this is Ca' d'Oro.
I know, look at that, the shapes, everything.
But, once again, they didn't copy-paste it.
And the whole building was ordered by the richest, you can imagine.
Yeah! But reportedly, this dangerous local oil baron,
Musa Naghiyev, who had the reason to be close-fisted because the guy wasn't born with
a silver spoon in his mouth. He started from digging wells.
So, is he getting rich, then, because he's found oil on land he already owns? How does this work?
Well, actually... No, in most of the cases,
they started from bailing the wells, which was a horrible job,
and when it came with gas, the guys on top had to take out immediately because otherwise they've got
a dead body. Of course! So the mortality was quite high.
But, when private people like these guys could buy a piece of land,
and if you were lucky enough to get a gusher like this, and some gushers
were given names like Wet Nurse, Golden Bazaar, Devil Bazaar...
SHE LAUGHS Oh, my gosh.
..and so on.
You woke up a millionaire, so it was these crazy fortunes
that actually were flaunted into the streets of Baku
in the shape of these magnificent edifices,
because each oil baron wanted to outdo another one.
And so Baku became ever more luxuriously European,
until the collapse of the Russian Empire at the end of World War I.
And then, in 1920, the Bolsheviks came a-conquering,
desperate to secure Baku's oil.
I'm meeting Alastair outside a Soviet building that still stands.
20th-century building, neoclassical, have a look at the top.
It could be the sort of element of a Greek temple,
and then the odd detail
which is a completely different language altogether.
It's actually fascinating because, you know, we've seen examples
already of that Soviet history being erased after
Azerbaijan becomes independent, famously the Kirov statue.
Here we've got something different.
This is a building from the Soviet era that's been allowed to survive,
and it's the former Lenin Museum.
So, at some point, '50s, this arrives,
it's built, and inside it's devoted to Lenin's life and works.
I suppose it's because you'd recognise this style anywhere
in the world, whether you're in Washington or London,
this is the architecture that, you know, decisions are made within, that people learn within,
it's got all that grandeur to it.
There's a clear message that a building like this projects.
But not all Soviet buildings here are the same,
as I am beginning to notice.
Among the often overbearing grandeur,
there are touches of the eccentric and strange.
We're going for a cup of tea at the Pearl Cafe,
two minutes' walk from the Lenin Museum, slap bang on the seafront.
It's a Soviet-era building,
but it was built in the late '60s and it's great fun.
A little holiday made of cast concrete, mosaic and pebbles,
designed to tell you that you're having a lovely time.
Ah, here comes the tea.
The tea, oh, and we've got a cream tea, there's some jam.
Oh, my goodness. And are they scones?
This looks great. Not quite. A nice little snack there as well.
And a lot of sugar.
Yes. Thanks. Perfect.
Nina's Polish background means she's already familiar with different ways
of doing tea.
I turn to her for advice.
Now, the bit... Thanks very much. The bit I don't get,
does the jam relate to the incredibly sweet baklava-like thing,
or somehow does it relate to the tea? It relates to the tea. Now,
I have found out a bit about what we're supposed to do.
So, there's two ways to do this.
Obviously, you can see the tea, you don't have milk. Mm-hm.
And... You can have a lemon. You can... In fact, I will... So far, quite standard, yeah.
I will put some lemon in. Want a piece of lemon?
Absolutely. And then you put some jam...
Not in the tea? No, on the side, like this.
Go on, you've got to have a bit.
OK, so, let's get a couple of strawberries, yeah?
Yeah, OK? Take a little bit of jam on your teaspoon.
Oh, gosh, I can't break that.
Mix it in? No.
Don't put it in the drink.
Put it in your mouth. Oh, you put it in your mouth?
Right, fine, I can do that. Then you strain the tea through it.
OK? Oh, so you don't swallow?
No. This is the idea? Right. Jam in, sip.
And kind of suck. All right. I mean, it's lovely jam.
Mmm! Mmm, that's good. That is nice.
It is quite sick... It is quite sickly.
No, I like it. And when are you allowed to swallow
the strawberry? This is weird!
SHE LAUGHS
It's a good combo, I like it. Anyway, I'm going to have a bit more jam with my tea.
SHE LAUGHS
We want to look deeper into Baku's past.
We've been told that the tradition of carpet-making is fundamental to
Baku, and that's what we want to explore next.
