A simple pir in Qax, typical of hundreds of these sites throughout the countryside.

These are the markings of a pir, a holy site usually associated with the grave of a holy person. While the tradition predates Islam, the pirs in Azerbaijan have grown rapidly since the collapse of the Soviet Union in both the Sunni north and Shiite communities in the rest of the country. Religious scholars say their popularity is as much a product of the country’s secular orientation as they are monuments of faith.

Inside the Bibi Hibat Pir outside Baku, rebuilt in the 1990s.

Dr. Nariman Gasimoglu, a religious scholar and director of the Baku-based Center for Religion and Democracy, explains that the pirs are ideal for what he termed the “secular religiousness” of the Azerbaijani population. “I’d estimate no more than 5% of the population practices the rituals and laws of Islam, but the rest consider themselves believers,” said Gasimoglu. He said that limited access to Islamic education and the authority’s crackdown on any centralized religious power meant that pirs – with their local character and idiosyncratic rituals – could flourish in the absence of more hierarchical Shiite religious authorities.

Inside the Bibi Hibat Pir outside Baku, rebuilt in the 1990s.

In and near Baku, the largest and most impressive religious structures are pirs. Filled with marble, carpets, intricate mirrors and glistening lights, observers say they are the most popular destination for locals and pilgrims alike. Many contain separate mosques within their walls. For example, the Mir Movsum Agha pirin Shuvelan – a town on the Absheron Peninsula near Baku – is open round the clock and receives hundreds of visitors each day from throughout Azerbaijan and beyond. An employee at the pir’s slaughterhouse said they collect enough sacrificed meat to provide assistance to approximately 600 local people.

The pirs are most active during Kurban Bairam, the annual holiday that celebrates the story of Abraham’s acceptance to sacrifice his son’s life as an offering to God and the subsequent reprieve. “Kurban” means sacrifice and people routinely bring animals, sweets or money to the pirs when if their prayers have been answered.

Far from the bustle and wealth of Baku, local pirs in villages are also growing as the religious taboos of the Soviet Union recede into history. “My grandfather knew all the history of this pir and this cemetery,” said Suleman Kindir, a twenty-five year old from the village of Pensar, near the southern border of Azerbaijan, “He also made this place more beautiful.” He is referring to the large murals depicting Imam Ali, Imam Hussein and various Koranic verses, all of which were commissioned in the last few years.

Suleman Kindir in his family's pir, in front of a mural added in the last few years depicting the death of Imam Hussein, a pivotal moment in Shii Islam.

The glass ceiling of the pir in Pensar.

This is true throughout the country. In far flung Bash Shabalid – located in the mountains north of Sheki near the border with Russia’s Dagestan province – there is no shortage of stories about the locally revered Sheik Ehmed, his grandson Mullah Mustafa and the pir devoted to them. Mustafa’s contentious legend includes organizing a rebellion of 30,000 people in the 1930’s and – according to local lore – somehow eluding his subsequent exile and execution.

The pir of Sheik Ehmed and Mullah Mustafa in Bash Shabalid, a village at the base of the Greater Caucasus Mountains.

Dr. Bruce Grant, a professor at New York University, argues that these pirs serve as “portal to other world” for pilgrims and scholars alike. Rather than regarding these religious institutions as “quaint” or “charming local color that might help us encourage tourism,” Grant suggested that the pir has became more than just a site for other-worldly requests; it is also a living symbol of local history and identity, both of which have been instinctively hidden in a territory that has been fought over in civil conflicts and invasions from three distinct empires.

In an essay for the journal of Comparative Studies in Society and History, Grant catalogs the “social world within this brick and mortar” and finds it has remained vital throughout the 20^thcentury, even as other local institutions were assimilated by central authorities. Whatever the mystical beliefs or actual history surrounding the pir, its gravitas in the community is hard to overstate today.

Local farmhand Shamil Salmonov recounted a story of a how two boys tried to repair the pirs’ roof during the purges of the 1930’s, only to be caught by a mysterious stranger who ordered them to return to the pir. “It was mullah Mustafa,” said Salmonov, “With a banquet laid out for the brave believers. In the morning, there was no trace of the mullah, not even the ashes of the fire could be found.” According to Grant’s fieldwork there are dozens of such stories even in the tiny community of Bash Shabalid.

