Baku Nights: Oil Boom Palaces, Soviet Modernism and Caspian Jazz

Baku is a city that has been rich twice, a hundred years apart, and spent both fortunes on architecture. The first boom came in the late 1800s, when the Absheron Peninsula produced half the world's oil and the barons who made that money built themselves a downtown of Parisian mansard roofs, Venetian balconies and Moorish arches, all crammed together a few blocks from a walled medieval Old City that predates them by centuries. The second boom came after 2005, when a fresh wave of oil money bought Zaha Hadid curves and a trio of Flame Towers that light up the skyline every night like something out of a different century entirely. You can stand in one spot in Icherisheher, the Old City, and see all of it at once: a twelfth-century maiden tower, a nineteenth-century merchant's palace and a twenty-first-century glass flame, none of them apologizing for the others.

Wander the Old City in the morning before the tour groups arrive and it still feels lived in rather than preserved. Caravanserais that once housed Silk Road traders now hold carpet shops and courtyard teahouses where old men play backgammon over glasses of black tea and cubes of sugar. The stone alleys twist without logic, which is the point. Just outside the walls, the Fountains Square district holds the oil-boom mansions, ornate enough that Baku is sometimes called the Paris of the East, though the comparison undersells how strange and specific the mix actually is. Nowhere else stacks Zoroastrian fire temple, medieval fortress and starchitect museum inside a twenty-minute walk.

After dark, Baku turns into something else. The Bulvar, a long seaside promenade along the Caspian, fills with families eating ice cream and teenagers on rented bikes, but a few blocks inland the city has a real jazz scene, a legacy of the Soviet era when Baku was one of the only places in the USSR where American jazz records circulated freely and homegrown musicians fused it with mugham, the local modal singing tradition. Basement clubs still book live sets most nights, and the mugham-jazz hybrid you hear nowhere else is worth the trip on its own. Add a functioning speakeasy scene in restored oil-boom basements and a handful of natural wine bars pouring Azerbaijani qvevri wine, a tradition as old as Georgia's next door but far less internationally known, and the nights run long without much effort.

Day trips reach further into the strange. Gobustan, an hour south, has both Bronze Age petroglyphs and honest-to-god mud volcanoes, cold gray cones that bubble and belch on a windswept plateau above the Caspian. The Ateshgah Fire Temple, a Zoroastrian and Hindu pilgrimage site built over a natural gas seep that burned continuously for centuries, sits in an industrial suburb that makes the eternal flame inside its courtyard feel even more surreal. None of it looks like anywhere else, which is exactly the draw.

This suits travelers who like their architecture layered and their nightlife unadvertised, who want a city still working out its own identity in real time rather than one that settled into a brand decades ago. Baku is not on most people's shortlist for the Caucasus, and that is precisely why it should be.