Baku

Azerbaijani: Baku

Turkish: Bakü; Persian: Baku (باکو); Russian: Baku (Баку); French: Bakou; Georgian: Bako (ბაქო); Armenian: Bak´u (Բաքու)

The etymology of the name is not entirely clear. Derived from the word ‘Bak’hü’ in one of the ancient Indian languages, the name is translated as ‘To the Fire ’; in the ancient Iranian languages, ‘Baku’ means ‘City of God’, which, due to its numerous fire pits, was a sacred site for fire worshippers. Another widely accepted derivation is from the Persian term ‘badi-kube ’ , meaning ‘city of the blowing winds’.

Baku is situated on the western coast of the Caspian Sea, in the southern part of the Absheron Peninsula (Azerbaijani: Abşeron) at 40° 23' north and 49° 51' east, in a natural, sheltered bay. The city lies 28 metres below sea level. Due to tectonic shifts, the water level of the Caspian Sea has fluctuated considerably over the centuries, as evidenced by numerous underwater architectural finds. The city is surrounded by several saltwater lakes. Arid semi-deserts alternate with hilly landscapes.

Historically part of Shirvan (Azerbaijani: Şirvan), which encompassed the areas north of the River Kura as far as Derbent, Baku became a centre each time the actual capital, Shamakhi (Azerbaijani: Şamaxı) had been destroyed by earthquakes (1191, 1667 and 1859).

Baku has been the capital of the Republic of Azerbaijan since 1991 and is the country’s largest city (January 2020: 2.293 million inhabitants). Baku was part of the Kingdom of Shirvanshah (799–1539) and, at various times, came under the rule of the Sassanid Empire, the Arab Caliphate, the Mongols, the Safavid Empire and the Ottoman Empire. From 1747, Baku was an independent khanate, forming shifting alliances with neighbouring states. Following its incorporation into the Russian Empire in 1806, Baku became one of nine uyezds (уезд / uezd = the smallest administrative unit in the Tsarist Empire) within the Caspian Oblast in 1840. From 1859, the city was the administrative centre of the Baku Governorate. In September 1918, Baku became the capital of the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan, and from 1920 of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, initially in union with the two other Caucasian Soviet republics, Armenia and Georgia. Baku was the fifth-largest city in the Soviet Union.

City of the Winds, referring to the interplay between the cold north wind, Chasri, and the warm south wind, Gilavar. Black City, named after a district that emerged during the first oil boom (1872–1915) and was littered with pools of oil around the derricks. City of Eternal Fire, due to the burning gas and naphtha fields. Paris of the Orient, due to the district with European-style architecture that sprang up as a result of the city’s oil wealth. City of Chess, as the home of Garry Kasparov (born 1963, World Chess Champion 1985–1993/2000) and Teymur Radjabov (born 1987, winner of the 2019 World Chess Cup).

The rock carvings at Qobustan, 55 km south of the present-day centre, bear witness to early Neolithic settlement (a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2007). Settlements featuring rock carvings, as well as Bronze Age burial sites, are also found on the Absheron Peninsula.

Generally speaking, very few sources have survived regarding the early history of Baku, which can be attributed to its small size and peripheral role on a branch of the Silk Road. The date of the city’s foundation is unknown.

Among the earlier settlers in the 6th century were the Massagetae, an Iranian horsemen tribe. A Roman votive stele dating from the reign of Domitian (51–96), the last emperor of the Flavian dynasty, was found in Gobustan near Baku. The inscription reads: Imperatore Domitiano Caesare Augusto Germanico. Lucius Iulius Maximus, Centurio Legionis XII Fulminatae. It is one of the few to have survived the erasure of this emperor from Roman history.

As a result of the Persian–Roman Wars, Baku became part of the Sassanid Empire in the 4th century and is said to have played an important role in the Zoroastrian faith. The regional governors appointed by Khosrow Anushirvan I (501–579) were given the title Shirvanshah ( King of Shirvan).