[video soon]

Part of the reason the pirs have retained so much their local significance is many have partially escaped the worst of the Soviet era suppression of religion. Grant says there is archival and anecdotal evidence that pirs were more tolerated because “there was a real anxiety on the part of the government that if these shrines were shut down too, they would really have a problem on their hands,” said Grant. “According to archival materials, the government just didn’t take them all that seriously.”

At this pir in Mashtaga, it is considered good luck to weave in and out of the seven doorways of this outdoor grave.

The pirs, which for obvious reasons were usually located in cemeteries, could be accessed because funerary rituals were more tolerated than outward religious worship. “There is a clear pattern over the course of the twentieth century that whenever anyone was under the gun from state officials they would always say first and foremost they were praying for the dead,” said Grant. Whether it was policy or oversight, the pirs where spared the fate of most of Azerbaijan’s mosques and they became a last refuge for local collective memory.

Inside the Bibi Hibat Pir outside Baku, rebuilt in the 1990s.

According to Dr. Altya Goyushov, a religious scholar and professor at Baku State University and a visitor scholar at the UCLA, the growth of the pirs since the collapse of the Soviet Union is both a sign of change and continuity with the past.

The current expansion of pirs would not have been tolerated during Soviet times, but many other policies show the authorities resisting the growth of centralized Islamic institutions. “This government openly says [they] don’t have anything against religion, but mentally I think some part of old soviet tradition and view of religion continues,” said Goyushov.

An barely marked pir - this spot in the wood is considered a holy place and good for easing arthritis pain.

Echoing the opinion of many Muslim clerics and religious observers, Goyushov said many Islamic acts such as undertaking the Hajj or establishing new mosques in Azerbaijan were “almost impossible today” because of the bureaucratic hurdles involved. He saw a parallel for Azerbaijan’s current decentralized religious climate: “The revival of the new pirs is some version of what was happening in the soviet times during the twenties, thirties and forties.”

Another pir in Pensar, this one run by a woman.

A woman in a chador walks along the streets of Nardaran, with the country's largest pir in the background.

The fate of this uptick in pirs remains to be seen. Both Gasimoglu and Goyushov expressed concern with financial transparency at the pirs, as did many local imams who cautioned that fraud and corruption were no less common in pirs than in other sectors of Azerbaijan life. They also said the pirs may lose ground as Islamic education trickles into the country.

But they also agree that the pirs – and the figures they are built around – go beyond theological questions. Many of the pirs are dedicated to people who resisted, or the very least ignored, the central authority. Mir Movsum Agha, for example, did not perform any Islamic rites, but he is seen as a symbol of a local icon who the Soviet authorities were unable to incorporate into their system.

“Broken stones, inlaid stones, stones in riverbeds, stone in hand, tombstones, stones with drying dung, holy stones , stones to grind, to heat, to cool, to roll down the mountain and wait a hundred years for a shepherd to put salt on top of it, stone on stone, for sheep to eat”…

…I wrote while waiting for thousands of sheep to come down from the mountain to drink. I wait for them in the valley on the other side of the stream because of the sheep dogs that accompany them. I have asked everyone I could for advice about how to get past the sheep dogs to meet the shepherd, but no one filled me with confidence – these are pretty vicious dogs bred to fight wolfs in the mountains, so it’s a valid concern.

I content myself with taking their photo across the rushing water from last night’s rain, which fell as snow around the peak and has since melted in the sunlight. As I walk back to the terraced village of Xinaliq, I see a truck returning home. I am later told it is the moving truck of a shepherd family. The shepherd himself is likely still in the mountains making his way from the plains hundreds of miles away on horseback, surrounded by some section of the village’s roughly 6,000 sheep. Once they arrive from their “Kishlak” (mobile winter lodgings), they will build “Yailak”s (summer shelter in the mountains) and live with their flocks in the hills.

These sheep are central to life in Xinaliq. Their wool is sheered, dried, or colored all over the village. Their dung is mixed with earth pressed into pie shaped mounds and left on stones to dry. This will be burned in the winter for heat, since there is little timber at this altitude.

Near the river, by the new part of the village, is a school and the homes of the literature, history, Russian, English, math and physical education teachers. I spoke with several of them as I wandered around this pedagogical cluster until I wound up in the house of Sherif Ovzetin, the history teacher.

He was well equipped to tell me about Xinaliq, which is pronounced “Hinalig” and is called Ketish by its inhabitants. It is a tiny hamlet of some two thousand people that live high up in the mountains in the north of Azerbaijan.

