Between May 7 and May 19th I took my dream trip
to the Caucasus, where I have wanted to visit since I was a kid. This blog and the two to follow are thoughts
about each of the three countries visited.
I went with Road Scholars, a wonderful organization that
sponsors a vast variety of trips for older but active folk. It’s a great introduction to these places,
with informative guides and lots of information on all cultural and political
facets of the places visited, but I have a few caveats: One problem with a tour, even one at this
level is that there is not enough time in any single place to really check out
any one in depth for a label reader like me.
We also had very nice hotels, were plied with every possible variety of
local cuisine, and traveled in comfortable busses, but how much can we really
discover in four days in each country with our privileged tourist status?
And finally, the history of this region is so incredibly
complicated, with so much migration and cross-migration, so many languages and
shifting political situations, and bigger countries all around, always
threatening to bite off a piece, that whatever I am writing now may be
completely changed in five or ten years.
So within those limits, here goes:
Azerbaijan (May 7-11)
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| Old Baku (foreground) and New (background) |
I had no preconceptions about Baku except it’s being an oil
town, but I wasn't expecting the combination of Old Soviet and New Gulf-State
city. Baku is an oil and gas town, and
seems to be trying to outdo Abu Dhabi in tall buildings in crazy shapes and
immaculate buildings in a uniform gray limestone with very elegant, neo-Moorish
filigree ornamentation. The new city has
broad streets, opulent, manicured parks, and is incredibly clean. We never saw any dogs, and only the occasional
cat. All the expensive international
bling stores are here too (Armani, Tiffany, etc).
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| Old Baku: Palace |
Most of the small “old town” in the same gray stone, is
carefully restored, or in the act of being so, and so it has the usual
restoration conundrum (when a site is in use for a long time, what time does
one restore it to, and isn’t there
always older stuff still left around?).
Most interesting here were several restored caravanserais, the old merchants’
“hotels” stretching back to silk-road days, with big courtyards for camels and
traders, and accommodations for the merchants all around it.
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| Caravanserai - now picturesque but uncomfortable hotel |
This area is rug paradise.
There is an entire museum dedicated to carpets, with great lighting, and
geographical groupings of Azeri rugs, plus all sorts of interactive material on
rug making and the materials. The tourist shops around the old town are
festooned with new rugs in traditional patterns and sizes too.
Courteous and laid-back (or laid back appearing) people are
all around, and we were continually told that though the country is 93% Muslim,
that it’s not all a theocracy. Most
women don’t wear headscarves, Sunnis get along fine with Shiites, Jews,
Christians and other ethnic groups and faiths are not only tolerated, but
welcomed. There are a large number of
distinct tribal groups with their own localized languages, particularly in the mountainous north. In this
respect, it’s almost Utopia, unless you’re Armenian, since there is a long-standing
territorial dispute over the territory of Nigorno-Karabagh, now part of Armenia. It sounds like Israel and Palestine all over
again, and you are not permitted to go directly from one country to the other. There is also a part of Azerbaijan that’s
separated from the rest by Armenia, and the Azeri government has subsidized
very cheap flights so that folks can go from one part to the other. We were also fed quite a bit of bitter
rhetoric about Azeri refugees expelled from Armenia.
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| Zoroastrian Temple, Eternal Flame (now piped in) |
In the oil country surrounding the city, it’s flat, ugly and
industrial. Baku is on the Caspian Sea,
but it’s no Rio de Janeiro. No beaches, just oil and shipping, and the country
is definitely part of the Islamic world
(“Turkish Toilets,” are the norm); there’s regular ferry service to
Kazakistan and Turkmenistan. It also shares a border with Iran, that itself has
a considerable Azeri population, and this is perhaps reflected in the Azeri
mosques we visited, elegantly restored and also recently built mosques,
beautiful and serene with all the elegance of their Iranian counterparts.
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| Gorgeous New Mosque |
May 10 - in Sheki, a town in the northwest foothills. It’s more typical rural Azeri, but now being
developed more for tourism. The houses
here brick and stone, but it’s also more sophisticated than the towns
surrounding it, in that most streets are paved.
We visited the Khan’s summer palace with amazing painted and stained
glass of brilliant colors, with the Eastern type of total juxtaposition of
decoration patterns. The stained glass is
set into beechwood framing, both of tiny elements and no glue in complex
geometric and floral patterns; the glass being very bright in color, and
originally from Venice.
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| Sheki - Khan's Palace |
The Sunday market: wonderful veggies, meat cut from the
carcass and live poultry. The veggies are generally familiar; they are big on
green tart plums and sour cherries. Most
of the spices are also familiar, with lots of Azeri saffron and powdered
sumac. They make circular “halvah” of
walnut, filberts, oodles of honey syrup and a crisscross saffron pattern, a
Sheki specialty. Azeri lunches and
dinners follow a set pattern: on the table fresh herbs, tomatoes and cucumbers,
veggie salads, yogurt, bread and local very salty white cheese. Then comes soup, chicken, lentil, etc., then
a meat course, barbecued or tasty stews with veggies. Then tea-in-a-glass. No pork because of halal laws. All the ingredients are super fresh, and most
dishes are subtly seasoned to enhance the natural favors. Lots of food but not fatty, and people are
slim, except for plump older ladies. The
latter remind me of elderly Spanish ladies in the 1960’s. Like them, they generally dress in black, and
look just as formidable. It’s hard to
believe that I am the same age as many of them!
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| Sheki - Sunday Market |
I was hoping that we would visit the all-Jewish village of
Krasnaya Sloboda, near Quba, but we didn’t get up that way. North of the border in the North Caucasian
range is Russian territory, specifically Daghestan. Needless to say, we didn’t go there either.
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