In the first half of the 7th century, the principalities north of the River Kura came under Arab rule. Towards the end of the 8th century, large parts of Azerbaijan were swept up in the Khurramid revolt, which was directed against the Islamic Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258). In the 9th century, the rulers of Shirvan, who were of Arab descent, increasingly withdrew from the Caliphate’s control, and in 861 the Kingdom of the Shirvanshahs was established. The kings owned the oil wells in Baku and had oil extracted, which was exported primarily for military purposes, using shipping routes across the Caspian Sea. Manuchehr III (1120–1160), one of the most significant kings of the Shirvanshahs, married Tamar, the daughter of the Georgian King David, thereby securing a temporary alliance against the Seljuks.

In the second half of the 13th century, the Shirvanshahs came under the control of the Mongol Elkhani dynasty. During the campaigns of the Mongol ruler Timur Lenk, the Shirvanshah Ibrahim (1382–1417) was able to secure his influence in the region by paying tribute and providing military aid against the Mongol Golden Horde; following Timur Lenk’s death in 1405, he even advanced with his army as far as Tabriz in Iran.

Following the February Revolution in Russia in 1917, the Provisional Government established the Special Commission for the South Caucasus (OZAKOM) on 9 March 1917, comprising Duma deputies from that region. At the same time, workers’ and soldiers’ councils were formed. On 28 May 1918, the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (ADR) was founded in Tiflis/Tbilisi. In Baku, however, the ‘Baku Commune’, consisting of Bolsheviks, ruled from April to July 1918. This government of People’s Commissars immediately nationalised the oil industry and abolished private home ownership. Thereafter, power was taken over by the ‘Central Caspian Dictatorship’, which comprised Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and Armenian nationalists, and which summoned a British expeditionary brigade led by Major-General Lionel Dunsterville (1865–1946) to Baku to repel the advancing Turkish-Azerbaijani troops. On 15 September 1918, Baku was nevertheless captured by Ottoman and Azerbaijani troops. Following the Armistice of Moudros on 30 October 1918, the Turkish troops were forced to leave the Transcaucasus and hand over the railway lines and the city of Baku to the Allies. The ADR government was able to come to terms with British control and consolidate its power, enabling the ADR parliament to commence its work in Baku in December 1918. The German settlers in Azerbaijan were represented in parliament by Lorenz Kuhn (1884–1942) from the German colony of Helenendorf. In his welcoming address, he praised the “centuries-long, dedicated to work, and characterised by good neighbourly relations with the indigenous people” of the country and spoke of “the confidence of the Germans in the Caucasus that, under the protection of the laws of the young Azerbaijani Republic, they would be able to continue to preserve [sic] their national character”^[1].

On 28 April 1920, the Red Army marched into Baku and brought an end to the short-lived independent republic. On 12 March 1922, the newly founded Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan united with Armenia and Georgia to form the South Caucasus Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (ZSFSR), which became a founding member of the Soviet Union. Following the dissolution of the ZSFSR in 1936, the three constituent regions formed their own Soviet republics.

During the Second World War, Baku played an important role as a supplier of oil, as a place of refuge for the wounded, and in taking in internally displaced persons from the European part of the Soviet Union. During the political thaw of the 1960s, Baku experienced a cultural renaissance.

On 18 October 1991, the parliament declared Azerbaijan’s independence. Following frequent changes of power during the First Nagorno-Karabakh War (1991–1994), Heydar Aliyev, the former secretary of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan, established himself as head of state in Baku. He signed international oil supply contracts that paved the way for a second oil boom in Baku.

Baku is governed by a city administrator (head of the executive), who is appointed by the President of the Republic. The introduction of an elected mayor is one of the demands made by numerous political groups. The city comprises twelve administrative districts.

In his *Geographica*, Strabo (63 BC – 23 AD) referred to the population between Iberia (Eastern Georgia) and the Caspian Sea as Albanians; modern sources refer to them as Muslims, Persians or Tatars.

Following the first Russian conquest in 1723, Tsar Peter I ordered the settlement of Armenians in Baku. Chuvash and Tatars from the Volga region were recruited for shipbuilding.