The Ketish speak their own language and trace their origins to one of the 26 tribes of the Albanian kingdom. They have three different “P” sounds for example and a modified alphabet has just been developed for them by several linguists consisting of 50 Latin characters.

Half an hour through the winding canyons is the village of Gris, which also speaks its own unique language. While other Albanian descendents such at the Lezgians, the Udin, the Avars, the Haput and others also have their own language, there are only a handful of languages that are isolated to a single village.

Mountain dwellers along the Greater Caucasus Range are fond of explaining their tapestry of languages with a bit of accidental divine intervention. First, Sherif tells me, God created all the peoples of the world and then set off to distribute their various languages, all of which were kept in a bag. But when the creator flew over the soaring snow covered peaks of the Caucasus and the bag got caught on a particularly high crag. Through this small tear came a stream of languages sprinkled throughout the region.

Today hammers are pounding and roofs are being reinforced. While large parts of the village was abandoned due to rapid emigration during the last few turbulent decades, the government has decided to pour considerable resources into the village to preserve it for both anthropological and tourist purposes. By rebuilding the 1.5 hour road and going on a hiring spree (and adding a 30% “altitude” bonus) the government has reduced the emigration out of Xinaliq.

I spoke with the workers throughout the village about their work and I heard on several occasions that they are building a museum. What is the museum? I’d ask. The entire village they’d say. I have no doubt if I lived here, this would be good news, pure and simple. But one can make the argument that a museum is the cemetery of culture – remembered, honored, but certainly not alive.

It’s an impossible issue to sort out definitively, but hints of this tension do come out. Even the history teacher – who is proud of the progress in the village and has tacked his own boat to the winds of tourism – often told me of how different things were in his childhood when “people actually needed each other.”

Life was very hard in Xinaliq for much of its history. Sherif the history teacher told me how hundreds of residents used to line up shoulder to shoulder from the plateau where the village sits all the way down to river bed below to pass stones from arm to arm up the steep elevation.

Now, the Xinaliq school has had high speed internet for years and includes dormitories for the children of shepherds to live in while their fathers lead the giant flocks of sheep over 300 kilometers to the plains of Shirvan.

There are maybe eight cemeteries around the village, ranging from ancient stones overgrow with mineral deposits to recent additions. Some of the stones bear Arabic and Albanian markings, which the history teacher says can be traced to the 7^th century. And why not!

For the first time in my half year reporting throughout the regions of Azerbaijan, I see a community actually receiving the money allocated by the government and putting it to its intended purpose – to keep the youth from leaving.  “My son raised a family here,” said Mezahir Milikov, 47, “It’s good now, there is work for a while – the pay is good. It’s a good village.” And after the temporary work ends in a few years? “He can take care of the sheep, we have ten or fifteen of them. In the city you need money everyday, but here even a little is enough.”

Before I end this entry, I want to mention a poet from Xinaliq, Ragim Alhaz, who has gathered significant renown in Azerbaijan and whose fables and stories are part of the local canon. While he died a few years ago, the history teacher translated some of his anecdotes – a few of my favorites:

Many winters ago, an official meeting was announced Quba, the nearest town and the provincial capital. A message was relayed to Xinaliq that their village had to send a representative to this committee and so the elders picked a young man widely respected throughout the village to be their voice in Quba. He was not a wealthy man but he knew how treacherous the mountain roads were, so he put on his warmest jacket, which was by no means fashionable (he had a rope for a belt) but sturdy enough to survive the elements.

He was delayed in a blizzard during the walk and arrived a day late to the Quba committee. As he entered the town hall, the other representatives stared with disdain and there were some snickers in the crowd. The head of the committee asked the man, “Surely the people of Xinaliq had someone more decent and worthwhile to send to provincial counsel!”

Without missing a beat this man replied, “Oh yes, they certainly do, but they sent him to the decent and worthwhile committee.”

Another great story involves two brothers, Hoopolum (the dumb one) and Shoopolum (the smart one). The history teacher begins the story in the traditional “once upon a time” they use here at the beginning of fairy tales: “One came and one went away”… Anyway, there were two brothers and Shoopolum had to leave his mother and home with Hoopolum for a long time, so he tells his brother, “Take care of mom and the house and goes.”

Well Hoopolum decides the old woman needs a bath, so he makes fire, puts a tub on top of it, put the mom inside, and covers it with a lid. He puts a stone on the lid for some reason too. In the meantime he decides to repair the house, which, obviously, becomes a disaster. Then he sees his brother coming down the road and panics, drops all the broken windows and hammers and runs to check up on mom, who has long since expired in the tub.