While Alistair heads for the Carpet Museum, I'm going to meet an artist,
Faig Ahmed, whose work challenges the entire tradition
of carpet-making.
And this time, I'm travelling Soviet-style.
And I am in a Lada.
Now, these are an echo of past Soviet times
when all of the taxis would have looked like this.
It is a bit of a retro way to get around.
I personally like it.
I'm not sure about the safety.
No seat belts, no mod cons at all.
But, hey, it is a flavour of old Azerbaijan, I think.
It's rather fascinating because Faig's workshop
is a little way outside the city centre, so what I am getting is a whistle-stop tour
of exactly how far the glittering,
no-expense-spared city of Baku really extends.
And it isn't very far.
Soon enough, I'm driving down the roads where, as far as I can see,
no expense has been spent at all.
Ah!
Still, nice drive.
Nice driver, too.
Thank you!
I love this car.
SHE LAUGHS Thank you.
Faig shares this extraordinary space.
It's not all about art.
Traditional carpets are made here too, and in Azerbaijan,
weaving is traditionally a job for women.
So, this is the workshop.
Oh, this is amazing! What a space!
Salaam. So this lady is making a traditional carpet.
Gosh. Working from this plan along the top?
Yeah. Yeah. So this is the photo of the previous carpet.
Uh-huh. But this one, they know by heart.
Oh, OK! So they don't need any sketch, they don't need any...
They're very skilled. So these are the traditional ones,
but yours are made in here as well, are they? Yeah. OK. Yeah.
But whether they are art or entirely traditional,
the rugs here are all made the same way - individual knots of colour
made around the white vertical threads.
But Faig takes those traditional patterns and melts them,
makes them flow, connects them with the present day.
So, this one... Oh, this is one of yours? Oh! So, same technique,
but they are using the mat for this, because little, little...
Yeah. So this is what it will look like?
Yeah. This one, the actual, actual, the previous one.
So... That's amazing.
I love the idea that it looks like paint swirl.
It is incredible. It is, actually. Because anyway it's paint,
anyway it's oil. Yeah! Somehow.
Oil, it turns out, is something of a theme.
Faig is reminding us how much Azerbaijan has been changed
by this abundant resource.
Look at this. This looks like an oil slick.
The whole framework of the piece has just gone bonkers, hasn't it?
Actually, this has to be on the floor...
Oh, I see! Like it's dripped down?
It's kind of, yeah, it's kind of dripped.
The traditional shape is, you know, rectangular, edged, symmetrical.
You're making all of that confused. THEY LAUGH
This is what artists have to do, actually,
a little bit go out of the box.
But the carpet is very simple, but it's in a very complicated object.
But at the same time, it's a kind of very flexible object, too.
Yeah, there's a freedom.
But I love that, that it's... It's freedom in limitation.
While Nina has been dealing with the cutting edge of carpet art,
I'm about to plunge into the deep history of carpets in Azerbaijan,
and as you might expect of Baku by now,
the building it's in is brand-spanking-new.
Of all of Baku's shiny new modern buildings,
I think this one wins the prize for literalness,
because it's the Azerbaijan Carpet Museum,
and you have to hand it to the architect,
it does look remarkably like a big rolled-up rug.
Inside the Carpet Museum is a world of bewildering variety.
There are, of course, carpets everywhere.
Fortunately, the museum's director, Shirin Melikova,
is here to give me a helping hand.
There are carpets that are wonderfully simple,
there are carpets that are wonderfully ornate.
Carpets are the genetic code of our nation,
and all the historical periods
could be seen in the carpets.
All our history, traditions,
folklore and literature could be seen in our carpets.
You can see tribal carpets, you can see folk carpets,
you can see the court carpets,
and you can see really different patterns
and compositions and colours of each region.
Shirin takes me to another part of the museum
to show me something I really should have expected.
OK, these are not like any carpets I've seen before.
Or elsewhere in the museum.
What's going on? That is carpets from Soviet time
in a socialist realism style.
So you can see here the collective farmer,
the worker and the woman, who now are free,
and she can be educated
and she could be some engineer.
And of course, the oil. And of course, the oil.
You can see the industrial city, oil rocks.
And here you can see completely new way of patterns. You see the pipes...
Industry. Absolutely. Industrial carpets.
Carpet art is really alive
and it always reflects its epoch.
The Soviet moment was just the most recent conquest in Baku's turbulent
history. Nina's been desperate to get into the Old City,
parts of which date back to the 11th century.