According to Abbasqulu Bakichanov (1794–1847), the founder of Azerbaijani historical scholarship, the population of the Shirvan region was particularly shaped by resettlements resulting from the many wars and consisted of various Persian, Arab, Mongol and Tatar tribes. The few Armenians and Jews in Derbent, Baku and Guba are said to have assimilated into the Muslim population.^[2]

In 1849, Baku was still a small provincial town with only 7,400 predominantly Muslim inhabitants.^[3] After Baku had become the centre of the governorate, approximately 14,000 people lived there in 1863. A larger number of Germans did not settle there until the second half of the 19th century. Following the granting of oil concessions in 1872, the population of Baku and its surrounding area grew to 182,897^[4], with the proportion of Russian and Armenian inhabitants increasing. Within 34 years, the population had thus increased thirteenfold.

With 2,460 people, the Germans accounted for 1.3 per cent of the city’s population. They were, on the one hand, descendants of the colonists who had settled in the South Caucasus in 1817–1818 following their emigration from Württemberg, and, on the other hand, civil servants and officers, teachers and tradespeople of Russian-German origin. In addition, numerous ‘Reichsdeutsche’ were working in Baku as engineers and businesspeople, including specialists from Siemens and Halske who carried out the electrification of individual businesses in the 1880s, as well as experts working on solving Baku’s drinking water problem.

In 1913, Baku had a population of 206,000, of whom approximately 4,000 were German. Representatives of German companies acted as key intermediaries for technical innovations from Western Europe. In 1926, 6,357 Germans were living in Baku.

During the Second World War, Germans in the Soviet Union were collectively suspected of collaboration. From October 1941, 22,741 Germans were deported from the Azerbaijan SSR to Kazakhstan. Only a few, who had spouses of a different nationality, were allowed to remain. On 13 December 1955, decrees issued by the Supreme Soviet of the USSR allowed those affected to leave the special settlements in Central Asia; however, they were not permitted to return to their former places of residence. It was not until the Supreme Soviet’s declaration of 14 November 1989 that they were rehabilitated.

By 1979, only 1,048 Germans remained in Azerbaijan, 793 of whom were women. The ‘Rebirth’ movement, in which up to 100,000 Russian Germans of various age groups were active between 1989 and 1991,^[5] had also established a branch in Baku. Nevertheless, in 2018 the German minority in Azerbaijan numbered fewer than 500 people, of whom only a few still spoke German as their mother tongue.^[6]

In the wake of the Karabakh War in the 1990s, approximately 207,000 Azerbaijani refugees from Armenia arrived mainly in Baku and Sumqait (Azerbaijani: Sumgayıt), whilst at the same time around 200,000 Armenians were forced to leave Baku. The number of Azerbaijani internally displaced persons from Karabakh who found refuge in Baku is estimated at several thousand. After 1991, the Azerbaijani population was clearly in the majority; however, Russian remained the language of communication amongst the long-established residents.

We can only speculate as to whether a Roman legion was stationed here in the 1st century. The Russian Empire’s Caspian Flotilla was transferred from Astrakhan to Baku in 1867.

During the First World War, a naval aviation officers’ school was founded in Baku in 1915; thanks to the ice-free training facilities available all year round, it became a significant unit within the Tsarist Empire’s naval forces. In 1918, the city came under the control of the Turks, the British and the Russians in turn.

During the Second World War, Baku was one of the targets of the Third Reich’s ‘Operation Edelweiss’. The German Luftwaffe undertook no fewer than 74 futile attempts to penetrate Baku’s airspace, which remained completely undamaged. To mislead the enemy, the architect Konstantin Senčichin had built a mock-up with the city’s outline 30 kilometres from Baku.

During the 44-day war between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the autumn of 2020, several Armenian medium-range missiles were shot down by Azerbaijani air defences in the vicinity of Baku.

Following its colonisation by Russia in 1806, the city was governed by an ethnically diverse group of Russian officials, including the Danish Baron Justus Hübsch von Grossthal (1882–1888) and Mikhail Nakashidze, who was of Georgian descent (1904–1905). The local nobility, or the descendants of the Khan, were nevertheless integrated into the civil service in order to secure their loyalty. The oil boom not only attracted foreign capital but also fostered the emergence of a local middle class. Social status was determined less by one’s background or education than by the yield from the leased land. As a result, unskilled labourers or craftsmen were able to become wealthy patrons within a short space of time.