Shoopolum is understandably furious, but he is also in a rush. He has been invited to the neighboring village for a wedding and has no idea how to deal with this situation. So he tells his brother to dress their mother in youthful clothes and wrap her up in a carpet, and they set off together to the neighboring village.

When they arrived, Shoopolum quickly unloaded the carpet from the donkey that brought it and stashed it in a corner of the house, telling everyone, “Hey, my dame is in there!” The women sitting around the carpet keep inviting this mysterious woman to join them, but obviously she does not respond. Finally a girl pulls the carpet, offer the woman some food and the corpse falls out to great screams.

Shoopolum feigns shock and demands to know who has cursed and killed his girl. The villagers are terrified of this supernatural spectical and offer Shoopolum the girl who pulled the carpet in exchange for him departing on good terms. So he agrees.

When he returns to his village, everyone demands to know what happened to his mother. He explains that he went to another village where they magically exchange old people for young girls. Everyone is very intrigued, and lead their grandmothers to the village hoping for young marriageable girls. The other villagers realize they’d been had and beat up the naïve villagers, who also return home looking to get their revenge on Shoopolum.

Upon seeing him, they give chase and he took off to save his neck. The crowd was gaining on him though, so he ran up to a shepherd and told him – those people there, they’re coming to kill you. The shepherd panicked and asked for help. Shoopolum suggested they switch clothes and that the shepherd should jump in the river. Then he went to a high place just as the angry mob arrived.

“Where is Shoopolum?” They demanded. “He jumped in the river bless his soul,” answered the disguised Shoopolum. “Why bless his soul, he’s a scoundrel,” they yelled. “I know, but it must be a magic stream. He pushed me into the stream and when I came out, I had all the sheep I could see – look – and he pointed to the shepherds flock.” And so the villagers having lost the trail of Shoopolum jumped into the river to try their luck and were carried away downstream.

There’s many more stories like this – I’m happy to append them if there’s some interest.

Larger slideshow here.

Had another story go up on EurasiaNet.org, so here’s a few photos that didn’t make the cut there.

Azerbaijan has always been located between cultural traditions, absorbing words and ideas from the vast empires that have surrounded it. So it is fitting that the only thing everyone agrees about today’s meykhana – a form of poetic improvisation – is that it is a unique product of the Absheron peninsula where Baku is located.

Some say it originated with from Sufi dervish traditions, while others see its origin in more secular literary forms. Even the word meykhana, which can be literally translated as “the place of wine,” – although “spirits” captures the meaning more closely – yields many interpretations, from heavenly nectars to back alley taverns.

Banned during much of the Soviet period for its potentially provocative nature, meykhana was briefly encouraged during WWII to propagandize against the Nazis. After it had served its purpose, it was again banned by the authorizes and left to incubate in the hands of a few underground poets who passed it at great personal risk through informal schools that continue – and have multiplied – in the present day.

An offshoot of Persian or Arabic Ghazel poetry and Azeri Mugham, Meykhana is the poetry of the streets recited by a common person for a fee at weddings, good for a chuckle and maybe a raised eyebrow or two. But in the right hands, it also became the epitome of protest and integrity.

The men – and rarely a woman – pick a topic and then tap out a 6/8 rhythm with their fingers on the table or a nagaradrum. They take turns improvising a chorus and individual verses under strict rhythm, plucking inspiration from anywhere they can find it. While different schools have different approaches, the basic criteria are constant: adherence to rhythm, rhyme and theme. A sense of humor is highly recommended.

Meykhana is often compared to the indirectly political Russian bards like Vladimir Vysotsky or early American rap music, because it has existed outside the established culture, propagated by copied cassettes and originally beloved by a small but committed group of fans. Today meykhana is more popular than ever, with several competitions on television each year.

While meykhana made the leap to televised competition in the early 1990s, it can best be understood if you visit a smoky, simple teahouse in the Baku suburbs of Mashtaga, Ahmedli, or Yasamal – the three most popular, but by no means only “schools” in Azerbaijan. Experienced meykhana poets typically perform at weddings, but these hangouts are where the informal practice takes place, often everyday, for a student of meykhana.

Mehman Ahmedli, a lifelong meykhana poet, echoed many of the other poets interviewed when he said, “It is growing to be very popular now because is some money in it, so there are hundreds of wannabe meykhanists – but there are maybe a dozen real ones, the rest is air.”

