92CASPIAN MYSTIQUEthe Soviet Union. Now the Aliyev
family, which has presided over
Azerbaijan since 1993, has applied
a new level of ambition to the
construction, with an ultramodern
airport, shiny sports venues, a
grand war memorial, and shopping
centres that look like spaceships.
President Ilham Aliyev—who
succeeded his father, Heydar, a
former Politburo leader—runs
the nation like a Persian Gulf
emir, using government money,
of which there is plenty when
oil prices run high, to nudge it
into the world’s consciousness.
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
Olympic Games.T
HE SWOOPING Heydar
Aliyev Centre 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 rippling down the other
side. To the west, on the waterfront,
sits another 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 skyscrapersknown as the Flame Towers have
few tenants, they have become
Baku’s new signature, overtaking the
millennium-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
Contemporary 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 “musing 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, Kefli, 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 lawyer
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 aren’t88 • JULY 2019