REMEMBERING OLD BAKU

No city in the Caucasus can boast of such a rapidly changing appearance our Baku has undergone. Ask any passer-by today where the very city centre, the heart of the city, is, they will name Torqovaya or Fountain Square. But a little over a hundred years ago this very city centre was a real suburb.

Taza Pir

With the start of oil production, the city's population increased dramatically (for example, in 10 years by the time of the census in 1898, it doubled, and then it doubled again over the next twenty years - author), and that's when the city began to go beyond the fortress - Icarisahar. It was then that the term "mahalla", which is usual for us today, appeared. The territory inside the fortress was never called so because it was a very small place. The emergence of city districts - "mahalla" - is also due to the status (level of income, profession). One of the first suburbs (and possibly the first) is the area around Taza Pir Mosque. The history of its origin is quite interesting.

Now Baku has water pipelines, but at the end of the 19th century, people lived where they could get potable water at shallow depths. In Baku, the problem was that the water almost everywhere was a little salty or brackish. This is why we usually call fresh water "sirin su" ("sweet water"). Taza Pir is a place where enough fresh water was found. Many began to dig wells and did it so often that one of the diggers stumbled upon an ancient tomb. Ordinary people, of course, thought it was a holy place and built a mosque near that grave. Almost until the middle of the last century, the area was popularly known as "Taza Pir mahallasi".

Mahammadli

If you get into a time machine, go back in time and climb a little higher than Taza Pir, you can get into "the mahalla of the Huseynqulu spring". The thing is that a source of the most delicious "sweet" water was found there by a workman named Huseynqulu who dug wells.

This mahalla was inhabited by people from the village of Mahammadli who, like many, came to Baku for the oil rouble. A mahalla soon appeared under the same name. It was located where the Nizami metro station stands now, but did not reach Cafar Cabbarli Street.

Palciqli

Below this area, in the direction of present-day Kubinka, there was a steep slope that looked more like a very shallow crater. It was the most unprestigious district in the city, where the poorest people lived. During rain, all water in the city flowed in here. Because of this, the area of present-day Kubinka was popularly known as "Palciqli". It was connected with the fact that over many thousands of years, clay, which was also called "Palciq", had accumulated here. The difference between these two areas - Sovetskaya and Kubinka - is visible to this day. While the old houses in Sovetskaya are squat and often semi-basement, houses on Kubinka, according to a well-established custom, are a little higher. This is due to the notorious water flows that filled Kubinka more than one hundred years ago, forcing residents to build their homes higher, and apparently, also because the building material in the form of clay was available in large amounts literally underfoot. Passing through Kubinka, you can pay attention to it - there are still houses over a hundred years of age there.

Karpicbasan

Just to the east of the slope near Palciqli, the Karpicbasan area was located. Its name derives from the fact that in the middle of the 19th century there was a factory for the production of bricks there. The factory was said to have gone bankrupt because of quarrying (Baku is a rare place where quarrying is cheaper than making bricks - author). A huge number of bricks, which could not be sold, were thrown out right next to the plant. People from the suburbs gladly took advantage and collected bricks for their homes, and at the same time, came up with a name for the district.

Samaxinka, Quba

The city then was much smaller, and the suburbs were so close to the present-day centre that an area, which was much closer to the present-day centre, was called Samaxinka although it was on the same road. Samaxinka is a place where transport departs for Samaxi and Kubinka - for Quba respectively. These two districts of Azerbaijan have always been particularly important for Baku, and not only for communication and travel. The thing is that products arrived at the market of the city mainly from Quba and Sirvan as there was no rail and road transport. They flocked to the city's largest market, which was open only on Sundays. That's why it was called "Hafta bazari". This market was in the area where the monument to Fizuli and the building of the Azerbaijan State Academic National Drama Theatre stand now, and Fizuli Square was then called Quba meydani.

At that time - at the end of the 19th century - the city's population barely reached 50,000. We can now walk around the former suburbs on foot, and people living in today's suburbs have to get home changing at least two means of transport. Buzovna, Mardakan and Sabuncu were then considered separate villages separated by bare steppes.

