Ateshgah of Baku

A pentagonal walled courtyard with an open fire altar at its heart, the Ateshgah of Baku stands on ground where natural gas once seeped from the earth and burned on its own. The Absheron Peninsula has long been known for such flames — the name of the site comes from Persian and means "home of fire" — and travellers' accounts from the 17th century already describe seven vents of perpetual fire at Surakhany, the town on Baku's outskirts where the temple stands.

The complex visible today was built mostly in the 17th and 18th centuries. Its plan resembles a caravanserai: a walled courtyard lined with small cells where ascetics and pilgrims lived, and in the middle a four-pillared altar topped by a trident, where the main fire burned. Seventeen inscriptions survive on the walls — fourteen in Sanskrit, two in Punjabi quoting the Sikh scripture, and one in Persian — with dates ranging from 1668 to 1816. They invoke Ganesha, Shiva and Jwala Ji, the Hindu goddess of flame, and point to the community that built and used the shrine: Indian merchants from the Multan region who traded across the Caspian. European visitors from the 18th and 19th centuries recorded Hindu yogis, Sikhs and Zoroastrian pilgrims from Persia and India alike, and whether the site had an older Zoroastrian past remains debated by scholars; Alexandre Dumas, who came in 1858, found only three worshippers left.

As the Indian community dwindled and oil and gas extraction spread across Surakhany, the temple was abandoned in the late 19th century. The natural flame finally went out in 1969 after decades of drilling beneath it, and the fire that burns today is fed by gas piped from the city. The complex became a museum in 1975, and in 2007 it was declared a separate state historical and architectural reserve. Its image appeared on Azerbaijan's very first postage stamps in 1919, with oil derricks rising behind it — a fitting pairing for a sanctuary that owes both its fire and its fate to the gas beneath the peninsula.

Getting there

The Ateshgah is in the town of Surakhany, about 2.4 km from Amirjan and roughly 11 km east of central Baku. The nearest airport is Heydar Aliyev International Airport (GYD), about 7 km away.