THE BAKU LIFE OF THE FLYING COACH

When people talk about old Baku, what is the first thing that springs to mind? The pictures of what it looked like before, postcards and photographs, the boulevard and Torgovaya Street, Parapet, trams and, of course, the phaeton.

How it all began

It all started in the late 19th century with a fashion for convenient and fast coaches of special design called phaetons. The difference of the phaeton was its high manoeuvrability, which was so necessary in the city. The phaeton very quickly gained fame as the best public transport, spreading around the world and of course, making its way to Baku. Apart from ease, speed and manoeuvrability, the hallmark of the phaeton was real lights. Instead of electric bulbs they used special candles or carbide gas. At the turn of the century, the phaeton was faster than cars, and in the middle of the night, having turned around the corner, it could accidentally knock down pedestrians.

Coachmen were usually not very poor people, and often they were former peasants who managed to save money or residents of Baku from the Old City. For renting the phaeton they paid 20 roubles a month (just over the wages of a worker) and therefore they made every effort to earn. Sometimes in the evening, when dusk descended, you could hear someone shouting in the silence "Phaeton! Phaeton!". This is how they addressed customers. Sometimes on holidays, crowds of them stood at the Old Europe restaurant, waiting for some rich man to come out and call one of them. In their spare time, often during the day, coachmen played backgammon placing the board between two coaches.

They earned especially well when a rich oilman and a generous officer hired them for a wedding procession. Sometimes it could be composed of fifteen coaches. The first carried the newlyweds, the second and the third one - musicians, then the family, and the last one carried the dowry - furniture, boxes of dresses and utensils. Driving along the cobblestone streets, coaches roared as the rattle of the dowry mixed with music.

But the revolution came, and sumptuous feasts left the streets of Baku together with the phaetons. This was due to unfavourable economic reasons. This attribute of the old city became more and more supplanted by the car - a symbol of the 20th century.

In general, if you look at the phaeton, you can see that it is a lot like vintage cars, or more precisely, they are like it. When the age of motors and wheels began to pick up speed and when cars started to be mass-produced, the phaeton left, giving its appearance to its descendant. To see this, it is sufficient to compare it with the first production car Ford T.

About the phaeton without romanticism

It is fair to say that the phaeton has been slightly idealized and made an object of the cult of antiquity. In fact, stories associated with the speediest transport of the time were different. Here's what Russkoye Slovo newspaper wrote in 1908: "The gendarme captain Loliashvili, leaving the theatre, called a phaeton. An unknown person jumped off the phaeton and tried to shoot the captain at close range with a revolver. It misfired. The captain disarmed the gunman, who turned out to be an assistant chief clerk of the police department." Or another story from the newspapers of the same year: "Shagidyants, who threw a bomb at the chief of the security department, Orlovskiy, in February and was wounded by a guard on the way to prison, was treated at Mikhaylovskaya Hospital. Today, six armed men broke into the hospital, disarmed and tied up a policeman, took Shagidyants into a phaeton and disappeared together with him."

That is to say as fast transport, the phaeton was also convenient to get to a crime scene and immediately leave it. Moreover, since the phaeton was not easy to operate and maintain, a trip in it was more expensive than in a usual coach or in a horse-drawn tram for a large number of passengers. Therefore, the phaeton attracted the attention of thieves who knew that a wealthy man could be inside.

Here is another crime report from the beginning of the century: "On 30 April, a coach followed us as we left Baku at 0900 pm. My wife, having a presentiment, stopped the phaeton, allowing the Armenians to pass, and said to me: 'These are robbers, let's go back.' I persuaded her to carry on. We hid the diamonds and 4,000 roubles. Near the station, one of them stopped the horses, two directed revolvers towards the mouth and the chest of my wife, and the fourth one took aim at me, demanding money and diamonds. "Hello, I was waiting," I said, and gave them 100 roubles, and they took a handbag with 90 roubles from my wife. Wanting to take a stick with diamonds, they took an old umbrella. By chance I was unarmed."

Return to the street

The phaeton returned to Baku in the 1960s, together with the Khrushchev thaw and the same slight warming towards the pre-Soviet past. The city started to be landscaped, the boulevard was restored, and new trolleybuses and several horse-drawn trams appeared. Deliberately made to look antique, the phaetons began to cruise the boulevard and the historical centre to the delight of locals and the few tourists.

Almost all of them looked "primitive" (which was normal within the framework of Soviet single-type mass production), but there was one that stood out against the background of others and was a kind of challenge to the culture of mass consumption. Exquisitely elegant, with a magnificent convertible top made of real leather (instead of imitation leather), with red velvet seats and black lacquered handrails, it quickly became a real tourist attraction.

This phaeton was run by a man named Qurban-kisi. He got the usual Soviet salary and drove everyone for free. This phaeton was family owned and was kept at Qurban-kisi's garage. His father, grandfather and maybe even great-grandfather were coachmen.

When this profession was allowed again, Qurban-kisi restored and renovated his ancient coach himself. He drove guests and friends, and in the evenings he left the coach in the Old City behind Qosa Qala Qapisi. There he washed the horses, fed them, covered the coach with a tarpaulin and the horses with blankets and returned home.

Today phaetons can still be occasionally seen on the streets, but their beauty, alas, dissolves among the abundance of cars, advertising and high-rise buildings. They drive in silence, sometimes stopping on the boulevard and watching tourists by. And no one hears "Phaeton! Phaeton!"