The Flame That Runs on a Gas Main
Azerbaijan calls itself Odlar Yurdu, the Land of Fire, and the temple that gave the phrase its best-known image stopped burning in 1969. The gas that had fed it for centuries had been drawn out from underneath by the industry the country was built on.
The courtyard at Surakhani is a pentagon of low stone cells with a square altar in the middle of it, and on the altar there is a flame about the height of a person. Coaches arrive from Baku all morning. People photograph the flame, which is why the place is on every itinerary sold in the country, and then they photograph the four smaller flames burning at the corners of the roof above it.
The fire is real fire. It is not, in the sense that matters, the fire the building was put here for. The natural vent that fed this spot went out in 1969, drained by the oil and gas extraction going on all around it, and the Ateshgah was reopened as a museum in 1975. What burns there now arrives through a pipe from Baku's mains supply. Somebody turns it on.
What was burning before
The Absheron peninsula sits over shallow structures so charged with gas that methane finds its own way up through fractured sandstone, and once alight it stays alight. Vents like this were being described by travellers long before anyone drilled anything; Marco Polo passed on an account of the oil at Baku that he had not seen himself. The building at Surakhani is seventeenth and eighteenth century and is laid out like a caravanserai — cells around a court — because that is partly what it was. Inscriptions are carved over the doorways in Devanagari Sanskrit, one in Gurmukhi Punjabi and one in Persian, and the dated ones fall in the eighteenth century. The people who used it were Indian merchants and ascetics who had come up the trade routes from Multan and Sindh. The label "Zoroastrian temple", which the guides all use, is asserted far more often than it is evidenced.
The industry underneath
A well was drilled at Bibi-Heybat, on the bay south of the city, in 1846. It went down twenty-one metres by hand and it struck oil, thirteen years before Titusville, which is why Baku claims the first drilled oil well and why the claim is argued about — it turns on what "drilled" and "commercial" are taken to mean. What is not argued about is what came next. By the end of the 1890s the Baku fields were producing something close to half the world's oil. The Nobel brothers founded Branobel here in 1879 and had built, the year before, the first successful oil tanker in the world, a Caspian vessel they named Zoroaster. Under the Soviets output peaked in 1941 at 23.5 million tonnes, more than seventy per cent of everything the union produced, which is the reason a German army spent the summer of 1942 trying to reach the Caucasus.
All of that came out of the shallow onshore reservoirs of the same peninsula the temple stands on. The seep at Surakhani was already thinning by the 1880s, when the last resident worshippers left; a century of pumping finished it in 1969.
The ground here burned for as long as anybody had been writing things down, and it stopped burning for the same reason that anyone outside the Caucasus has ever heard of Baku.
The one that is still real
Half an hour north of the city, near Mehemmedli, a strip of hillside perhaps ten metres long burns continuously with flames up to about three metres. Yanar Dag is a genuine seep and it is not on a meter: gas escaping through thin porous sandstone, with none of the mud or liquid that comes up at Lökbatan and the other mud volcanoes along the coast. Locally the story is that it was lit in the 1950s by a shepherd's cigarette. A presidential decree of 2 May 2007 made it a state historical, cultural and natural reserve, which in practice means a wall, a ticket office, a viewing terrace and a café. It is the same fire, behind a turnstile.
Why the name stuck
Odlar Yurdu — Land of Fire — is not a tourist-board invention; the geology is real, and Azerbaijan has, by the usual counts, a large share of the world's mud volcanoes along with the seeps. But the phrase has been doing national work for two decades. The Flame Towers were finished in 2012, three curved slabs on the ridge above the old city whose LED skins animate a flame across the whole facade every evening. Baku hosted Eurovision the same year. The flame is on the tourism logo and it was on the pitch at the European Games.
What to do with that
None of this is a scandal and none of it is a reason to skip Surakhani. It is a reason to go in a different order. See Yanar Dag first, so that you have watched ground burn on its own before you look at the version that does not. Then at the Ateshgah, walk past the altar and read the doorways. A pentagon of eighteenth-century cells with Sanskrit cut over the lintels, a very long way from the nearest Hindu community, is a harder and more interesting object than an eternal flame: it is the only substantial thing left standing from a merchant diaspora that ran from the Punjab through Persia to the Caspian and then disappeared. The flame is the exhibit everyone photographs. The doorways are the exhibit.