WHERE PEOPLE COME TO SEE AND BE SEEN

Nizami Street is one of the longest streets in Baku. It starts in the hilly part of the city, runs through the whole of the centre and ends in the Black City, at the monument to Shah Ismail Khatai. But the best known part is the pedestrianized section, called "Merchant Street" [Russian: "Torgovaya"]

Why "Merchant Street"?

It is reliably known that this area was first called " Merchant Street back in 1860, when Baku was nothing like we know it today. Although, the reason for this was very tragic: the previous year a destructive earthquake almost destroyed Samaxi and a huge part of the population of what was then Azerbaijan's largest city moved to Baku. At the same time the Governate of Baku was created and as the population increased this area began to be built with state support. And the merchants, who moved from Samaxi, built a whole number of caravanserais here and rows of shopping stalls were set up in the gaps between the buildings and in front of them.

The role of the outstanding architect Qasim bay Hacibababayov, who also moved here from Samaxi after the earthquake, in the creation of Merchant Street must also be mentioned here. It was he who led the team of architects who created many of the beautiful buildings outside the wall of the fortress. Alas, all that is left of his legacy is Fountains Square, two former caravanserais - one is now the Nizami Museum and the other the Araz cinema - and just a few architectural dwellings at the very edge of Merchant Street.

You can easily see that where Merchant Street turns into Fountain Square the streets are not quite parallel but fan out with the centre in the square itself. These are merely leftovers of the "patchwork" sprawl of Merchant Street and the neighbouring streets as it was in the 1860s-1870s.

The private - commercial - sprawl of Merchant Street also made a considerable contribution to this "patchwork". Some 150 years ago - as now - it was the main commercial area. At the end of the 1860s the street was officially called "Merchant Street" in all the documents. But it was called that only from the Merchants' Lane (which also has not survived: here Nizami Street intersects with Rasul Rza Street) and ran to the opposite side from the centre. And the part of the street closer to the centre was called "Governors".

At the intersection of these two streets lived the wealthiest merchants who owned the tall four-storey houses of the time, and in the 1870s the first oil industrialists started to join them. It was in Merchant Street that the first homes of Musa Nagiyev, Samsi Asadullayev and Murtuza Muxtarov stood. And they were built by the celebrated architects of the time - N.A. von der Nonne, M. Qafar Izmaylov, the aforementioned Hacibababayov, and others.  

The houses on Merchant Street

It would be difficult to describe the history of the architecture of Merchant Street in a few pages. Perhaps the main event for the people of Baku at the time regarding this street was the Imperial Hotel. It was built in 1888 and made Baku a real European city. On the first floor of the hotel was the well-known photographic studio of A. Mishon. Photographs of the highest quality of those times were created here and they were by no means cheap. And in the 1890s the local area teemed with florists', confectioners' and grocers' shops of the highest quality. 

Typically, as in the case of Mishon, these were all local brands, who built up their reputation from scratch and brought an element of authenticity to the city. In our days of uniform brands, which have taken over the central streets of almost all major cities, once can only perhaps recall a similar past with sadness.

The "Europeanness" of Merchant Street began with the Imperial, but a couple of years later, as the oil boom spread, other hotels appeared nearby - the Grand Moscow, the London and the rather more modest Northern Rooms [Severnyye Nomera].

The huge, if not exactly beautiful, house of the magnate Haci Racabli, known to us today as the Vatan cinema, gave a finished and formal look to Merchant Street at that time. He made this street long and continuous, without any gaps.

Opposite this building, incidentally, was the excellent confectioner's shop of the businessman Mirza Tagiyev, who had moved from Samaxi. It was known locally as "German", but it was a hundred per cent local brand that supplied products (superb cakes) to other provinces as well and even to Emperor Aleksandr himself.

One of the most architecturally fine buildings of today's Oil Academy was also situated on Merchant Street - today this part of the street is no longer named.  In 1899 this house was built by the architect Goslavskiy and was designed for the "Baku branch of the Russian Imperial Technical Union". At first this was only a one-storey building, but another two storeys were added in 1925, blending harmoniously with the original group.

In 1904 a huge, luxurious building for the time was built, which is still called the Old Mill and which, according to the plans of its creators Haci Zeynalabdin Tagiyev and the Skobelev brothers, was actually designed for industrial purposes.