Baku also attracted thousands of workers from the Azerbaijani provinces in northern Iran, from the Caucasus and from rural areas of Russia. This led to the formation of large Azerbaijani, Armenian and Russian working-class communities, which tended to live alongside one another. Whilst the Russian and Armenian workers took on skilled and better-paid jobs, the immigrants from Iran were mostly cheap seasonal labourers for dangerous oil well drilling. The strong underground labour movement served as a kind of training ground for the future communist leadership of the Soviet Union. German, Georgian, Jewish and Polish communities also established themselves in Baku and were represented in the parliament of the First Republic.

As part of the Islamisation of Azerbaijan in the 7th century, the former pagan and Zoroastrian temples were converted into mosques. From the 12th century onwards, Baku was one of the centres of the mystical Sufi order, which was influential in Shirvan during the Middle Ages. A well-known figure was Seyid Yəhya Bakuvi (1403–1466), who wrote numerous works on the philosophy of the Khalvati Order. The most important spiritual practices were retreat into prayer and the renunciation of material possessions.

In 1849, there were eleven mosques in Baku, as well as one Orthodox, one Catholic and one Armenian Apostolic church. Since the early modern period, the Muslim population had been predominantly Shia; nevertheless, there were several Sunni mosques, such as the Ləzgi Məscidi in the Old Town, which was attended by workers from Dagestan. In 1872, following the example of the Russian Orthodox Church, two religious administrations for Muslims in the South Caucasus were established, with their centre in Tbilisi, and they also had representative offices in Baku. In 1918, the centre of the administration was moved to Baku. Following Sovietisation, the authority was abolished and only granted admission in 1943 to secure the support of the Muslim population during the Second World War. The Muslim Administration consisted of a Shia chairman and a Sunni deputy. The office sees itself as the guardian of tradition, ensuring the shared use of mosques by both denominations. Denomination is not recorded in the statistics.

In Surachani, 30 km from the city centre, an ancient fire temple (Azerbaijani: Atəşgah) was rebuilt in 1713 and used as a place of pilgrimage by Indian fire worshippers until 1883.

Religious composition of Baku in 1897 (population 182,897):^[9]

The first Azerbaijani play premiered in Baku in 1873. Mirzə Fətəli Axundov’s (1812–1878) drama *The Khan’s Vizier of Lenkoran* broke the dominance of Persian as the literary language. In 2020, there were eleven state or municipal theatres in Baku, including the Russian Theatre. The State Pantomime Theatre is housed in an old synagogue. Two private companies perform at various venues.

Baku is home to 33 museums, including the birthplace of the famous cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, which also commemorates his father, the musician Leopold Rostropovich, as well as the Museum of Miniature Books in the Old Town. During the Second World War, several examples of looted art ended up in the Azerbaijan Museum of Art in Baku, including *The Women’s Bath* (1496) by Albrecht Dürer from the Kunsthalle in Bremen. Since the late 1990s, Azerbaijan has returned several works of art to Germany.

The Baku Boulevard National Park plays a prominent role in cultural and social history. The city walls on the sea side had already been demolished in the 1880s, as the oil trade had made it necessary to expand the harbour. In place of the old town walls and narrow alleyways, a public space typical of European cities had emerged, designed with the collaboration of Armenian, Azerbaijani, German, Russian and, above all, Polish architects. In 1909, this 650-metre-long green oasis and promenade in the barren desert landscape included a public lido and a theatre. The beach promenade, which was initially accessible only to the upper classes due to admission controls, became the most important leisure destination for workers and their families during the Soviet era. In 2015, the promenade was extended by 16 kilometres and now encompasses the Carpet Museum, the Museum of Musical Instruments at the Centre for Traditional Mugham Music, as well as several industrial monuments dating from the oil extraction era. Mugham has been listed as a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage since 2008.

The first secular Muslim girls’ school (1901), funded by the philanthropist and patron Hadji Seynalabdin Tagiyev (d. 1924), was named after the Russian Tsarina Aleksandra Fyodorovna (1872–1918) and was regarded as the first school of its kind in the Muslim world.

