Baku's Old City and the Fire Temples of Azerbaijan

The Land of Fire: Where Silk Road and Sacred Flame Meet

Long before oil derricks appeared on the Caspian horizon, Azerbaijan was known to travellers as Odlar Yurdu — the Land of Fire. Flames rose unbidden from the ground across the Absheron Peninsula, fed by natural gas seeping through cracks in the earth, and for more than two thousand years those flames drew pilgrims, merchants and fire-worshippers from as far away as India. At the heart of it all sat Baku: a fortified city on the Caspian shore that grew rich as a waypoint on the Silk Road, and whose walled Old City still stands today as one of the best-preserved medieval quarters in the Caucasus.

For travellers visiting Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan, Baku’s Old City and the fire temples scattered across the Absheron Peninsula offer something the rest of the Caucasus doesn’t: a direct, physical link to Zoroastrianism, one of the world’s oldest continuously practised religions, and to the merchant caravans that once carried silk, spices and oil between China and the Mediterranean.

Icherisheher: Baku’s walled Old City

Icherisheher — literally “Inner City” — is the historic core of Baku, a dense knot of stone lanes, caravanserais, mosques and courtyard houses enclosed by fortress walls. Its exact origins are debated, with historians tracing the earliest settlement to somewhere between the 7th and 12th centuries, but by the medieval period it had become a fortified trading town of real consequence, sitting on a branch of the Silk Road that linked Persia and Central Asia to the markets of the Black Sea.

Two structures dominate the skyline. The Maiden Tower (Qız Qalası), a cylindrical stone tower dating to at least the 12th century, is Baku’s most recognisable landmark — its exact original purpose is still debated by historians, with theories ranging from a defensive fortification to an observatory or a Zoroastrian fire monument. A short walk away stands the Palace of the Shirvanshahs, built in the 15th and 16th centuries by the Shirvanshah dynasty, who ruled the region for some 800 years and made Baku their capital after Shamakhi was devastated by an earthquake. The palace complex — a mosque, mausoleum, bathhouse and the octagonal Divan-khana pavilion, all carved from pale sandstone — remains one of the finest examples of Azerbaijani architecture anywhere in the country. (Odyssey Traveller has covered the palace in detail in a separate article — see “Related Reading” below.)

Beyond the two great monuments, the Old City’s real texture lies in its everyday Silk Road infrastructure: the Multani and Bukhara caravanserais, built to shelter travelling merchants and their goods; the Synyg Gala minaret, dating to the 11th century; and bathhouses, madrasas and a Darulfunun (an early university) founded in the 15th century by the scholar Seyid Yahya Bakuvi. Historically the walled city was organised into distinct quarters — clergy, shipbuilders, oil workers, Dagestani blacksmiths and a Jewish quarter among them — a reminder of how cosmopolitan Baku already was centuries before the modern oil boom.

In December 2000, UNESCO inscribed the “Walled City of Baku with the Shirvanshah’s Palace and Maiden Tower” as Azerbaijan’s first World Heritage Site. A powerful earthquake struck the city later that same year, and by 2003 conservation concerns had placed the site on UNESCO’s Endangered List. Restoration work over the following years was thorough enough that the Old City was removed from the danger list in 2009, and it remains in excellent condition today — a rare case of a working, lived-in old town rather than a museum piece behind glass.

Zoroastrianism and the Land of Fire

To understand why fire matters so much here, it helps to look past Baku to the geology beneath it. The Absheron Peninsula sits above one of the richest hydrocarbon fields in the world, and for millennia natural gas has escaped through fissures in the ground, igniting on contact with air or lightning and burning, in places, for centuries without pause. To the ancient Zoroastrians of Persia, for whom fire was a symbol of divine light and purity, and to whom the eternal, self-renewing flame represented the presence of Ahura Mazda, this corner of the Caucasus would have seemed like sacred ground made visible.