We're travelling back in time,
to an era when Baku had been conquered by Arabs,
by expansionist Islam,
and was ruled by a dynasty called the Shirvanshahs.
Oh, this is me getting into my comfort zone.
Ooh! I'm happy to be in the Old City.
This was the bit I was really looking forward to.
I know. 14th century! It makes me happy that you're happy.
I am happy. Here by the twin gates. They are beautiful, those gates.
And very symbolic. It's where the Shirvanshah dynasty entered when they made Baku the capital city.
I like the fact that the scale of architecture here's completely different. Absolutely.
All of a sudden, I can't see any gleaming high-rises.
It's quite refreshing. Single-storey, very wind-y.
In fact, we've got maps,
and you can see how technically chaotic it looks here.
They do say people get lost here.
I'm going to find the Shirvanshah Palace.
Yes. I want to find...
In fact, the oldest mosque in Baku.
I have a feeling... I think we're here.
No, we're over here. Oh, no, no, we're over there. No, no...
Would you like to stay together? We are starting well.
SHE LAUGHS Would that be helpful?
I'm so sure of my internal compass that I don't need the map.
It's in my pocket if I do get lost, but I won't.
Nice hat.
Great - two flights of stairs.
I don't know which way to go.
Herb Street.
Harb Street, Harb Street!
I'm here! I'm basically about two metres away from the gates where I started.
I'm sure I've seen that laundry three times already.
But getting lost at least gives us the opportunity
to enjoy the Old City.
There's a lot here that was rebuilt in the 19th century,
but they always kept the narrowness of the medieval streets.
SHE SIGHS
Thank goodness. I've found it!
I'm in the very heart of the Shirvanshah Palace.
Most of the structure dates from the 15th century.
The dynasty that built it,
which ruled the area around Baku from the year 861,
survived successive conquests by bending with the winds.
In the face of Arab Muslims, they converted to Islam.
In the 13th century,
they swore loyalty to the Mongols and became minor Khans themselves.
They ducked, they dived and survived
until the middle years of the 16th century,
becoming the longest-lasting dynasty the Islamic world has ever seen.
This portal is a wonderful example of an iconic Islamic art.
So, unlike Christianity, Islam, right from the off,
specified that figures,
human beings, and indeed animals,
wouldn't be included in their visual arts
because only God can create the image or likeness of man and nature.
So instead, they focused on foliate decoration.
Here you can see beautiful vine
and fig leaves writhing over the surface in
these deeply carved geometric patterns.
And the other great source of inspiration for Islamic art and architecture
is of course the Qur'an, the sacred text.
Up there you can see two lines in Kufic script.
And they were able to develop beautiful series of art,
just by perfecting different types of calligraphy.
But this site is important, too,
because, while it could be used as a place for feasting,
there is also something underneath that's quite interesting.
So you can imagine the court all gathered together,
music taking place in here,
feasting and a vibrant court full of men and women.
And indeed, this particular area here is known as the milk well.
Underneath is a well of water,
and women would come here from the court, and they would go
down a set of stairs that leads into a secret chamber underneath here,
and down that they would pray for God, Allah,
to bring them the milk they need to nourish their babies.
Ah, at last, my mosque.
OK, it's taken a little while,
but finally I found the Siniggala mosque which I wanted to see.
And, well, it is actually a really beautiful 11th-century structure,
most of it. But have a look at that minaret.
Because right at the top you can see, to the left,
there is a much newer stone, and there's a reason for that.
It is because, if we go back to the 18th century,
in the 1720s, the Russian tsar, Peter the Great,
sent a fleet to Baku to conquer the city and the surrounding area.
And a cannonball hit the minaret and completely shattered
that side of the top of it.
Things were not looking good, but there's one thing you can rely on here in Baku, and that is the wind.
Suddenly the weather completely changes
and the fleet was driven away.
And of course, for the people of Baku, it seemed like a wonderful
example of divine providence saving the city.
Mosque found, lesson of centuries of Russian interest in Baku
well learnt, time to find Nina.
My goodness, what a maze. I was getting worried! SHE LAUGHS
I thought we'd never see each other again.
It has been good, though. Yeah. I love it, I love getting lost
in places like this. I know. It is exciting.
That's part of the experience, isn't it? You actually have to.
In the Old City, Baku seems comfortable with its past,
but we're both becoming aware that its Soviet history hasn't been
tidied away as totally as we first thought.
