CASPIAN MYSTIQUE
114 | July• 2019
domed 15th-century Palace of the
Shirvanshahs, to the ornate man-
sions of the first oil boom, to the
muscular office blocks built by the
Soviet Union. Now the Aliyev fam-
ily, which has presided over Azer-
baijan since 1993, has applied a new
level of ambition to the construc-
tion, with an ultramodern airport,
shiny sports venues, a grand war
memorial and shopping malls that
look like spaceships.
President Ilham Aliyev – who suc-
ceeded his father, Heydar, a former
Politburo leader – runs the nation
like a Persian Gulf emir, using gov-
ernment money, of which there is
plenty when oil prices run high, to
nudge it into the world’s conscious-
ness. Baku has hosted the World
Chess Olympiad, the European
Games, and the Eurovision Song
Contest; staged Formula 1 Grand
Prix races; and made unsuccessful
bids for the Olympics.
THE SWOOPINGHeydar Aliyev Cen-
tre has been compared to a whale,
a glacier and an airport terminal.
None of those give the building
its due. From any angle you would
swear it’s in motion, its undulating
whiteness rising to a peak and rip-
pling down the other side. To the
west, on the waterfront, sits anoth-
er showstopper. The low, tubular
Azerbaijan Carpet Museum was
designed to resemble a rolled-up
rug. Each time I pass it, I grin.
And though two of the three
curved, glass-sheathed skyscrapers
known as the Flame Towers have few
tenants, they have become Baku’s
new signature, overtaking the mil-
lennium-old Maiden Tower, once
part of the city’s fortifications.
Not everyone is pleased with this.
“Baku was a small Paris,” artist and
social activist Sitara Ibrahimova tells
me. “It has become a small Dubai.”
Ibrahimova takes me to see two of
her installations at the Yarat Con-
temporary Art Centre. For one, she
shot film of herself wading in the
Caspian Sea and scrubbing her arms
with black oil. It is, she says, a “mus-
ing on the resource’s overwhelming
significance in framing the collective
unconscious of the country.”
That night I join her at a small,
sleek wine bar, Kef li, in the heart
of Baku. I could be in Moscow, or
Brooklyn, except that all the 90-plus
wines on the menu are Azeri. Kefli’s
co-owner, a 30-year-old law yer
named Rufat Shirinov, tells me he
opened the bar as a sort of patriotic
act. “A lot of very Azeri things were
lost in the Soviet years,” he says.
Shirinov serves me two wines made
from the local red Madrasa grape, then
a white Bayan Shira. I prefer them as
political statements rather than as
beverages, but the wines are proving
to be palatable for the 20-somethings
around me. The scene reminds me
of Budapest or Prague right after the
fall of the Eastern bloc – except these