An Aural Tour of the Baku Metro

The Baku metro system has a violent history. In the chaos of the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union it was subject to terrorist bombings and was the site of the worst subway disaster in the world. In October of 1995, three hundred people were suffocated by poisonous fumes when a train car caught fire between Ulduz and Nəriman Nərimanov stations.

It also happens that the metro stations house some of the best examples of public art in Baku. Save for the hilarious, depressing, or seriously wonderful (depending on your politics) proliferation of statues and posters of Heydar Aliyev, public art has, well, literally remained underground. Nizami Station, named after the medieval poet who, inconveniently for the nationalists, wrote in Persian, possesses glittering mosaics illustrating episodes from his poems. In Neftçilər Station, which has maintained its communist name honoring oil workers, enormous mosaics represent men taming a vortex of whorling petroleum as a Bolshevik maiden leads the proletariat with an unfurled red flag. 20 Yanvar Station, named after the winter day in 1990 when Soviet tanks rolled into Baku and inexplicably killed hundreds of Azerbaijani civilians, displays a dramatic, cubist-esque depiction of the events. Above ground there is barely room for a public sphere - journalists are stabbed or jailed, the lame opposition’s rallies are relegated to irrelevant corners of the city, Baku’s citizens are for the most part complacent rural emigrés concerned with navigating private, patriarchal, patronage systems - let alone for public art.

And so it is particularly sad that all of Baku’s Soviet-built metro stations are considered classified. It is forbidden to take photographs of them, even from the top of the hundred-foot long escalators that ferry commuters into their depths. (Soviet metro systems were, after all, designed in the 1960s to be mass bomb shelters in the event of American nuclear attack.) In exchange, however, the foreign visitor (really the only person insane enough to want to take pictures of the art in the first place) is treated to cheerful, jangly melodies played as the trains arrive at each station. I’ve been told this is the only subway system in the world to have such a thing. It leaves me pondering whose idea this was and when it was implemented. Most likely it was meant to soothe uneasy passengers concerned about the possibility of being burnt alive in one of the still very toxic, very flammable train cars.

I recorded all but one of the stations’ songs in April as I rode the whole line from Baku Soviet (now already renamed İçəri Şəhər) to Həzi Aslanov, transferring at 28 May and continuing to Memar Əcəmi. So, sheltered from nuclear bombs, vulnerable to spontaneous combustion, and exposed to Soviet fine art, ride it with me and let these tunes form a sonic, alternative map of the city.

Download MP3s here:

Bakı Soveti - Həzi Aslanov
28 May - Memar Əcəmi

Marx said it better

I was looking over my Karl Marx reader yesterday and came across a passage that I had underlined from his comments on James Mill.  He wrote:

"The only intelligible language in which we converse with one another consists of our objects in their relation to each other.  We would not understand a human language and it would remain without effect.  By one side it would be recognised and felt as being a request, an entreaty, and therefore a humiliation, and consequently uttered with a feeling of shame, of degradation.  By the other side it would be regarded as impudence or lunacy and rejected as such.  We are to such an extent estranged from man's essential nature that the direct language of this essential nature seems to us a violation of human dignity, whereas the estranged language of material values seems to be the well-justified assertion of human dignity that is self-confident and conscious of itself."

Rediscovering a human language was more or less the topic of my post on the Suraxanı fire temple.  In Azerbaijan, this process is both impossible and imminently possible, particularly under the conditions of petrol capitalism.  But I believe that if a truly global alternative to the transformation of the realm of public politics into the realm of private management is to emerge it will come from an unexpected place like Azerbaijan.  If you are familiar with Azerbaijan the impossible part of this statement will be fairly self-evident, but I would take the risk of saying that this country is full of surprises, its ingenuity barely understood because nearly every book or article on Azerbaijan speaks in the very estranged language Marx decried.

Goodbye Baku Soviet

This is all that remains of Bakı Soveti metro station. It was demolished almost overnight as part of a continuing effort to erase every Soviet symbol from the landscape of Baku. Today I took pictures of the rubble.

