PHOTOGRAPHS BY RENA EFFENDIS
HE LOOKS LIKE the Soviet
Union come to life. Like the
women who would shuffle
through Red Square in boxy
overcoats on even the warmest days.
Her hair is dyed a faded red, her stolid
face is rectangular, like a fur hat.
We’re dining at adjacent tables, Afa
and I, at Firuze, a popular restaurant
in downtown Baku, the capital of
Azerbaijan. At 50 years old, Afa has
spent half her days living free of
Soviet hegemony. Yet she speaks
Russian to her teenage daughter.
She sips vodka. And it seems utterly
fitting that she has ordered Chicken
Kiev, a dish named for another
capital the Soviets dominated.
Afa’s daughter, Aytac, could have
stepped straight from a fashion
catwalk. She wears a white blouse
that shows off her upper arms and
shoulders, and she hasn’t stinted on
eyeliner. She’s eating sulu khingal,
a traditional Azeri dish of lamb,
chickpeas, and noodles. She prefers
the Azeri language to Russian, she
tells me, and is working to master
English “because it’s the future.”
It is a Wednesday night. I have only
just arrived in Baku, which perches
on the Caspian Sea between Russia
to the north and Iran to the south.
Already I sense the cultural upheaval
of this capital. It isn’t merely
generational; at the table to my left,
a man sits with two women wearing
the Islamic hijab. “We’re seeing that
more and more,” Aytac notes.Her family is Muslim, like 97
per cent of Azerbaijanis, but she
has never practised. Yet faith is
becoming part of her life. “I’m a
deist,” she volunteers. When I ask if
her mother is Muslim, Aytac shrugs.
“She doesn’t know what she is.”BAKU HAS ALWAYS BEEN at the
crossroads of something. For
centuries it languished under
the control of the Persians, the
Russians, or the Turks. Now the city
and its country are experiencing
a breakthrough, but one roiled by
an authoritarian government, the
vicissitudes of an oil economy, and
the challenge of integrating Islamic
customs with Western secularism.
“We speak Russian, our names
are Islamic or Persian, we try to be
Turkish,” Azeri filmmaker Teymur
Hajiyev tells me the next evening
as we sit at a traditional restaurant
beside a stone wall that is almost
a thousand years old. “We have
a Frankenstein culture. We haven’t
yet figured out what it means to
be Azerbaijani.”
Even as Baku’s two million-
plus residents struggle to define
themselves, they live in a place
that looks like nowhere else. Its
rulers always have been partial to
grand architectural gestures—from
the domed 15th-century Palace
of the Shirvanshahs, to the ornate
mansions of the first oil boom, to
the muscular office blocks built byCASPIAN MYSTIQUE86 • JULY 2019