Mehman says that while the most important thing about a good poem is its lyrical power, protest was once a much bigger part of the recitations. “Before it was local, in your courtyard, but now it’s on TV and seen everywhere so you have to know some limits,” he said. Mehman mentioned a poet named Ghengis “maybe 7 or 8 years ago” who “said everything – all of that stuff, about all the things you cannot talk about – way, way past the line.”

“It was beautiful,” he added. “We didn’t know him, no one knew him well, but then he just disappeared completely.”

Kerim Novruzov, a widely respected meykhana poet from Mashtega, said he has studied the classic poetry and literature of Azerbaijani and Persian writers for most of his life. He has seen meykhana emerge from the underground following Azerbaijani independence and he has watched it spread throughout a country transformed in countless ways.

“Meykhana has always been about everyday life, it is a communal approach to consciousness,” said Novruzov. “Problems everyone knows and sees, like the drains flooded after the rain – this is our material.”

“Azerbaijan and meykhana exist in parallel,” he added, “One reflects the other.”

Novruzov explains that personal attacks on people are not common, except if two poets are competing with one another. Meykhana critiques tend to shy away from direct political attacks, both because polemics make for bad poetry and an element of self-censorship.

“On TV you can say whatever you want, but then you have to answer for it,” Kerim said, referring to the meykhana competitions on Azerbaijani television stations.

Mehman Ahmedli, a lifelong meykhana poet who runs the Ahmedli (a settlement of Baku outside the main city) school, agrees that meykhana has become commercialized and risks becoming a victim of its own success. “Back then it was about love – we were hungry, had no money, but we did not care about being popular,” he said, “And today everyone just races to get on TV and get the money.”

Shirzad, a longtime Meykhana enthusiast also from Ahmandli who has archived meykhana performances for over a decade, explained meykhana’s relationship with politics with this allegory: “If someone throws you a dumbbell, you tense up before you catch it, but if it’s just a cottonball you don’t flinch. Meykhana is the needle inside the cotton.”

Not all Azeris see today’s meykhana in this light. Ali Novruzov a blogger and activist (no relation to Kerim), explained how he sees meykhana as his friends nodded in agreement: “It’s like a cancer for Azerbaijan – put it in a museum already! It’s just another tool to make zombies of the youth.” He directed his main critique toward the televised meykhana program, drawing a distinction with what he said is the genre’s more activist roots: “Meykhana is not oppressed anymore, it’s worse: it’s subsidized.”

“I guess it is opposition: opposition to girls smoking cigarettes, homosexuals and other ethnic groups,” said Ali Novruzov, “If you protest so indirectly, you haven’t said anything.”

Meykhana invariably draws comparisons to hip-hop, both in its content and message. One of Azerbaijan’s first hip-hop groups, Dayirman, came to prominence with their wartime anthem “Karabakh or death.” Emin Efendi, the director of Dayirman Productions, said that while hip-hop and muyhkhana follow different paths, the individual artists all know one another.

“We grew up in the same ghettos afterall,” he added.

While Meykhana has been integrated in pop culture, Azeri hip-hop has never been more turbulent. A song released in 2009 called “Azadliq [Freedom]” from the rap group H.O.S.T. featured Dayirman and ventured where no maykhana can. With lyrics like:

“I am a Karabakh veteran / under the eyes of the police. / I am a superior with many funeral tents / under my armchair. / I am tombstones / with villas erected above them!… Save me from / illiterate physicians! / Free me from / illusory elections! / Expel me / from moneyversities!” (it’s got plenty of flow too – check it out here, full lyrics here)

Azeri hip-hop has moved in a new direction, surpassing or betraying its meykhana roots, depending on who you ask. While members of H.O.S.T Alliance could not be reached for comment, other poets and fans said both the group and its fans have been periodically detained and warned against further provocations. The group has not followed up with similar anti-establishment music.

“There’s a time and a place for each type of music,” said another renowned Bakuvian rapper Ibrahim “Oran [Uranium]” Ibrahimov, “All my words, thoughts, feelings come out best in rap, but meykhana is in my blood.”

To see a video of some meykhana from the Ahmedli school, check my article on EurasiaNet.org.

When Azerbaijan won Eurovision I was drinking with a Meskhetian Turk somewhere in the flatlands of Central Azerbaijan. I had gone to see the night livestock market, which isn’t exactly at night nor a market. But the point remains, instead of covering the biggest story of the year about Azerbaijan in the Western press, I was feeling sorry for sheep on a roadside in Sabirabad. Figures…

Even the sheep were thrilled!

