We arrived in Baku after dark at 7:50pm last night. Our journey from Sydney was fabulous on Turkish Airlines via Kuala Lumpur to Istanbul (on an Airbus A350-900, registration TC-LGY), connecting with an Airbus A321 (registration TC-LTG) into Baku. Because of the current closure of Iranian airspace, the flight into Istanbul flew over several of the areas we were due to be visiting over the following three weeks – over Baku and then west across Azerbaijan and Georgia. It was somewhat confronting to see that much of the Lesser Caucasus Mountains in Georgia, where we were scheduled to visit in about a week’s time, were covered with snow. Maybe we should have brought some warmer clothing???
After clearing immigration and customs in Baku’s very modern and impressive Heydar Aliyev Airport, we met our driver and took a minibus to the Ibis Hotel, our base for the coming three nights. After just over 30 hours travel since leaving home, we were certainly relieved to arrive at the hotel, hoping for a solid night’s sleep…
…which we may have had if we had not been woken by an unwelcome phone call at 4:30am the following morning (today – Saturday). It was difficult to get back to sleep after that, especially as the room was over-heated and difficult to cool, so we rose and enjoyed an early breakfast.
Following breakfast, we went on a 5-kilometre walk from the hotel to the Caspian Sea waterfront at Ağ Şahar Bulvari Park, near the spectacular white architecture of the Victory Museum Arch and several other futuristic mirror-fronted high-rise buildings. The white archway over the Victory Museum was especially impressive. A new construction (just two and a half years old), it was built to celebrate Azerbaijan’s victory over Armenia in a 44-day conflict in 2022 to reassert control over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. It was immediately clear to us that Azerbaijan has been using its oil revenues since the breakup of the USSR to create a visually impressive urban landscape with a mix of stunning new architecture and very well renovated (and often updated) Soviet-era apartment blocks.
At 11:00am, we attended a briefing meeting with Rich Beal, the leader of the 19-member group of travellers with whom we would be sharing the subsequent three weeks of travel through the Caucasus. A member of the Koryo Tours team, I had travelled with Rich previously through Tajikistan, so it was great to re-kindle a long friendship, introduce him to Di, and meet our fellow travellers.
The theme of this, the first day’s visits, was “modern Baku”, so it made sense to begin our tour with a visit to Baku’s most spectacular (many would say iconic) building, the Heydar Aliyev Centre. I had been blown away by this building when I visited the exterior around sunset in 2018, and today’s visit was no less impressive although quite different – partly because the grounds at the front were boarded off for renovations (making views of the front of the building difficult), and also because the focus of today’s visit was the building’s interior.
Suffice to say that there is no other building in the world that matches the Heydar Aliyev Centre’s curved architecture and interior use of space. The exhibits we saw, comprising models of famous buildings in Azerbaijan, carpets, clothing, innovative and modern works of art, and so on would be special in any building, but under the curves and flows of this building’s architecture, they were simply breathtaking.
Our next stop was lunch in the Ancir Restaurant on the Caspian Sea waterfront. The short drive of a few kilometres took almost an hour because of the heavy traffic in central Baku, but when we finally arrived, we were treated to a lovely smorgasbord of traditional Azerbaijani dishes, finished off by the curious “mince-meat, walnuts and pomegranate paste” dessert.
Another inordinately slow drive brought us to the foot of another of Baku’s distinctive buildings, the mirror-clad Flame Towers opposite Azerbaijan’s Parliament Building. We walked from there through very sobering lines of memorial plaques to Turkish soldiers who were killed in 1918 fighting to free Baku from Russian Tsarist control of Baku and enable Azerbaijan to gain independence from the Russian Empire to a viewing platform that provided a panoramic vista across the city of Baku.
After getting our photos at the viewing platform, we walked back towards the Flame Towers and took the funicular railway down the steep hill to the Carpet Museum, helpfully shaped like a long roll of carpet and housing a three-storey display of the history of Azerbaijan’s famous carpet making traditions. The designs on display were true works of art, culminating in some creative artistic carpets on display on the third (top) floor of the building.
It was 6:15pm when our visit concluded and we returned to our hotel, ready to enjoy a snack and cool drinks before trying to catch up on some much-needed sleep.