I'm going to visit a building just outside the northern walls
of the Old City, the Nizami Museum of National Literature,
named after a 12th-century poet.
And I'm going to visit a rather celebratory cemetery.
Have a look at the shape, the structure,
the underlying solidity of this building.
In my head, it once looked like a building at the top of the square
which is clearly based on European models in a classical tradition -
lots of pilasters with fancy Corinthian capitals,
balustrades across the roof, you can still see some here -
but something happens to this building in the 20th century.
The Soviets decide that, yes,
let's have a museum named after the 12th-century Persian poet Nizami.
And I think part of the reason for that is because you have this
fascinating moment in Soviet history where at that moment Azerbaijan is a
Soviet state, but if you like,
the Soviets want to signal that the people who live here can express their own identity in some sense,
and so this essentially neoclassical 19th-century building is radically
overhauled. You can see, all of a sudden, it looks radically different.
The facade becomes very Islamic in terms of ornament and design,
those beautiful tiled niches,
and in each niche there are statues of different writers,
all born within the borders of modern Azerbaijan.
And then in the middle, you can't forget this.
A Soviet star, right in amongst all that wonderful curling Islamic decoration.
The Soviets were encouraging loyalty to both Azerbaijan
and the Soviet Union.
This was standard practice in every Soviet republic,
but as a strategy,
it runs a risk that one day national identity may come to matter more.
I've been told that if I want to see a celebration of the importance of
being Azerbaijani, this is the place, the Avenue of Honour.
It's a cemetery to the honoured dead of Azerbaijan.
And its foundation was ordered in 1948,
smack dab in the middle of Soviet times.
Still in keeping with those twin Soviet aims of pride
in your individual republic and pride in the Soviet Union itself.
But there's definitely something bubbling up here.
A positive pleasure taken in the very idea of being Azerbaijani.
Not all cemeteries are sad.
All of the commemorative statues, plaques,
they're clearly in the social realist style, but it's not sad,
tragic social realism.
This is joyous, exuberant, slightly over-the-top.
I mean, look at this example here.
This is commemorating Rashid Behbudov.
He was a star of the screen and a singer.
If you just look at the statue here,
he could just jump off that plinth and start singing any second.
He could do a duet with fellow singer Muslim Magomayev,
Azerbaijan's answer to Tom Jones.
In fact, after walking around here for a while,
I'm beginning to think that it's actually dedicated to practitioners
of jazz-handing.
I like to call this happy realism.
There are composers and pianists.
Here's one, cigarette still in hand.
There are poets and traditional musicians.
Here's an optimistic politician.
And here's the comedian and actress
Nasiba Zeynalova, smiling.
You get the feeling that the intention of an enormous number of
these sculptures is not to remind us that these people are dead.
They're trying to remind us that these people were very much alive.
So far, it's been statues and buildings that have been our clues to Baku's past.
I want to see if this same story of gathering national pride can be
found in Azerbaijan's art, so I'm visiting the National Art Museum,
and I'm looking for just one work,
a sombre masterpiece by a man from Baku, Tahir Salahov,
who was young in the '50s,
and whose father was killed on Stalin's orders.
It isn't on display.
It's only just arrived back home in Azerbaijan from a show in Moscow,
and it has something to tell me, I think,
about life here in the middle years of the 20th century.
It feels so special to see this up close.
It's such a powerful and haunting... this is unforgettable, this work.
I think, for me, the power of this painting is its ambiguity,
and you see that at once in the light of it, this gloomy,
strange half-light.
It could be dawn, it could be after the sun has set.
And in amongst the gloom, some details start to emerge that
what it's saying about Azerbaijan, the spirit of the country,
its condition, round about 1960, when this work was painted.
The dirt on the coat.
Wrinkles, lines of worry.
A generally slightly grubby, grimy, scuffed quality.
This is not socialist realism, it's not about the heroism of the worker,
it's not a piece of blunt propaganda for a regime.
It's something new.
It's something that Salahov,
the artist who painted this, was pioneering,
known as severe realism, severe style, and it has that austerity,
that severity, that's immediately palpable.
I feel if you look at his face, this central character,
he's not NOT a hero - he's got a grubby coat,
but he's not someone pathetic.
Instead, he's quite defiant, I think.
That glare, that face is confrontational.
He's letting you know in that stare that life doesn't have to be this way at all.
