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“This fireplace has burned 4,000 years and by no means stopped,” says Aliyeva Rahila. “Even the rain coming right here, snow, wind – it by no means stops burning.”
Ahead, tall flames dance restlessly throughout a 10-meter stretch of hillside, making a sizzling day even hotter.
This is Yanar Dag – which means “burning mountainside” – on Azerbaijan’s Absheron Peninsula, the place Rahila works as a tour information.
A facet impact of the nation’s plentiful pure gasoline reserves, which typically leak to the floor, Yanar Dag is one in every of a number of spontaneously occurring fires to have fascinated and frightened vacationers to Azerbaijan over the millennia.
Venetian explorer Marco Polo wrote of the mysterious phenomena when he handed by means of the nation within the thirteenth century. Other Silk Road retailers introduced information of the flames as they’d journey to different lands.
It’s why the nation earned the moniker the “land of fireside.”
Such fires had been as soon as plentiful in Azerbaijan, however as a result of they led to a discount of gasoline strain underground, interfering with industrial gasoline extraction, most have been snuffed out.
Yanar Dag is without doubt one of the few remaining examples, and maybe probably the most spectacular.
At one time they performed a key function within the historical Zoroastrian faith, which was based in Iran and flourished in Azerbaijan within the first millennium BCE.
For Zoroastrians, fireplace is a hyperlink between people and the supernatural world, and a medium by means of which non secular perception and knowledge will be gained. It’s purifying, life-sustaining and an important a part of worship.
Today, most guests who arrive on the no-frills Yanar Dag guests’ heart come for the spectacle relatively than non secular success.
The expertise is most spectacular at evening, or in winter. When snow falls, the flakes dissolve within the air with out ever touching the bottom, says Rahila.
Despite the claimed antiquity of the Yanar Dag flames – some argue that this specific fireplace might solely have been ignited within the Nineteen Fifties – it’s a protracted 30-minute drive north from the middle of Baku simply to see it. The heart affords solely a small cafe and there’s not a lot else within the space.
For a deeper perception into Azerbaijan’s historical past of fireside worship, guests ought to head east of Baku to Ateshgah Fire Temple.
“Since historical instances, they suppose that [their] god is right here,” says our information, as we enter the pentagonal complicated which was constructed within the seventeenth and 18th century by Indian settlers in Baku.
Fire rituals at this web site date again to the tenth century or earlier. The title Ateshgah comes from the Persian for “dwelling of fireside” and the centerpiece of the complicated is a cupola-topped altar shrine, constructed upon a pure gasoline vent.
A pure, everlasting flame burned right here on the central altar till 1969, however today the hearth is fed from Baku’s important gasoline provide and is just lit for guests.
The temple is related to Zoroastrianism however it’s as a Hindu place of worship that its historical past is healthier documented.
Merchants and ascetics
Built like a caravanserai-style vacationers’ inn, the complicated has a walled courtyard surrounded by 24 cells and rooms.
These had been variously utilized by pilgrims, passing retailers (whose donations had been an important supply of revenue) and resident ascetics, a few of whom submitted themselves to ordeals resembling mendacity on caustic quicklime, sporting heavy chains, or conserving an arm in a single place for years on finish.
The temple fell out of use as a spot of worship within the late nineteenth century, at a time when the event of the encircling oil fields meant that veneration of Mammon was gaining a stronger maintain.
The complicated turned a museum in 1975, was nominated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1998, and as we speak welcomes round 15,000 guests a 12 months.