Baku now stretches all the way from Cape Bayil to Bibi Heybat, and you can hear elders say almost about any street in the city centre: "You know, when I was a kid, it was a suburb."

Bayil

The southern part of the city is no less interesting than others. Take, for example, Bayil (Bailovo in registers of the time), which is part of Sabayil district of Baku as a village today.

It is an area of landslides, which is why it has been almost deserted for a long time. And the land in such places is poor. Why "Bayil"?  Here's what the doctor of geographical sciences, a leading fellow at the Institute of Geography of ANAS, an expert on paleo- and historical geography, Seyran Valiyev, told us. According to him, in 1234, Shirvanshah Fariburz III built a castle on one of the islands of the Bayil bay, which was destroyed by changes in the sea level and an earthquake. It was discovered in 1939 as a result of archaeological excavations. In peacetime, this building could serve as a maritime customs point for the Shirvanshahs on the trade route between Iran and Azerbaijan, as well as from Russia, Central Asia and Europe, where traders arrived from. It could also be defensive, given the characteristics of its structure. Subsequently, it was named Sabayil Castle based on the area where it was found. Some scholars give a religious meaning to the name "Sabayil", as the word has three syllables: "Sa" - three, "ba" and "il" - god, i.e. a place of three gods. It is possible that this castle could house a monument of fire worshipping or serve as a place where dervishes could find refuge. We should say that this place is still of great interest for study. In particular, archaeologists have recovered parts of the frieze of the castle, which were exhibited in the museum of the Palace of the Shirvanshahs.

But let's go back to Bayil. Currently, it is a prestigious area, where a small number of architectural houses have survived - with large areas, four-metre ceilings and massive wooden doors in porches, which remind us of the old days. How did it happen?

The territory of Bayil started to be built up heavily in the late 1850s, when the city's development plan was adopted. At the suggestion of the Imperial Navy Department in 1858, a "plan of pasture lands on Cape Bayil was created for the construction of the admiralty and gardens for maritime officials bound to settle in Bayil, according to the plan presented by the commander of the port".

It was a new and architecturally beautiful area of the city, which became even more beautiful following the relocation of the Main Directorate of the Imperial Caspian Shipping Company from Astrakhan to Baku in the 1880s. The development of the area took place, by the way, in a planned way, because it was intended for high-ranking military officials and the risk of landslides was already known. All buildings were built considering the terrain. Today not so much houses (which were destroyed in 160 years) as the overall strategy of construction, which took into account even the road to Bibi Heybat, which is still located in the same place, reminds us of those days.

Bayil was then divided into a kind of stages: sailors lived below, officers above, and the houses of the management were even higher.

With the beginning of the Civil War, Bayil residents, regardless of nationality, mostly officers of the empire, were not in the best position. Initially, the Soviet government put up commissars in their apartments, and then the new Soviet intelligentsia - physicists, geologists, writers and poets. In this area, there are still houses populated if not by geologists, then by their descendants. That's how this not the most comfortable area blown by winds from the Caspian Sea received its prestigious status.

Bibi Heybat

As for the road that goes from Bayil, in the 19th century, it ended in Bibi Heybat on the very first oil fields of the world. Bibi Heybat is not only the first place of industrial oil production in the world, as every schoolboy knows, but also a place where oil extraction from the seabed began for the first time in the Soviet era. But that happened later. In the 19th century, Bibi Heybat was a small village with a population concentrated in the vicinity of a mosque with the same name. People lived here selling kerosene and fishing. In the 1850s, wealthy industrialists came here and the village began to grow and connect to Bayil with a chain of residential and commercial buildings. Another interesting fact: Bibi Heybat is the only place on the Abseron Peninsula, where the population is now lower than at the end of the 19th century (2,000 compared to 2,500 in 1898).

The only attraction of Bibi Heybat is its mosque, which, unfortunately, is only a replica of the one that was built in the 13th century by Shirvanshah Abu al-Fatah. But the original was destroyed by the Bolsheviks in 1936. They say that the old mosque was of great architectural value, but due to the lack of precise drawings, the restorers were unable to recreate it.

Bibi Heybat can be considered the last of suburban settlements in our way. Then the road leads to the famous Sixov beach where you leave the city by the Salyan highway.