I didn’t think it would be such a big deal (and maybe it’s not), but it has sparked a good deal of self-reflection here. So I’d like to offer a little metaphor I recently heard from my friend Hasan in Sabirabad. It’s a good short hand for me – I find it more than a little patronizing, limited and slightly offensive – everything a metaphor should be. Azerbaijan is big on animal metaphors – there’s the bunny on the back of the lion, the pack of wild dogs, “you can’t have a forest without a fox,” etc… etc… but my favorite was about an adolescent boy.

After the night market, Hasan helped me to translate for a group of local activists who were organizing farmers after last year’s devastating floods. He kept adding his own extremely positive assessments of the government, the president and so on. Then I stayed on at his house for a second night, after reporting in the flood zone one year after the face and the conversation was completely different.

Hasan has lived for years in Moscow, Uzbekistan and Turkey, so he has access to an outsiders perspective. But once he started explaining his own understand of How Things Are, it was preceded with “let’s talk as neighbors.” He explained that the first night, I was a guest, so he had no interest in speaking about politics or the problems of everyday life. Everything was fine, he insisted and poured another round.

But the second night I was no longer a guest, I was a friend, so we could talk openly. And we discussed into the night about where he say the country going. He explained the local nuances, distrust, corruption, solidarity, pragmatism, optimism and inertia that usually only enter my conversations with outsiders or activists. In short he knew which way the wind blew.

His analogy for “Azerbaijan and Progress” was that of an adolescent boy seeing a beautiful woman. At first, he is shy to look, but he cannot help it. When no one is watching him, he is watching her. He looks her up and down and longs for her. He is overwhelmed with desire, but he has no idea how to approach her. He can walk over to her, but he’d lose his speech, he’d become unsure and shy or babbling, talking over his own words.

So he sits and the desire only grows. But he won’t get her. Maybe he will try, but it will be a failure. Only when he is older, more experienced will he see her, but by then she will not be the most beautiful girl in the world – she will be an attractive woman, one he can read, understand and maybe even woo. He will have a chance with her because he has had years of watching other men fail and succeed. He has learned how to take risks until they are not risks anymore but decisions.

So according to this analogy, the adolescent is Azerbaijan, the beautiful woman is European style progress and Eurovision is a batting of her eyelashes – or was that a wink?

And now, for your viewing pleasure,  the wedding singer, basketball all-star, scholar, scientist, historian, warrior, mourner, good-for-nothing jack of all trades, Hasan (and the Volga he swears he bought off a minister):

On May 10 Heydar Aliyev, the former president and current billboard favorite in Azerbaijan, would have turned 88 years old. So naturally, the government pulled out all the stops. Like last year, thousands of flowers from 50 countries literally covered the park between the Heydar Aliyev Palace and the statue of Heydar Aliyev as two hot air balloons were inflated in front of the giant flower mosaic of Heydar Aliyev, ensuring that his unmistakable Kremlin-Mona-Lisa smile would soar above the city already covered by his portraits.

The websiteof President Ilham Aliyev, the son of the late Heydar, set the tone: “The magnificent monument of savior and founder of the contemporary Azerbaijan, genius son of the nation, Heydar Aliyev, and its pedestal were covered with flowers.”

Like most foreigners here, I’m a little tired of seeing the face of Heydar on countless posters, offices, flags, building walls, etc., etc. but he is a person held in great esteem by the vast majority of people in the country – even those I know don’t accept the official line on their country’s history.

The sayings of Heydar and Ilham are written on posters and buildings everywhere in the country and usually are translated to me as a patronizing cliché or platitude. But one in Hachmas is a personal favorite – “In Azerbaijan there is no alternative to the politics of Heydar Aliyev.”

But before I trot out my world-weary foreign arrogance, lets put this into perspective. It was a beautiful day, the park looked great, the flowers were beautiful and people do need to rally around a leader. Celebrating with flowers seems pretty benign compared to some of the school children goose-stepping on Ataturk Day in Turkey.

And lets not forgot how half the country in the USA celebrated the civil war anniversary or take a moment to acknowledge that for all the criticism of Heydar Aliyev or the subsequent cult of personality built around him, we still celebrate Columbus Day in the USA and I’m sure Heydar was a far better man.

