READER’S DIGEST© ADAM JONES/FLICKR
parked outside the Sirvansah Muzey
Restoran, a “museum restaurant”
where banqueters dine in a facsimile
of a Soviet-era flat. I wouldn’t think
enough time had passed, but Soviet
chic is in style in Baku. The city’s
Intourist hotel, which for five-plus
decades accommodated government-
supervised tour groups, has been
faithfully renovated down to its façade
of grey.
Babayev, a commercial artist, was
in his late twenties when the USSR
collapsed. He moved to the US, then
returned to Baku in 2007 when his
father, the esteemed painter Rasim
Babayev, passed away. He found
an eager Azerbaijan, freed from the
control of the Soviet Union, speeding
toward nowhere in particular.
Right now, we’re cruising along the
coast to Babayev’s dacha, a Russian-
style country home. I’m envisioning
Cornwall. Instead, we’re navigating
rutted roads in a desiccated
landscape by the Caspian Sea. When
we reach Babayev’s neighbourhood,
however, he steers us to a handsome
cottage. Soon we’re sitting in a
courtyard ringed by pomegranate
trees and Babayev’s sculptures.
He tells me his father was born in
1927 into an educated home with
Azeri books written in the prevalent
Muslim Arabic script. Within two
years the Azeri alphabet would
change to Latin characters in an
effort to secularise it. The shift lasted
a decade, until Stalin’s governmentdemanded that all official textbooks
and documents be printed in the
Russian Cyrillic. When the Soviet
Union fell, the Cyrillic reverted to
the Latin alphabet.
“When you change an alphabet,
you change history,” Babayev tells
me. “You lose your culture.”
The conversation weighs on both
of us, so he proposes a swim. At the
end of an alley, beyond a stretch of
rocks and sand, is the Caspian Sea,
considered the world’s largest inland
body of water. Around Baku it has
been polluted by years of neglect, but
here it is translucent.
“Like a thousand years ago,”
Babayev says.
To the east, somewhere across
the blue expanse, is the nation of
Turkmenistan. To the northwest,
I spot the mountains of southern
Russia. I pull off my shoes. The water
is chilly, but I duck into its gentle
waves and begin to swim. nJULY 2019 • 91A vintage Soviet Volga