A Baku Kind of Day

After a 10-hour flight to London, a 6-hour layover, and a 5-hour flight across Europe, I landed in Baku, capital of Azerbaijan. By midnight I was in my room at the new Ambassador Hotel, too tired to sleep, too tired to do anything else--except take a sleeping pill.

I awoke this morning, and after a luxurious buffet breakfast I wandered down the street. I haven’t been in a really exotic place since India (see www.martyinindia.com), and I felt the familiar rush of the unfamiliar. And here, not only was everything unfamiliar, it was vaguely unidentifiable: Azerbaijan is part European, part Asian; part Russian, part Mongol; part miniskirt, part headscarf; part blood feud, part Microsoft.

In Azerbaijan, as in so many parts of the world, the 15th century can feel only minutes old, while the recent past often has the inevitable feel of primeval destiny.

After changing money, buying water, and checking produce prices (bananas $2/pound, onions $0.20/pound), I met my guide Azia in the hotel lobby and off we went for a tour of the city. After a 40-minute traffic-choked drive through wide streets lined with mostly-modern buildings, we parked and walked to our first stop—Martyrs’ Alley (http://www.panoramio.com/photo/18663237).

The memorial complex sits atop a hill overlooking the Caspian Sea, the largest salt-water lake in the world. A park during communist days, it now institutionalizes the country’s three most important memories. A cemetery holds the black tombstones of soldiers killed by Armenia in the Nagorno-Karabach conflict in the early 1990s; down its center, a 25-foot wide walkway is lined with memorials to the Turkish soldiers who defended Baku from the British in World War I; and at the end of this walkway, granite engravings show the faces of civilians who were killed by the Red Army’s desperate invasion on January 20, 1990.

So there you have it: the enemy, the friend, the occupier. And minutes after meeting my guide, only hours after entering this ancient Silk Road-era land, I was up to my neck in politics. Or as she put it, “the truth.”

The rest of the day was spent scrambling about a 15^th-century palace complex. My guide happened to be a UNESCO consultant, and so we discussed both history and her critique of the palace’s restoration. In Azerbaijan, as in so many parts of the world, the 15^th century can feel only minutes old, while the recent past often has the inevitable feel of primeval destiny.