Maybe I'm reading too much into this,
but this painting speaks to me of a dissatisfaction
with the Soviet regime, a pride in the people of Azerbaijan.
And the breaking point came in 1990 as the Soviet Union came undone.
I'm close to where we started.
Across the hill from the great viewing platform where we began,
there's this hugely dignified monument.
It reaches back in time to the Islamic architecture of Azerbaijan's
pre-Soviet past.
Each arched doorway is narrowed and stretched upwards,
almost as though the entire building is yearning, reaching for the sky.
Inside, there is an eternal flame.
It burns for the citizens of Baku who died in what's called
Black January, January of 1990,
when 26,000 Soviet troops with tanks came here to suppress a movement for
Azerbaijan to secede from the USSR.
At least 134 people died, possibly many more.
Many of these cars were occupied when the tanks rolled over them.
And someone must have thought this bus was full of very dangerous people.
Most of the population of Baku attended the funeral.
Coffins covered in red carnations moved through them to their final
resting place,
on the hill where Kirov's statue would stand for a few more months.
In the avenue leading to the monument, the Avenue of Martyrs,
there are individual plaques for those who died at the hands
of the Soviet troops, with photographs of each human face.
It's one of those moments where the historical date is set in stone.
It's almost like it's an architectural full stop,
it marks this punctuation point in history.
And it's clear that the events of Black January
were crucial, because from that moment on,
being Soviet was so much less important than being Azerbaijani.
And I can't help thinking this is exactly the sort of moment into which a strong leader will step.
I'm still in the Avenue of Honour, where nobody seems entirely dead,
and I'm approaching a statue that's all about strong leadership.
This huge statue here commemorates Heydar Aliyev,
the president of the independent Republic of Azerbaijan from October 1993.
Now, he doesn't really feel dead to the people of Azerbaijan because he is so important tothem.
In many ways, he is seen as the saviour of the country from that period of post-Soviet chaos.
Heydar Aliyev had governed Azerbaijan for many years
in Soviet times. He won the election with 99% of the vote.
He died 14 years ago of heart disease and was succeeded by his son, Ilham Aliyev.
It sounds more like a monarchy.
A large part of the work of the last 14 years has involved remembering
the father. Keeping him alive has become one of the purposes of Baku.
This is the statue of Heydar Aliyev in Heydar Aliyev Park,
with the Heydar Aliyev Concert Hall in the middle distance.
There's a Heydar Aliyev Avenue, too, six lanes of traffic,
and it leads here, to a building that's one of the reasons why Alistair and I wanted to visit
Baku in the first place.
What about this, then!
It is gorgeous, don't you think?
I do. I mean, it's hard, you can't really find anything bad to say
about this. It has to be celebrated.
And it makes me think of the effect of really spectacular stark-itecture.
You know, this was designed by Zaha Hadid, opened in 2012,
and I think is the reason, in many ways,
why Baku, as a city, is now on people's maps as a cultural tourist
destination. You know, this is world-famous already, that quickly.
It is so outstanding, partly because of its setting,
because all around us are Soviet blocks, cubes, high-rises,
and there are some interesting shape to some of the more modern
architecture, but this is just stand-out, and it's white, it's gleaming, it's spectacular!
I think we're agreed, it's great architecture.
The amazing thing is, it puts me in mind as well, slightly,
of a big recent cultural story in the Middle East.
You see great development in places like Abu Dhabi,
where they're bringing, building these spectacular buildings
as museums, and they're filling them with world-class masterpieces -
in the case of Abu Dhabi, with works on loan from the Louvre.
Well, it's going to be interesting to see what's inside here, isn't it?
It's going to be very interesting.
Inside, dream-sequence architecture.
It's a world of glossy heated floors and pure white curves.
Insane sightlines to higher floors.
Sweeping stairways,
built for someone, or something, considerably bigger than us.
It also contains an exhibition of models of Baku's buildings, old...
This is sort of an example of the Parisian chic.
..and new. This is where we are, Nina!
SHE GASPS That's meta, isn't it?
Look! A space inside a space!
I love it.
Are there little versions of us in there?
It's all gone a bit Doctor Who.
But a very large amount of the inside of the Heydar Aliyev Centre
is devoted to - who else?
Heydar Aliyev.
Strong on branding.
On the first floor there's an entire museum devoted to his life,
with a soundtrack, celestial music.
