Walled City of Baku

In October 2023, I had my first (and probably) only visit to this country and I took full advantage by visiting two UNESCO sites during my stay. The hotel was close to the office and about a half an hour walk from the old town, To gather my thoughts of the day I started walking and made it to the Maiden tower which is one of the main center pieces of this UNESCO world heritage site. I had time to walk around it, take some pictures of the tower as well of some of the old sites that are exposed here. It was too late to get to the top itself. Later that week we came back and saw some more of the old town, like the Northern gate and the streets that are well cleaned up and restored in the center.

This site is on the UNESCO list as it is a historic place where civilization have been for 1000s of years and this has always been a central trading post between Russia, Iran, Turkey and other places. The old town is still clearly present in between the rest of the city and it has been nicely restored. However, the importance is more regionally than globally and it is not a first tier site that anybody in the world would recognize. I am glad I was able to travel here and check out two UNESCO sites, but this is not normally a place a tourist would come to. …

I visited this WHS in 2023 shortly after the Formula 1 Grand Prix organised around the Walled City of Baku. The metal/concrete protection on the fortified walls was still there as were the spectator stands and lack of painted road signs (really messy when driving through Old Baku towards Gobustan).

It is easier to appreciate the remaining walls around the old city of Baku from outside, especially near the city gates and double gates. From within the city walls, there will most likely always be a stark contrast between Old Baku and the modern high rise buildings outside the city walls. Earthquakes have devasted most of the historic buildings several times throughout history and as recently as the year of Baku's inscription on the WH list. Especially most of the residential buildings (with their wide wooden balconies) within the city walls have collapsed and have either never been rebuilt or have been rebuilt in a dull modern style. Therefore, the remaining historic buildings within the city walls stand out.

The Baylar Mosque is worth visiting inside for its architecture. It has been converted into a Koran Museum with a permanent sacred relics exhibition. The Mohammed Mosque and Minaret dates back to 1078-1079 and stands at the heart of Old Baku between the city's two main highlights: the Maiden Tower and the Palace of the Shirvanshahs. Other noteworthy buildings worth visiting in Baku are the Gasim Hey Hammam, the National Museum of History, the Ismailiyya Palace, the Nizami …

It's more of a "City with some walls" and it's rightly on the endanger list because urban development has made it seem like there are just remains and ruins in-between a modern city. It's not horrible in any way but I wouldn't call it a marvel of culture to be placed on the world heritage list.

Anyone coming to Azerbaijan is probably gonna set foot in Baku. It's the gateway to the country and the only thing you could avoid is the city center. The airport is a bit out of town and after you drive and marvel at the modern skyscrapers that reminded me off Dubai, built by gas money for sure, you can set foot in a sort of old town. There aren't many special things to see. The tower as seen twice in my pics is probably the biggest thing. Trotting around will take less than an hour and you will feel "oh it's another brick wall" here and there - nothing major. You find street peddlers, shops, food bazaars and it's all pretty enjoyable. As I said it's nothing bad and a stopover in Baku is easy and probably on the average Joe/Jane's itinerary anyway so just don't expect too much.

p.s. not sure how it is these days but as you can see from my pic I visited in 2017 and Google Maps didn't allow navigation so be prepared for alternatives if you want a drive app running (Waze probably works better).

Azerbaijan isn’t exactly a tourist magnet, but it does try really hard to reach out to the world. In a few weeks' time it will stage its first Formula One race (on a street circuit just like Monaco!), and it has been host to the European Games and Eurovision Song Contest in recent years. Its capital Baku houses half of the country’s inhabitants and is a sight to behold. A relatively small part of it, the Walled City of Baku with the Shirvanshah's Palace and Maiden Tower, has been designated as a world heritage site.

Despite the "Walled" epithet, the medieval city center isn’t fully enclosed anymore. Only the western and northern sides still are fortified. In our timeline, we put ‘12th century’ as the age of this WHS, derived from the construction date of the landmark Maiden Tower. This tower lies on the edge of the old town, at a stretch without a continuing wall. It has a peculiar cylindrical shape, with a rectangle brick structure attached for additional stability necessary in this earthquake-prone region. It is climbable via an inner staircase, you’ll see that there’s a cistern hidden inside.

The whole site is easily walkable and low on traffic. There are many restaurants on hand for a tea break or a kebab, and there is outdoor art (some of it Soviet-style). Somehow I had expected more of a ‘medieval town center’-atmosphere, but most of the buildings are from a much later date and/or don’t have their …

The Walled City of Baku was the other WHS in Azerbeidzjan we visited, including Shrivanshah's Palace and the Maiden Tower. Pity, the restauration activities made the tower almost invisible.

+39 an humid was my first impression of Baku, the largest and most cosmopolitan city by the Caspian Sea, a city that easily could become a major tourist resort if the tourist hotel was in place, houses refurbished and the oil industry somewhat more careful about polluting the water. The actual World Heritage Site, the Walled City of Baku with the Shirvanshah's Palace and Maiden Tower, is located in the centre of the town, next to the Fountain Square and the main shoppingareas on Nirzami Street. The Shirvanshah’s Palace has been recently refurbished and together with the Maiden Tower and Caravan Saray’s, it provides an excellent image of life of the mid-15th century and days of the Silk Road trade.

My stay in Baku lasted for a week which also provided me with the opportunity to see more of the Absheron peninsula where Baku is located and the south and northwest of Azerbaijan.

Everything in Baku is centred around oil since the mid 19th century when the Swedish Nobel brothers together with other oil-prospectors basically started the world-wide oil-boom ou of Baku. But even before these days, the Baku area was filled with oil-related phenomenas. Today you can visit Zoroastrian Astegah Fire Temple, a sacred temple since the 6th century as well as burning mountains besides finding thousands of “donkeys” – oil-pumps working 24/7 delivering the black gold.

My traveling also took me further south, to Gobustan where you find strange nature phenomenas as mud-volcanoes and the over 12.000 year …

Taken as a whole Baku is, in my opinion, “worth a journey”. However, the medieval part of it, which has been inscribed as a WHS site, is not particularly notable or interesting in itself – “worth a visit” for an hour or so if you are already there but a bit lost in the modernity of Baku and lacking the scale and atmosphere of some other such Central Asian medieval cities. Perhaps its most amazing aspect is that it even survived the changes in Baku during the Oil boom and the Soviet era.

There are however a number of sites on the WHS Tentative list around Baku which should not be missed including the petroglyphs and “singing stones” at Gobustan and the Zoroastrian Fire Temple in the suburb of Surakhany. A number of more modern sights are also “worth the journey”:-

a. many fine buildings from the 19th century “oil boom city”

b. the “surreal” environment in the oil fields around the city with pipework, “nodding donkeys” and seeping oil everywhere

c. the artificial islands and roads leading from the shore to oil wells stretching far out into the Caspian