This is the design of the building planned to replace it. Its glass structure is probably an attempt to symbolize "transparency" - that neoliberal watchword which will somehow deliver all of the world's people unto consumer bliss. The station will be renamed İçəri Şəhər after the old city which it adjoins, abandoning its former, awkwardly ideological name.

I stand with Baku Soviet, not out of any romanticization of what was a nightmarish, bureaucratic mess - a failure - but because its anachronistic presence, as a failure is pregnant with what Walter Benjamin called "a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past."

At any rate, if I had bothered to take a photo before it was destroyed, this is what it would have looked like.

A World Surpassed

On the outskirts of Baku, in the blighted oil settlement of Suraxanı, sits a small stone temple which is almost universally regarded as Azerbaijan’s finest tourist attraction. Western expatriates (a motley crew that I hope to write about soon) sardonically urge the few foreign visitors to make the trip to Suraxanı mostly for this self-referential reason, emphasizing the devastated, almost Martian, landscape which spreads out from the town. In contrast, at least one semi-official tourist marketing video features the temple prominently; shot at night, its fires casting wild shadows in the courtyard, Suraxanı’s panoply of sheet-metal roofs and telephone poles kept out of frame. Initially these two reactions to the temple seem opposed: the ironic fascination of the foreigner, and the sentimental glorification of the temple by a nascent tourist industry. In reality they are both ways of avoiding the profound sadness of the place, a sadness made all the more unbearable by the battered traces of human devotion that appear everywhere in the temple complex and by the multiple worlds they call into being in the midst of such singular squalor.

The temple, now called Ateşgah from the Persian words for land of fire, rests on a site long held sacred due to the profusion of natural gas which, long ago, would sometimes nocturnally ignite, bathing the entire peninsula in eerie blue light. According to some, a wandering Zoroaster had revelations here which led him to declare the existence of one supreme god, Ahura Mazda. Yet the current temple probably dates to the mid eighteenth century when North Indian merchant-pilgrims, not Zoroastrians, built the structure around a large natural gas vent to worship a now uncertain variety of fiery deities. Inscriptions in Punjabi, Persian, and Sanskrit were carved into the shelly limestone above the doors leading into the windowless cells where the pilgrims slept, cooked, and prayed. At its height multiple priests maintained the complex and a steady stream of visitors could be expected to spend days, weeks, or even months seeking the fires’ cleansing properties and atoning for sins.

Europeans also began to make their own sort of pilgrimages to Ateşgah. Perhaps only a few years after the temple was completed, an English physician to the czarina’s army wrote a letter to a curious friend concerning “the Everlasting Fire in Persia” and the temple of the fire worshippers. This 1748 letter was published in Philosophical Transactions, one of the oldest scientific journals in Europe, sandwiched between “an account of the Cornel-Catterpillar” and an article relating “divers Means for preserving from Corruption dead Birds, intended to be sent to remote Countries.” Appearing in European accounts just before the Enlightenment, the temple straddles the divide between older spectacular and wondrous forms of knowledge and newer tabular and taxonomic forms in which all of these diverse things (caterpillars and temples and dead birds) could be grouped together in a journal of science in order to more effectively exhibit their differences. For Europeans then the temple sutured the fantastical to the rational. Even as late as the mid nineteenth century Suraxanı maintained its status as a place of wonder. In 1845 a Professor Beresin traveled to Suraxanı and observed, “In the day time these fires are not particularly striking, but at night, when they illuminate the gloomy and deserted neighborhood, the picture changes, and, behold, the simple temple of the fire worshippers becomes a fairy castle. Multi-coloured tongues of fire dance weirdly in the winds. Tongues of fire are carried away by the breeze, but at the points which they leave there spring up flames of greater brilliancy. It is not surprising that the imagination of Easterners should be played upon by a spectacle of such rare beauty and grandeur and that these fire worshippers should credit these eternal fires with a mysterious and supernatural significance. We must remember that Easterners are not the only ones who have indulged in fire worship; as a matter of fact there is scarcely a country in the world that has not had its fire worshippers.”