The university was founded in 1919 during the First Republic; its students included the future Nobel Laureate in Physics, Lev Landau (1908–1968). The Higher School of Petroleum and Chemistry enjoyed an international reputation; the Academy of Sciences also had a strong focus on chemistry. Numerous scholars from the European part of Russia were involved in the establishment of the Academy of Fine Arts, the Conservatoire and the Medical University during their formative years. At the time of their foundation, the language of instruction and research was Russian.

In the Middle Ages, Baku served as a refuge for the Shirvanshah dynasty and its Sufi religious scholars. The medieval buildings and palaces are small in scale, whilst the residential houses predominantly have flat roofs, which provide cool respite in the summer evenings.

As there are no natural sources of drinking water in Baku and the surrounding area, groundwater collection basins (ovdan), covered by a structure to provide shelter from the wind, were installed in all residential settlements. A complex system of aqueducts (kəhriz) supplied the city with water in the 14th century. A historic drainage system, constructed from flat stone slabs, has been dated to the 14th century and, in some cases, to the 17th century.

Many residents of Baku had built houses with gardens far outside the city for the summer months, where they grew figs, grapes, pomegranates and shade-providing mulberry trees. A popular pastime was pigeon breeding, which took place in small coops on the flat roofs.

Owing to the presence of numerous workers from outside the city, the population statistics for 1897 showed a significant surplus of men. During the first oil boom, private security firms, known as Qoçu, sprang up. Until the 1910s, house numbers were not in common use; instead, the owners’ names were recorded in address books.

From the second half of the 19th century onwards, the German community played a role in the everyday life of the upper middle class: there was demand for a Fröbel kindergarten, German teachers in the grammar schools and other schools, as well as nannies and governesses. German specialists were involved in the postal and telegraph networks, as well as in the electrification of the city’s districts. Annual dance festivals attended by all ethnic groups, including Germans from the Caucasus, were a fixture on the calendar; there was also a German ladies’ orchestra.

Topographically, the city can be divided into three distinct districts: the organically developed Old Town with its medieval palace, mosques and baths; the outer city, planned in modern times; and the large housing estates built during the Soviet era.

The so-called ‘Baku Eclectic’ style combined various European architectural styles with the delicate local stonemasonry. The ornaments, carved from the local Aglay shell limestone, were a key decorative feature in the city during the modern era.

The architects of German descent working in Baku were Russian citizens: The German-Baltic architect Ferdinand Lemkuhl (1822–1894) built the Armenian Church of St Gregory the Illuminator (1867–1869) and was the architect of Baku’s first theatre (1883). Adolf Eichler, born in Oryol, served as the city council’s district architect from 1892 to 1911 and, in addition to the Protestant St Elizabeth’s Church, built the Aşumov Mosque, a school and private houses. Nikolaus von der Nonne (1836–1906) from St Petersburg was city engineer from 1883 and, in 1897, drew up the master plan for Baku on behalf of the City Duma. Between 1898 and 1902, he was mayor of the city.

Following the Sovietisation of Azerbaijan, many detached houses for workers were built on the outskirts of the city, before Constructivism made its mark on public buildings such as the workers’ clubs designed by the Vesnin brothers and the workers’ canteens by Mikayıl Hüseynov and Sadıx Dadaşev, shaping the architecture of Soviet Modernism from 1950 onwards. Among the monumental buildings of the Stalin era, the ‘Government House’, completed in 1952 and designed by Lev Rudnev (1885–1956), is particularly noteworthy.

During Ilham Aliyev’s presidency from 2003 onwards, substantial oil revenues fuelled a construction boom with projects such as the Heydar Aliyev Centre (Zaha Hadid) and the Khazar Islands, the Carpet Museum (Franz Janz) and the White City, which replaced the ‘Black City’.

In 1997, the German company Wintershall funded the restoration of the Kapellhaus, which is now the headquarters of the German-Azerbaijani Cultural Association and the Goethe Centre.