There is no shortage of material available online about the reasons people celebrate the man. I won’t go into those here because so much of the actual history during his presidency is not verifiable or seriously studied yet.

Thomas Goltz spends the better part of 500 pages trying to pin down the man behind the mantle in his excellent account of the country’s most turbulent years. In his prologue ofAzerbaijan Diary, he said the book is “a sort of super-unauthorized biography by someone who got quite close to the Grand Old Man[…],” but he also admits the futility of answering that questions: “Who was, who is Heydar Aliyev? I don’t know[...] He is either (a) the chief agent of post-Soviet Russian irredentism in Azerbaijan, sent in as part of a deep, dark plot to destroy the country from within or (b) a true Azeri patriot all along, seeking the best for his shattered nation the only way he knows.”

90% of Azeris would agree with the latter view, with the bulk of the non-conformists being non-Azeris. Maybe I’m looking for something that isn’t there, but I do believe I hear some lingering doubts when I hear people say “he was the right man for the moment.” Considering the depth of the pit Azerbaijan found itself in, this isn’t the kindest thing you can say about a man – but it certainly makes a hero out of him.

Some of the most curious and engaged thinkers I’ve talked to here regard Heydar as a great man – even when his methods seemed counter-productive. One of my friends, who was involved in medical care for ministers during that period, said he saw today’s corruption begin with Heydar. According to him, Heydar centralized power by telling all of his ministers that they had a free hand to suck up as much money from their ministries as possible – whoever proved most adept at funneling cash would be rewarded with even more money. Sounds pretty bad, huh?

“But it was the only way to create a meaningful leadership that was capable of resisting all the foreign agents and fight the war we were about to lose completely,” he said. And getting money for the government was a very serious issue indeed – it’s not taxes were being collected. Also, Armenia was making huge gains in the war, the streets were dangerous, there was zero oil money, diaspora money, and aid money. Plus Iran and Russia (and probably the West) were already licking their lips at this oily treat whose taste probably brought back nostalgic memories of their youthful empires. That’s the harshest story I’ve heard. “He didn’t know democracy, it wasn’t what he was good at,” my friend added, “He was good at consolidating power which was exactly what everyone saw was needed.”

So while a few people can articulate arguments that put him at the center of Azerbaijan’s problems today, they don’t really blame him. With the political arrests, lack of free speak, fixed elections and widespread corruption, a relatively recent transplant might find himself dubious of this near-deified nation father figure. But I have to assume part of the reason I don’t “get” why this cult of personality goes so deep is because I didn’t experience just how chaotic Azerbaijan was during those troubled years.

In a recent conversation I had with a local expert and journalist, she told me how odd it felt for her to watch recent government crackdowns on the protestors and actually feel some begrudging respect for how organized and professional the riot police acted. She is by no means a loyalist to the regime, but she does admit that her mind immediately shot back to the chaos on the streets of Baku during the early 1990s.

Heydar Aliyev is intimately linked with the greatest trauma the of the previous generation. Children grow up in a different country, but their parents tell them that this man stabilized Azerbaijan before it had fountains and jeans and wifi – so Heydar’s legacy lives on. The next generation won’t have any firsthand account though, and who knows how they will react to this blotted hero-worship. Goltz wondered the same thing when he wrote “But some decades from now, when a new generation passes judgment on the sins of today’s heroes, will they then tear down the statues and rename the towns?”

A last little Heydar moment from my travels. “So why do people have a big poster of Heydar on their walls?” I asked a Russian man in a far off mountain village who was one of the very few who saw nothing worth liking in Heydar – or any politician so far as I could tell. “It’s a kind of superstition,” he said, “Like a talisman – if it’s up, good things are more likely to happen, if not bad things may come into the home.”

First the Gobustan petroglyphs, which the guide said are from 23,000 years ago. Yes, thousand. The internet says, 12-8th century BC, but honestly who even knows? There’s a couple hundred of these and they really cool in real life. Apparently, they put tooth paste inside the crevaces to make more contrast in the photos. I didn’t even try to do that – they already demand a 2 AZN fee for taking photos. But here’s a pretty holy site from long before there was an Azerbaijan, an Armenia, a Georgia, a Russia, a Persia – before any of that. Plus, look at that cool boat they made:

Next we have some sheep near the railroad tracks. This is the kind of thing to look for to properly appreciate what’s so lovely about Azerbaijan. In the future I will have a post devoted to animals standing next to concrete blocks.