Until the revolution Merchant Street "blossomed" with many more beautiful houses. Among these were the Main Baku Synagogue, which today houses the Rasid Behbudov Theatre of Song, Rothschild's residence, now a private house, and a number of others. But perhaps the last real big event for Merchant Street was the building of the opera house (1911), where the Opera and Ballet Theatre is still located. But when we talk about it, we cannot help but mention the legend that goes with it.

The legends and traditions of Merchant Street

In 1910 the celebrated opera singer Antonina Nezhdanova used to tour Baku. She spent about a month here and sang arias from Rigoletto, Ruslan and Lyudmila, Yevgeniy Onegin and other famous operas. All her concerts were held in the City Stock Exchange building, the stage of which was fine, but acoustically it did not meet with opera standards. And so, when it came to future tours, the singer was forced to say no, mentioning this drawback. Present at this conversation was one of the millionaire Mailov brothers, who promised that within exactly a year an opera theatre building would be built and that the singer would be the main guest at the opening ceremony.

Tagiyev, too, was party to this conversation. He had a number of houses himself and he was confident that his millionaire colleague was overreacting in trying to show off what he could do in front of the lady. He didn't neglect to tell Mailov about this. Many important guests were witnesses to this conversation, and so as not to disgrace himself, Mailov offered Tagiyev a bet - if he won Tagiyev would pay the cost, but if Tagiyev won, the building would pass over to him. The building was eventually built a year later. Tagiyev kept his word and paid back all the costs.

Since the beginning of the last century Merchant Street has traditionally been the central hub of the city, where people come to see and be seen. 

Even the poorest people of the Black City have always tried to come to Merchant Street dressed in the latest fashion. Those who were rather better off simply had to nip into photo studios and confectioners, if only to feast their eyes. 

In early Soviet times, there used to be open concerts in Merchant Street, and the theatres were replaced by new cinemas (the Vatan and Araz cinemas opened in the former caravanserais). And now, taking your girl friend to this street, you simply had to have an ice cream and pop into the cinema.

In Stalin's times life, in the broad sense of this word, rather died on the street (as it did throughout the Union), and it blossomed only in the 1950s and 1960s. New restaurants opened up, live orchestras played and the very latest place for the "in-crowd" was a nameless (but then capacious) pub on the corner of Samad Vurgun Street (where a shoe boutique stands today). It was in this house that the brilliant physicist, Lev Landau, once lived. The erudite engineers were well aware of this and half-jokingly (as though trying to become familiar with a great name) said: "Let's go and have a drink with Landau". Locally, this building was called "Landau's", although a signboard outside in Soviet letters said "Cafe, Beer".

At the beginning of the 1960s there emerged a tradition among young people that has lasted more or less for half a century. These were meetings at the "rich-kids' hang-out" [Russ: "na mazhorke"]. Until the beginning of the 2000s the meeting point was the Nasimi Monument and the small park opposite. The teddy boys, jazz lovers and, as a rule, children of well-off parents (party workers, physicists, engineers) used to meet here - they were called "rich-kids" among the people, hence the name of this place. The teddy boys used to come to show off their gear and talk about music. They never brought their records with them because the vigilant Soviet police used to wander around and it was easy to get banged up for operating on the "black market".

In the 1970s and later young people's tastes changed and it was rock fans who used to gather here with their guitars but they would never sing very loudly so as not to bother people.

Another traditional meeting place was "Shakhnovich's grocery store". It was on the corner of Passage, in the house topped with stone angels. It has stood here since the 1960s and had a special status. It was practically the only private shop in the whole of Azerbaijan owned by war veteran and Hero of the Soviet Union Trofim Shakhnovich. By using his "connections" with the status of a Hero, Shakhnovich traded in short-supply and high-quality products, which were scarce in a country with a planned economy. He was just a simple person who loved to sit on the steps of the shop and mix with the customers who often came to the shop just to chat. A visit to Shakhnovich was also a kind of traditional exercise for those going to Merchant Street. Shakhnovich himself died in 1982 but the shop carried on right up to the mid-1990s. 

Merchant Street today is just as much a symbol of the city as the Maiden Tower, Shirvanshah Palace and other much older monuments. It has a fine history, its roots going back to the mid of the century before last. And once you know it, it's much nicer to go back again and again to this street, hurrying to work, meeting friends or, just like a hundred years ago, to see and be seen.