In brief: As befits a city with a long history and a wealthy present, Baku is filled with museums celebrating its past culture and its future.
Two of the most stunning museums – in large part because of the buildings that house them – are its Carpet Museum and the Heydar Aliyev Center. The first unfurls the country’s myriad styles of woolen carpet weaving in a dazzling collection. The second enfolds the visitor in a dazzling, fluid structure, while surveying Azerbaijani culture across millennia.
A third, Miniature Books, housed in a modest sandstone building near the Shah’s Palace, made us squint to enjoy.
Each had a seductive appeal.
Heydar Aliyev Center
This exterior view of the award-winning Aliyev Center (2012) by renowned architect Zaha Hadid demonstrates the fluidity of its continuous surface, literally wrapping the internal spaces. Astonishingly, different viewpoints offer different ideas of how the building looks and functions. It took us hours within it to understand some of its secrets.
Backside view of the Hadid building, with gills, reflecting the set of apartment buildings on the nearby block. We found that this end housed the main museum of Azerbajaini culture.
The sinuous contours of the Zaha Hadid center as seen from its broad plaza, all perched on a grassy slope.
Our first view of the interior of the Aliyev Center, with its arcing neon-lit ceiling. To the right, through the looping portal, a broad funnel leads to a distinct section of the building, a museum honoring the long-time strong man of Azerbaijan, Heydar Aliyev. To the left, discretely hidden, is a concert hall that we could not enter that day.
The sinuous interior of the Zaha Hadid center on the ground level
Interior view of the Hadid building from the second floor on the museum side, presenting a harmony of curves inside and out. The exterior curves seem to morph into interior ones. Below, that’s a café with rounded seating and lighting. The stairs to the right are flat, not curved, but blend into the white surfaces curving around it.
The various tiers of the culture museum in the Aliyev Center. We especially enjoyed the presentation of pre-history, the delightful display of musical instruments and their sounds, as well as other Azerbaijani cultural highlights.
A lovely Ud, one of the instruments typical in traditional Azerbaijani music, on display at the Aliyev Center. You could listen to this- instrument and dozen others individually when you moved near each. In another part of the room, we watched videos of some groups using these instruments.
A lovely 12th century dish fragment at the culture museum in the Aliyev Center.
Vertiginous lookout from the top of the second museum in the Aliyev Center through the looped portal on the main floor. At the very bottom, near the stairs, a parabolic mirror from Anish Kapoor reflects back on this portal.
Carpet Museum
The two-levels of the Carpet Museum extend along the long roll of its carpet-like design by Austrian architect Franz Janz (2014). This view from one end shows its whimsical concept and the small park close to the city’s extensive boulevard along the Caspian shore.
Arrayed over the length of the Carpet Museum are lovely examples from all over Azerbaijan, displayed for easier viewing on a curve that echoes the building architecture.
On both floors of the Carpet Museum, women were demonstrating the intricate art of carpet weaving by hand. They were so nimble that we needed a long time to “see” how they formed the patterns by inserting and intertwining colored threads based on the model piece hanging in front of her.
Perhaps the largest of the carpets on display at the Carpet Museum was this mind-boggling beauty from the early 1900s that shows the influence of Persian carpeting in the adjacent Karabakh region of Azerbaijan. Floral designs populated by birds as well as Persian text surround the more abstract imagery of the central “ketebe.” The side ketebe emblems celebrate aristocratic hunters on horseback, presumably in tune with the carpet’s wealthy buyers.
Even the horses traveled in style as this sumptuous weave from the XX century shows.
A 19th century “Khila buta” carpet from the land of fire. The adornment of this Baku area carpet is all about fire and light. The somewhat abstract birds denote the sun – source of light and heavenly protection. The inverted comma figures that fill the center are symbols of fire. Azerbaijan is often called the land of fire. Early tribes worshipped fire as their god, perhaps because oil and gas often percolated up to the surface and caught on fire. More modern Azerbaijanis grew wealthy as the country became a major oil producer. Even the country’s name includes the word for fire, “azer.” (For more about the land of fire, click here.)
Miniature Books
At the Museum of Miniature Books, you can squint at them, but not thumb through them, alas. Thousands of them take up very little space, as you can tell. Yet we spent a large amount of time tracing their sources around the world and admiring their inventive designs. It’s an odd, but surprisingly fun museum.
This display demonstrates the typical size of the books, with a little tome on the bridges of Paris and Fontaine’s Fables. Other displays include even smaller ones.
These European examples are vivid in graphic design and style – and at most thumb size.
Others demonstrated more unusual design even in miniature.
(To enlarge any picture above, click on it. Also, for more pictures from Azerbaijan, CLICK HERE to view the slideshow at the end of the itinerary page.)