Finally, after a slow drive on a very bumpy road, you park the car and walk up a large hill. There’s oil coming right out of the ground and not a soul for miles (although there was a cow on the hillside that looked like a deity). In the distance are a couple of lunar looking mounds. They gurgle! And leak! And get mud all over your clothes and camera if you through something at them. What a weird site – it’s like you founding one of the earth’s internal organs.

Click to view slideshow.This is the third such attempt by the opposition Public Chamber group to create momentum for some kind of counterweight to the party of President Ilham Aliyev, which has come out of widely criticized election with a monopoly on political power in the country.

The question for me as a journalist is how to cover these actions. On the one hand, the story seems to be that the protests have no traction and no visible public support. Aside from the darting yellow jacketed media that ran from street to street hoping to see something happening, most people went about their business without much interest. I assume it was an uncomfortable feeling for other reporters to see so many of their colleagues and so few of the protesters. I’d guess it was at least 5 police and 3 reporters for every protester I saw today. Some Bakuvians watched the occasion dramatic arrest, others walked away, but all in all I’ve seen much more public anger at protests in New York City than here.

On the other hand, people are being forcibly detained for no reason. There are widespread claims of abuses in the jails, including beatings. Of those I saw being arrests, which are reported to be in the dozens, some were immediately seized because I assume the police recognized their faces, others were quickly thrown into a police van for clapping their hands or marching in a group. Most people were quickly grabbed and whisked away to a waiting bus or police car, without any provocation I could see.

It was a beautiful day outside and afterward I walked through Fountain Square watching locals and visitors alike enjoy the sun, eat ice cream and take photos. The occasional journalist could be seen walking around, maybe hoping there would be some follow-up or something unexpected. But so far, no surprises.

In my opinion, which I’ve bounced off of local friends and journalists, the public really does not support protests and an overthrow of the regime. But there is also a widespread sense that government is not legitimately elected. It seems Azerbaijan, taken as a whole, has chosen stability over democracy, but many thoughtful, brave people I know see this is as a necessary step to keep peace and order – and to remain united enough to retake the territory Azerbaijan lost in a war in the mid-90s to Armenia.

I also wonder about those the police arrested. They are brave – that seems undeniable. But are they relevant? Whatever the result of their seemingly hopeless protest, do their critics really want an Azerbaijan where no one willing to risk their comfort for principles?

There’s the tranquil Bibi Heybat Mosque, The famous “James Bond” oil fields where they filmed The World is Not Enough, a few beaches, and some overpriced resorts in various stages of construction. Otherwise there is a mostly a big wall on the right and the Caspian shore on the left. There’s a hole in that wall that leaves to a barren world of pipes, more walls and petro-chemical plants across the horizon.

I went to front gates of AzMeCo and asked to see the giant head of Lenin. The guard was in a good mood and laughed about the question. He sent me around the factory to the back where he said I might be able to find it.

The trick to sightseeing in Azerbaijan is to appreciate the unexpected. Call it absurd, but spending an hour trying to track down a giant bust of Lenin’s head is exactly how to get a sense of the country.

Here’s a warm up example:

This is a guy in Sheki who sites near the main tourist attraction in the city carrying around his stuffed wolf under a colorful sheet. For a few kopeks, he’ll show it to you along with some yellowed pages he said were registration documents. For a few more you can take their photo. You’ll notice in the detail that the wolf’s eyes have been replaced with light bulbs – there’s a switch on his belly turns them on.

That said, lets return to Lenin and the tanks. On page 139 of Mark Elliot’s extraordinary travel guide to Azerbaijan is a little hand drawn map pointing out a gas station, some chemical works and a little box labeled “Lenin still stands in grounds of factory.” Unfortunately, I have to report that according to the guards he has been removed into storage inside the factory just a few months ago. The pedestal remains though – I wonder what will take his place?

I couldn’t get permission to enter the factory’s storage room because it was a Sunday and there was no one available to give me permission. That also meant there was no around to shoo me out of the tank cemetery down the road. There are two actually, but the one Elliot marked as “Now a closed military zone – Keep Away!” is apparently mostly parts, while this little fenced in yard is full of the chassis.

I asked a plant supervisor nearby about the tanks and he explained that they were all brought here under an executive order from the President after the Soviet Union was dismantled. All the tanks are gutted for any salvageable parts and there is a tank factory right nearby, with shiny new painted tanks parked outside. See those hills in the last photo, that’s where they test out the munitions. Cool, huh?