CELESTIAL MUSIC PLAYS
Gosh, there's more photos of him
than I have of myself in my own home.
It's a pleasure to see so many.
Many, many pictures.
Hmm...
What do you think of this, Nina?
I... Careful what you say, the president is listening.
Yes. The walls have ears.
It's certainly an...elaborate celebration.
It's a very completist celebration.
Yes.
So this extraordinary structure is in service to the regime.
We want to see art that's free, unsupervised, uncensored.
Hard to find in a country where many artists live in exile.
I'm going to look for it in the past, in ancient rock art.
And I've had word of an artist with a reputation as something of a
critical voice.
Right now, she's working on a large private commission for someone who
collects pictures from Azerbaijan's recent history,
and Sabina Shikhlinskaya's subject is, of course, oil.
Sabina, hi.
Hi. Alastair. Hello. It's so good to meet you.
Nice to meet you. Yes!
And so... Right, my understanding is that this is a temporary studio.
Yes. Just work for these 20 canvases.
20? Mural, yes.
Gosh. Well, you need high ceilings for these. They're big, grand works.
Yeah. I've been looking at the work of Salahov, and, I mean, this,
as a first impression,
feels like it's perhaps indebted in some way to that.
You're very smart. I'm making them the same big, strong guys,
like social realism artists, they were doing at that time,
but in my case, like, they are not the real ones.
They are like monuments.
I mean, tell me about this.
I couldn't help, as soon as I walked in,
this feels like a grand, abstract expressionist homage, if you like.
With this glistening...
I guess that's meant to be...
It's like an oil slick, isn't it? Yes, it is the real oil.
The black is REAL oil?
Yes, it's real oil, which I am using now as an art material, because,
first of all, I like to use strange materials for my art.
The second is shooting by the meaning,
because my history of the oil starting from the catastrophe,
from the environmental catastrophe.
Well, it's fascinating, because I'm getting the sense,
as you're talking about these works, that, you know, your...
Correct me if I'm wrong. Your attitude towards the oil boom here is a complicated one.
Of course, to have, you know, sometimes people asking...
"In your country, in your history, are you happy to have petrol?
"Or it's happiness or it is disaster?"
And it's a good question because it can be both.
So I don't want to make people happy by my art. It's not my duty.
I will not criticise our democracy, you know,
because we are too young for that.
Of course it's not the best model.
It's open that it's not.
It's like this. But we still have time to change.
But another thing we are already late to do,
with this amount of money which came from the oil,
so we could be much better with the education and with the social
insurance for the people, with the medicine.
Unfortunately, we didn't do that.
I wasn't expecting to meet an artist who would speak so openly and be
this, if you like, outspoken.
So, I'm criticising my own country sometimes, like my own child,
cos I would like that it would be better and I know that there is the
potential to be better.
I think that the critical attitude
is uncomfortable for people who really should be criticised.
With the stupid decisions of some big ministers and the institutions.
So the history of the last ten years showed that a lot of...
Lots of money was...
Funds were stolen from the country by the people who had the very big positions.
Sabina's work, and her critical attitude, are inspired by a love for
her country, and she is indeed a brave and independent voice.
You know, she's a lady, clearly, with this very profound soul,
if you like, that matches the soul,
the national soul that she sees around her,
and it's definitely, to a degree,
allayed any fears I may have had about
this culture here being co-opted today by certain forces at work.
You know, by the state.
Actually, in her case, you know what? It isn't.
It's an honour to have met her.
Alastair has been looking for an artist who's working freely in the
present day, and I'm driving out to a place called Gobustan to see art
from a time before governments, before money, before history.
Once this insane landscape of collapsed cliffs was the shoreline
of the Caspian Sea.
In the 1930s, labourers discovered surfaces layered with carvings,
outlines of animals and dancing human beings.
Oh, they're all starting to come into focus now.
Wow. So we have got a really old
outline here of a male figure.
This is... This is early.
This is probably
upper Palaeolithic, early Mesolithic.
And then, next to him, this huge, beautiful bison.
Look at it. It's enormous.
That's the muzzle, there, the nose,
and the horn coming up,
and then it curves right the way across the rock.
But here you've got a woman, the shape of a woman.
There's her head.
Again incorporating some shells,
and her shoulders curve round like this.
And she's holding some sort of a stick. Is it a weapon?
Is it a javelin, a spear?
Who knows? But then it comes down, narrows down,
and then she has these fabulous big hips.