Time would prove Beresin more accurate than he could have imagined as a new race of fire worshippers descended on Suraxanı who shared neither his exoticizing but sincere love of the place nor the religious devotion of the “Easterners.” In less than four decades this entire world would be snuffed out as the Russian Empire’s exploitation of oil in the region intensified, largely due to the Nobel brothers’ (of Prize and dynamite fame) technological revolutions in oil extraction. Oil that had previously been slowly siphoned into leather pouches and then carried by donkey into the city could now be piped from reservoir to tanker and shipped off to other Caspian harbors. Following the completion of the Trans-Caucasian railway in 1884, which linked the Caspian and Black seas, the Nobel Oil Company was able to elbow its way into the European market, breaking Standard Oil’s monopoly and causing an explosion in the number of workers employed in the oil industry. In 1883 Baku claimed 1,254 oil workers. By 1901 nearly 28,000 people toiled in the peninsula’s oil fields.[1] One of these fields abutted the temple complex and a refinery was there established. At some point in the nineteenth century, the Nobel brothers took an image of the flaming temple as their company’s logo. With the land around Suraxanı rapidly becoming a forest of oil derricks, the number of pilgrims dwindled. One traveler wrote that when he “visited the temple in 1866 one Hindu priest alone remained to minister to the sacred fire. In 1881, when he made his second visit, he found the priest gone, the fire extinguished and the keys of the temple in the hands of the engineer of the refinery.”

By 1920 the keys passed to the Bolsheviks who continued to drill for oil in the area and at some point in the middle of the last century turned the fire temple into a museum.[2] Today those desiring to see the museum must walk past the forlorn Titanic Café (named after the wildly popular American film), scurry across railroad tracks, and pass under the faded sign of a hair salon before arriving at the wooden doors of the temple complex. The fire still burns – though now it is modestly fed by Suraxanı’s gas line and is only switched on for visitors. Structurally, the temple remains more or less intact; the museum consisting of a series of dusty, mud brown, papier-mâché mannequins representing Indian pilgrims in states of spiritual angst, a few faded maps, and brass Hindu trinkets all placed within the cells formerly used to house the devout.

It is in these cold, stone rooms where the sadness becomes most palpable. On my last visit to the temple a group of three teenage boys greeted me and a friend with a chorus of salams and gravely (for their age it seemed) unlocked each cell door to show us the exhibits. Inside one cell the electricity abruptly went out and one of our three impromptu guides quickly produced matches. The stolid front he had been putting up until then melted away as he giggled along with his buddies at the absurdity of trying to light up this dark, windowless room with one match. But for some reason this gesture seemed like the work that is necessary in a place like Suraxanı. A practiced and purposeful idleness, a spark of joy in a desert made by the modern world’s insatiable thirst for oil. In this matchlight I thought about the irretrievable loss of a real cosmopolitan world of accommodation, a world in which difference came before identity, where time was enchanted and traveling thousands of miles from India to Azerbaijan only to pray was both logical and economically feasible. This was dismantled in the space of one hundred years by people who chose chiefly to speak in the language of violence, for whom accommodation meant only less profit. It is their world of rigid identities, forged by industrial discipline, recorded in the empty and homogenous time of account books, glorified (or at least normalized) in History, that we have been bequeathed. The Bolsheviks, though they ended capitalist production, tried to internalize industrial disciplinary mechanisms, reclaiming History for the oppressed yet never questioning why we needed to have such a codification of memory.

And so I stay with this pack of kids, loitering in the temple complex, with nothing to do in Suraxanı except sit by the fire, telling jokes, trying to stay warm, and enjoying a few moments outside of adult supervision. Though left behind in Suraxanı by the cruelties of post-socialist capitalism, they at least have found a way of inhabiting this space that to me seems unendurably sad and lonely. If they could somehow reanimate or repeat that surpassed world, whose relics are all around them, then maybe we could strive together for a cosmopolitan world to come. Without seeing the fire temple in this atmosphere of quiet, expectant utopianism, I and these three will always live apart, our shared loss will go unacknowledged because we haven’t even begun to search for a (global, accommodating) language capable of describing it.

