CASPIAN MYSTIQUE112 | July• 2019PHOTOGRAPHED BY RENA EFFENDIS
HE LOOKS LIKEt he
Soviet Union come
to life. Like the wom-
en who would shuff le
through Red Square
in boxy overcoats on
even the warmest
days. Her hair is dyed
a faded red, her stolid face is rectan-
gular, like a fur hat.
We’re dining at adjacent tables,
Afa and I, at Firuze, a popular res-
taurant in downtown Baku, the cap-
ital of Azerbaijan. At 50 years old,
plus or minus, Afa has spent half her
days living free of Soviet hegemony.
Yet she speaks Russian to her teen-
age daughter. She sips vodka. And
it seems utterly fitting that she has
ordered Chicken Kiev, a dish named
for another capital the Soviets dom-
inated.
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 eatingsulu 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 merelygenerational; 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 never
practiced. Yet faith is becoming
part of her life. “I’m a deist,” she
volunteers. When I ask if her moth-
er is Muslim, Aytac shrugs. “She
doesn’t know what she is.”BAKU HAS ALWAYS BEEN a t t he
crossroads of something. For centu-
ries 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
figured out what it means to be
Azerbaijani.”
Even as Baku’s two million-plus
residents struggle to define them-
selves, they live in a place that looks
like nowhere else. The capital’s rul-
ers always have been partial to grand
architectural gestures – from the