And what you can see is
the Mesolithic bison
actually cuts through her,
so she is older.
She is probably Palaeolithic.
This is such an early representation of the female form.
What was their purpose?
Are these images part of a religion?
And what drew people to make those
images precisely here in this shattered world?
Oh, my gosh.
I'm finding it intensely moving, being in this ancient site,
with the Caspian Sea behind me and the evidence of those incredible
natural resources, gas and oil.
But when I look at these carvings in the rock,
they remind me that human beings have been drawn here for shelter,
for the wealth of the sea, the riches of the earth,
and for a chance to express themselves artistically and creatively,
for over 15,000 years.
A landscape like this can never really change.
All human beings can do is leave their marks upon it.
And there's something else we've been saving till dusk -
more evidence of the extraordinary nature of the landscape and geology
that surrounds Baku.
It's a hill called Yanar Dag,
where the earth burns, perpetually...
..and has for thousands of years.
I've been so excited about coming here.
I know. And there it is!
That is magic!
Fire coming out of the ground!
I mean, this is Azerbaijan, the land of fire.
Yeah. And at last, literally, we're seeing this stuff.
Well, this is one of the most
extraordinary things I have ever seen.
It feels like it must be some sort of man-made entertainment,
but it isn't. You know, the story is that this hillside has been burning like this for millennia.
To me, even in our modern day, this is quite a spiritual experience.
I'm finding this quite a spiritual thing,
to see fire coming out of the earth, naturally, and so, Zoroastrianism,
that religion that goes back around this area...
Of course, you know, if you're seeing fire appear out of the earth,
you're going to create a religious framework where fire is central.
It's funny, the more time we spend by these flames,
in a sense the more sacred they become,
but it's also making me think about how ingenious,
enterprising we are as a species, mankind,
that somehow people have been able to harness and tap this natural
resource, turn it into something economically profitable
which completely defines and shapes a culture,
and at the same time I feel quite humble being here,
because these flames supposedly have been burning for thousands of years
on this hillside, and that's quite a sobering thought, in a way.
As I say, humbling.
Yeah, I think being here is making me feel quite insignificant,
actually, in the tides of thousands of years of natural resources.
Yeah, humble's definitely the word. Amazing.
It's a wonderful place.
We linger until the darkness has fallen completely,
the better to enjoy the flames.
They are beautiful but inescapable.
This geology of oil and gas and fire was always going to shape the
culture, identity, history of any human beings who settled here.
No wonder that when the time came for the construction of the other
bold architectural statement that Baku's famous for,
they were inspired by the curve of living flames.
At night, the Flame Towers' linked LED displays flicker with the patterns of fire itself,
and proudly wave the flag first sewn in 1990.
We're back in town.
Before we go, we are heading for a performance of Azerbaijan's national
folk music, mugham.
We're expecting fire here, too.
I've heard its spirit is captured in
a line by a 16th-century Azeri poet.
"May my miserable soul be lit by the fire of love."
THEY PLAY AND SING MUGHAM
It's wonderful music and, yes,
just like a fire, it flares up and dies down again.
It's an ancient music with Persian roots,
and it reminds me of Azerbaijan's own complicated history.
All of those conquests, good reasons to grieve,
then rise above the grief.
We have come out of a beautifully warm mugham club.
Can I say this is madness?
Yeah. I don't know about you, but, you know, this was,
of all the places we've been to, the city I knew least about before coming.
I think what's really struck me is that its location on the edge of the
Caspian, looking north towards Russia,
looking west towards Europe and Turkey, and then, you know,
east towards the Islamic world,
all of that has had an impact on the identity of Azerbaijan.
You know, there's this sense of deep history that you've seen,
the rock art. And then at the same time it's all about now.
You know, this is so much a country that's trying to project its prestige
on the international stage at the moment.
It's clearly a moment when the people ruling the country are keen to define that identity,
and consequently it's presenting this quite glossy, shiny, sleek,
perhaps not wholly attractive facade to the rest of the world.
And in a sense I'm drawn more to places like this.
Yeah. The Old City. The wonderful mugham tradition.
And the dynamic is surprising in mugham in the same way
that Baku has surprised.
HE SINGS MUGHAM
MUSIC SLOWS DOWN AND GETS QUIETER
MUSIC GETS FASTER AND LOUDER AND COMES TO AN END
APPLAUSE