Azerbaijan

Azerbaijan meets the Caspian along a shore of oil derricks, salt flats and the hook-shaped Absheron Peninsula. The Greater Caucasus climbs along the northern frontier to Bazardüzü, sheltering stone villages such as Lahij, where coppersmiths hammer trays by hand. The Kura and the Aras cross a dry lowland of cotton fields, and in the humid south Lankaran grows tea and citrus below the Talysh Mountains. Gas seeps from the ground: at Yanar Dag a hillside burns.

Stone Age hunters carved reed boats, dancers and wild cattle into the rocks of Gobustan. Arab armies brought Islam. Nizami of Ganja wrote his Persian romances in the twelfth century, and the Shirvanshahs built a palace inside the walled old city of Baku in the fifteenth. Treaties in 1813 and 1828 divided the region between Russia and Persia. An oil boom from the 1870s drew the Nobel brothers. The Azerbaijan Democratic Republic of 1918–20 gave women the vote; Soviet rule lasted until independence in 1991.

Mugham, a classical music of improvised modes, is sung to the long-necked tar. Carpets from Quba and Shirvan are knotted in patterns handed down for generations, and at Novruz families leap over bonfires. Most believers are Shia Muslims. Tea comes in pear-shaped armudu glasses, and saffron plov is served with chestnuts and dried fruit. Oil and gas from the Caspian fields of Azeri–Chirag–Gunashli and Shah Deniz flow by pipeline across Georgia to the Mediterranean; hazelnuts and pomegranates earn smaller sums.