A form of rhythmic, spontaneous poetry developed in Baku, which was traditionally recited during convivial competitions in wine houses and thus came to be known as ‘Meyxana’ (wine house). Its most prominent exponent was Əliağa Vahid (1895–1965), who has been honoured with a monument in the Old Town. Since the 2000s, women have increasingly been found in this genre, which encompasses satire, mockery, current affairs, love and philosophy.

The political upheavals in Baku at the beginning of the 20th century are depicted in Essad Bey’s novel *Ali and Nino* (German edition 1937).

The Armenian-Azerbaijani writer Aleksandr Širmanzade (also Movsisjan, 1858–1935) wrote the work *Fire in the Oil Fields* (*Požar na neftjanych promyslach*, 1880) about working-class life.

Manaf Süleymanov’s (1912–2001) eyewitness account *Heard and Seen* (*–Eşitdiklərim, oxuduqlarım, gördüklrim*, 1987) deals with pre-revolutionary Baku. Stalin’s activities in the Baku underground are explored in Boris Akunin’s crime novel *Black City* (*Černyj gorod*, 2012).

*The Kahans of Baku: A Family Biography* (2018) by Verena Dohrn provides insights into Jewish life during the first oil boom.

The First Congress of the Peoples of the East (1–7 September 1920) aimed to establish Baku as a model for the spread of communist ideas in the East. In the same year, the Karl Marx Monument was erected, Azerbaijan’s first monument to an individual. Most communist monuments were dismantled in the late 1990s. A few monuments deeply rooted in the country’s identity remain, such as the statue of a liberated woman (1960).

During the 19th and 20th centuries, streets were renamed on several occasions. In the 1990s, the communist street names were largely replaced by the names of the founders of the First Republic or of those who fell in the Karabakh War.

Baku’s central memorial site is the Martyrs’ Cemetery on the city’s highest hill, where the victims of the Soviet invasion on 20 January 1990 and those of the First Karabakh War are buried. In addition, the site features a memorial stone for British soldiers and a stele for Turkish soldiers from the First World War, as well as a monument to General Hazi Aslanov (1910–1945). Victory over Fascism Day is celebrated here annually on 9 May.

Baku’s Old Town has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2000. In 2009, Baku was the Islamic Capital of Culture. For a long time, the city’s landmark was the so-called Maiden Tower, which is said to have been a Zoroastrian place of worship. Since the completion of the 182-metre-high Flame Towers in 2012, the three flame-shaped structures have been Baku’s landmark.

Richard Sorge (1895–1944), who was born near Baku to German parents, held a doctorate in philosophy, was a journalist and a committed Marxist, and worked as a Soviet agent for the military intelligence service.

One of a total of thirteen prisoner-of-war cemeteries in Azerbaijan is located in Baku. These were restored by the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e. V. as part of the war graves agreement between Germany and Azerbaijan dated 22 December 1995. The cemeteries are visited annually on Remembrance Day in November by staff from the German Embassy and representatives of the Protestant congregation.

In December 2019, the 200th anniversary of the settlement of Germans in Azerbaijan was celebrated.

The convergence of several civilisations from different eras that can be observed in Baku is perceived in different ways. The literature on the city’s history predominantly paints a nostalgic picture of a cosmopolitan culture which, since the city’s expansion during the first oil boom, has been a melting pot of different nationalities and has developed a very special identity and a distinct cultural sphere (Fuad Axundov, Farid Alakbarli).

International academic literature predominantly regards Baku as a periphery of empires. Jörn Grünewald characterises the working-class culture there and the surge in modernisation it brought about after 1920 as the product of a ‘Eurocentric civilising mission’. The Berlin historian Jörg Baberowski emphasises the coexistence, rather than the interaction, of the various ethnic groups at the turn of the century. Zaur Gasimov regards the narrative of ‘cosmopolitan Baku’ as an imperial construct that emerged from the search for normality and stability following a violent war, and which was based more on a state policy of homogenisation through Russification than on the overcoming of nationalisms.^[10]

