BakuBakı

People have lived on the Absheron Peninsula since at least the Bronze Age, and Baku is mentioned by early Arab and Persian geographers as a fortified port on the Caspian. Its position — a natural harbour with visible surface oil and gas seeps — made it valuable long before anyone drilled a well: the seeps themselves were used for lighting and, later, for religious ritual at sites like Ateshgah.

Baku's medieval identity was shaped by the Shirvanshahs, a dynasty that ruled the wider Shirvan region for centuries. After a major earthquake damaged their former capital, Shamakhi, the Shirvanshahs moved their court to Baku in 1501 and built up the walled Old City, including the Palace complex that still stands at its centre. The Maiden Tower, the city's most recognisable structure, is older still — most historians place its present form in the 12th century, though its original purpose (fortress, observatory, fire temple) is debated.

The Russian Empire annexed the Baku khanate in 1806, but the city's transformation came later, with the industrial oil boom of the 1870s–1900s. Baku briefly produced roughly half the world's oil, and the wealth built the grand stone buildings that still line Nizami Street and surround Fountains Square — a 19th-century skyline that would not look out of place in a European capital, funded almost entirely by petroleum.

That boom also brought political turbulence. In 1918, as the Russian Empire collapsed, Azerbaijan briefly became the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic — the first secular parliamentary republic in the Muslim world, with women's suffrage two years before some Western democracies — with Baku as its capital. It lasted about two years before the Red Army took the city in 1920 and Azerbaijan became a Soviet republic, a status that held until independence in 1991.

The Soviet period added its own layer: the Baku Metro opened in 1967, apartment blocks spread beyond the old centre, and heavy industry expanded around the bay. Independence in 1991 was followed by a second oil-and-gas boom in the 2000s, this time funding an entirely new skyline — the Flame Towers and the Heydar Aliyev Center among them — that sits, often within a single sightline, beside the 900-year-old Maiden Tower.

Icheri Sheher, the walled Old City, is a small enough area to walk end to end in twenty minutes, yet it holds most of the medieval city's surviving fabric: fortress walls, caravanserais where Silk Road traders once stayed, hammams, mosques, and hundreds of ordinary houses that are still lived in today. UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site in 2000, alongside the Maiden Tower and the Palace of the Shirvanshahs specifically.

The walls themselves are not a single build: sections date from different centuries, patched and extended as the city's needs changed, and parts were damaged in the 1990s by an accidental gas explosion, then restored. Walking the lanes, notice how streets curve rather than run straight — a defensive layout, not an accident, that also happens to keep the worst of the wind off pedestrians at ground level.

The caravanserais — walled courtyards that once housed merchants and their goods overnight — are some of the Old City's most atmospheric spaces. Several have been converted into restaurants and shops, so a visitor today can sit in the same courtyard a Silk Road trader might have slept in seven hundred years earlier, now with a menu instead of a stable.

Modern life presses against this old fabric constantly. Wi-Fi cafés sit behind centuries-old stone facades, and since 2016 a Formula 1 street circuit has run directly past the Old City walls each spring, turning the quietest historic quarter in Baku into the backdrop for one of the loudest events on the motorsport calendar for one week a year.

Baku's built environment is legible almost like a core sample. At the centre, medieval stone: the Maiden Tower's thick, dark walls and the Shirvanshah Palace's courtyards. Ringing the Old City, a 19th-century oil-boom layer of ornate European-style stone mansions, many built by oil barons competing to outdo each other's facades — some architects were brought in directly from Paris and Vienna.

The Soviet period contributed a different vocabulary: monumental public buildings like Government House on the Boulevard, built in a restrained Stalinist classical style, alongside more utilitarian apartment blocks further from the centre. This layer is less photographed than the other two but is where most Bakuvians actually live.

The newest layer, built almost entirely since the mid-2000s on the back of Azerbaijan's oil and gas exports, is the one most visitors photograph first: the three flame-shaped glass towers on the hill above the Old City, completed in 2012, and the Heydar Aliyev Center, a flowing white building by the late architect Zaha Hadid, also completed in 2012, which deliberately avoids straight lines or right angles anywhere in its design.

Seeing all three layers in close succession — sometimes in a single photograph, with the Maiden Tower in the foreground and the Flame Towers behind it — is one of the more striking things about a short visit to Baku, and is largely why the skyline has become the country's most recognisable tourism image.

Azerbaijani cuisine sits at a crossroads of Persian, Turkic and Caucasus influences, and plov — saffron rice cooked with meat, dried fruit, nuts or herbs — is its clearest expression: there are said to be dozens of regional plov recipes, each built around a different combination of ingredients folded into or layered with the rice.

Tea culture runs just as deep. Black tea served in a pear-shaped armudu glass, with sugar cubes held between the teeth rather than stirred in, is a daily ritual rather than a tourist performance — tea houses (çayxana) function as informal meeting rooms across the city, and a Baku tea house can be as central to social life as a café is elsewhere.

Dolma (stuffed grape leaves or vegetables), qutab (thin stuffed flatbread cooked on a dry griddle), and piti (a lamb and chickpea stew cooked and served in its own small clay pot) round out the everyday menu, alongside kebabs grilled over charcoal on a mangal. Sweets lean on layered, syrup-soaked pastries such as pakhlava, often tied to specific festivals — şəkərbura, a walnut-filled pastry, is strongly associated with Novruz in particular.

Wine has a longer history in the region than many visitors expect: Azerbaijan sits within one of the world's older wine-growing areas, though Soviet-era planning favoured bulk production over quality for decades. A newer generation of producers has been working since independence to revive higher-quality local wine, now increasingly available in Baku's wine bars.

Novruz, the Persian and Turkic new-year festival marking the spring equinox, is the biggest date on Baku's calendar, usually falling around 20–24 March. Bonfires are lit and jumped over as a symbolic cleansing ritual, the Boulevard and Fountains Square fill with concerts and food stalls, and households prepare a table of specific symbolic foods and sprouted wheat grass (səməni). Many shops and offices close for several days around the main holiday.

Since 2016, Baku has also hosted a Formula 1 street race — first as the European Grand Prix, later rebranded the Azerbaijan Grand Prix — on a circuit that runs directly past the Old City walls and along the Boulevard, reportedly one of the fastest street circuits in the sport. It brings road closures, restricted Old City access, and a spike in hotel prices for the week, usually in spring, though the exact date moves year to year.

Baku's daily rhythm is shaped as much by wind as by any calendar. The Khazri, a cold wind from the north, and the Gilavar, a warmer wind from the south, can each dominate for days at a time, and Bakuvians routinely check which wind is blowing before deciding whether an outdoor plan — a Boulevard walk, a Highland Park sunset — is worth attempting that day.

Religiously, Azerbaijan is a secular state with a Muslim-majority population that is, in daily practice, one of the more relaxed in the wider Muslim world: alcohol is legal and openly sold, and Ramadan is observed by some residents without disrupting the city's general rhythm of restaurants and cafés staying open.