The Nobel Oil Company logo photo and the turn-of-the-century photo of Ateşgah are from Azerbaijan International Magazine.

[1] Audrey L. Altstadt, The Azerbaijani Turks: Power and Identity Under Russian Rule (Stanford: Hoover University Press, 1992), 22.

[2] The Nobel family somehow managed to emerge unscathed from the socialist appropriation of their oil company, selling their shares to the Standard Oil Company in New Jersey.

Happy New Year! Yeni İliniz Mübarək!

Recorded this off the television a few moments ago. A tinsel-strewn fantasy world of English singing, cosmetics, gilded furnishings and Heydar Aliyev. Ignore the firecrackers exploding in the background.

World's Largest Phallic Symbol

Thank you, Azerbaijan, thank you. Be sure to check out the strangely pornographic array of flag photos here.

Untitled Article

Baku - December 12, 2007
Source: Today.az

The highest and largest flag in Azerbaijan has been raised in front of the Nizami district administration in Baku, as reported by Eldar Abbasov, assistant chief of Nizami district administration.

The flagpole is 61.5 meters in height and the flag itself is 10x20 meters in size.

It is currently the highest and largest flag ever raised in our country. The repair is planned to be completed by December 18, he noted.

It should be reminded that the construction of the highest flag in the world, to be raised on the recently established square of National flag in mid 2008 is currently under way in Azerbaijan.

The flag prepared by Trident Support will be 140-150 meters in height.

The Secret

Today I received an email from the American-Educated Alumni Association and the Azerbaijan Marketing Society inviting me to a screening and discussion of the film adaptation of the self-help book, The Secret. According to the email, the book’s author, Rhonda Byrne, claims “As you know The Secret you will come to know how you can have, be or do anything you want. You will come to know who you really are. You will come to know the true magnificence that awaits you in life.” Currently ranked 46th on amazon.com’s bestsellers’ list, the book apparently argues that negative thinking causes terminal illness, poverty, and natural disasters.

This is the organizing principle of official public life in Baku. Packaged as benign New Age advice, it is in fact a strict injunction: think positively (i.e. don’t think) and have everything you want! (or else). This perverse optimism does not only appear in lectures organized by and for Baku’s well-heeled citizens but is rapidly being built into the city itself. New apartment buildings like “Great Residence” are physical manifestations of this logic of boundless satisfaction. Unfinished high-rises loom above narrow streets with cars parked on their sidewalks, forcing pedestrians to scamper in the streets, pressed against dusty automobile doors, bumping into mirrors. A city that has until now valiantly refused to surrender its soul to the monotonous grid (socialist or capitalist) by allowing life to spill over into its alleys canopied with grape vines under which boy waiters balance trays laden with the lunch of local shopkeepers, is being violently reorganized using the principles of The Secret.

Yet this injunction to limitless enjoyment can only have as its object an imaginary person capable of infinite happiness (e.g. the smiling, blonde woman in the Star advertisement) while the real citizens of Baku are literally crushed by its effects. These are the subjects that groups like the Azerbaijan Marketing Society are manufacturing “by providing in-depth surveys and analyses which is widely recognized as the international form of conducting scientific and practical researches.” In Baku capitalist utopia is everywhere and nowhere, disappearing in the rubble of collapsed buildings only to reappear in the weird computer-generated images of future buildings attached to fences at construction sites.

The destruction of Baku is an obscene “secret.” Obscene because it masquerades as a secret while touching everything in the light of day. But in contrast to this false secret are real disavowed secrets, ones that have moved beyond being secrets into another darker category, that could provide the basis for future political movements opposing the “post-political” utopia of global capital. Over the next year I hope to uncover a few of these fragments.