Zoroastrianism itself traces back to the teachings of the prophet Zoroaster (Zarathustra) in ancient Persia, likely sometime in the second millennium BCE, and became the state religion of successive Persian empires before the spread of Islam. Fire temples — spaces where a sacred flame was maintained, tended and never allowed to go out — were central to Zoroastrian worship, and the natural burning vents of the Absheron Peninsula made the region a place of pilgrimage long before any temple was built there. The Venetian traveller Marco Polo is said to have recorded similar natural flames burning in Azerbaijan during his 13th-century travels along the Silk Road.

Ateshgah: the fire temple of Surakhani

The best-preserved of these sites is Ateshgah, a pentagonal walled temple complex at Surakhani, on the outskirts of Baku, built above a cluster of natural gas vents. Inscriptions at the site suggest construction began around 1668, most likely during the 17th and 18th centuries, in the turbulent period surrounding the fall of the Shirvanshah dynasty. The German traveller Engelbert Kaempfer, who visited in 1683, described “seven holes with eternal fires” burning at the site — a detail that helps date the temple’s active use.

What makes Ateshgah unusual is how genuinely multicultural its worship was. Surviving inscriptions are overwhelmingly in Sanskrit and Punjabi rather than Persian, indicating that Hindu merchants from Multan, in modern-day Pakistan, were the temple’s principal custodians — evidence of just how far the Silk Road’s trading networks stretched, and how far religious practice travelled with them. Sikh pilgrims left inscriptions here too, and Zoroastrian Parsi communities from Bombay maintained a presence at the site well into the 19th century, with a resident Parsi priest recorded there until around 1880.

The natural flames that once made Ateshgah sacred were extinguished in 1969, after a century of intensive oil and gas extraction in the surrounding area drained the underground gas field that fed them. Rather than let the site go dark, the temple’s fires are now maintained by a piped gas supply, and Ateshgah operates today as a museum, welcoming around 15,000 visitors a year and formally protected since 2007 as a state historical-architectural reserve.

Yanar Dag: the mountain that never stops burning

A short drive from Baku, on the northern edge of the peninsula, Yanar Dag (“Burning Mountain”) offers something Ateshgah no longer can: a genuinely natural flame, still burning directly out of the hillside. Gas escapes continuously through a band of porous sandstone along the base of the slope, and flames up to three metres high flicker along an 10-metre stretch of hillside, day and night, in all weather. Unlike the mud volcanoes found elsewhere on the peninsula, there is no mud or liquid discharge here — just fire.

Local accounts suggest the flame at this particular spot was accidentally set alight by a shepherd sometime in the 1950s, although natural gas fires have flickered across the Absheron Peninsula for as long as records exist, and it is this broader phenomenon that gave Azerbaijan its ancient name. Yanar Dag was declared a State Historical-Cultural and Natural Reserve in 2007, and it remains the country’s most accessible reminder of why fire, rather than any single monument, is the thread that runs through Azerbaijan’s ancient identity.

Why it still matters to travellers

Visiting Baku’s Old City and the fire sites of the Absheron Peninsula in the same trip lays two layers of history over each other: a Silk Road city built on trade, and a sacred landscape built on geology. Few places allow you to walk through 800-year-old caravanserai gates in the morning and stand in front of a flame that has burned, in one form or another, since before written history, by the afternoon. It is also, in a quieter way, a story about coexistence — Zoroastrian, Hindu, Sikh and Muslim communities all leaving their mark on the same small stretch of Caspian coastline, drawn there not by conquest but by trade and by fire.

For travellers, the practical appeal is straightforward: Icherisheher, Ateshgah and Yanar Dag are all within easy reach of central Baku, making it possible to see all three without a long journey, and the Old City itself is compact and largely pedestrianised, well suited to an unhurried, walkable day of exploring.

See it for yourself: Baku’s Old City and the fire temples of the Absheron Peninsula are visited as part of Odyssey Traveller’s Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia small group tour, a 22-day escorted journey through all three nations of the Caucasus.

Related reading: Palace of the Shirvanshahs — Odyssey Traveller’s dedicated article on the Shirvanshah dynasty and their 15th-century palace within Icherisheher.