As a result of the Russification of cultural life and the prestige associated with the Russian language, a cross-ethnic subculture emerged comprising the Bakincy (Baku residents), the Russian-speaking Azerbaijanis, Jews and Armenians, who communicated in Russian amongst themselves, as well as with the Russian and other Slavic inhabitants of the city, and increasingly within their own ethnic groups. Within the Russian-speaking, cross-ethnic Bakincy milieu, on the one hand, a local humour specific to Baku, original songs and hybrid forms of festive culture emerged; on the other hand, this local subculture flourished at the expense of Azerbaijani, Armenian, Mountain Jewish and other languages, which were spoken significantly less in Baku in the 1980s than they had been half a century earlier. Even though a society with a cosmopolitan self-image – in which ethnic affiliation was supposedly or actually irrelevant – emerged in Baku, underground nationalist organisations were nonetheless successful. For instance, the Armenian political organisation Krunk ( Armenian for ‘crane’) mobilised support for the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, whilst the Azerbaijanis mobilised against Armenian secessionist efforts and resisted the city’s intense Russification. The war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which produced hundreds of thousands of refugees, overshadowed the cosmopolitan identity of Baku’s heterogeneous urban population and altered its ethnic and religious structure.

• Eva-Maria Auch: Germans in the Multicultural Environment of the South Caucasus. Baden-Baden 2017 (Bibliotheca Academica – Oriental Studies Series, Volume 27).
• Eva-Maria Auch: German Traces in Azerbaijan. Explorers, Settlers and Entrepreneurs between the Greater Caucasus and the Caspian Sea. Baku 2014.
• Eva-Maria Auch, Manfred Nawroth: Breaking Boundaries. Germans in Search of a Home between Württemberg and the Caucasus. Berlin 2017 (Potsdam Library on Eastern Europe).
• Sara Aşurbəyli: The History of the City of Baku in the Middle Ages. Baku 1998.
• Jörg Baberowski: Nationalism Born of a Sense of Inferiority. In: Geschichte und Gesellschaft, Vol. 26 / No. 3, (July–September 2000), pp. 371–406.
• Benjamin Conrad, Lisa Bicknell (eds.): City Histories. Essays on the Cultural History of Eastern European Cities from Prague to Baku. Bielefeld 2016.
• Šamil Fatullayev-Figarov: *Arhitekturnaya Enciklopediya Baku* [Architectural Encyclopaedia of Baku]. Baku 2013.
• Zaur Gasimov: The Languages of Caucasian Cosmopolitanism: Twentieth-Century Baku at the Crossroads. In: Dina Guseynova (ed.): Cosmopolitanism in Conflict: Imperial Encounters from the Seven Years’ War to the Cold War. London 2018, pp. 247–269.
• Bruce Grant: Cosmopolitan Baku. In: Ethnos 75: 2 (June 2010), pp. 123–147.
• Jörn Grünewald: Baku and Odessa. Working-class culture on the Soviet periphery (1920–30). Berlin 2004.
• Mammad Jafarli: Political Terror and the Fate of the Azerbaijani Germans. Stuttgart 2012.
• Heike Maria Johenning: Architectural Guide to Baku. Berlin 2018.

Periodicals

• Yearbook of Azerbaijani Studies: Essays on Politics, Economics, History and Literature, Berlin 2007–2014.
• Kavkazskij kalendar’ [The Caucasian Calendar], Tbilisi 1846–1916.

• https://bakuresearchinstitute.org/en/ (independent think tank specialising in research on Azerbaijan)
• deutsche-kolonisten.de/ (Jutta Rzadkowski’s genealogy website)
• http://www.kaukasusdeutsche.de (specialist portal on the history and culture of Germans in the Caucasus)
• www.laender-analysen.de/cad (Caucasus Analytical Digest – country analyses, published by the Centre for Eastern European Studies at the University of Bremen)

[1] Azerbaijani Democratic Republic (1918–1920), Parliament, Stenographic Records I [Azerbaijani Democratic Republic (1918–1920), Parliament, Stenographic Records I]. Baku 1998, p. 29. URL: anl.az/el/Download/2017/03/2-755359.pdf (accessed 8 February 2022).

Elnura Jivazada: Baku. In: Online Encyclopaedia on the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, 2022. URL: ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/p32330 (accessed 10 March 2022).