A view of Baku as it appeared in 2005
An oil rig just offshore
Gobustan Prison was a strict regime prison that housed many of Azerbaijan’s criminals and political prisoners...
This is the prison, located in the desert south of Baku.
A short walk brought him to a 125-year-old limestone mansion. Covered in gnarled grapevines and topped with gargoyles, it was a relic of Baku’s first oil-boom years, when rich Europeans like the Nobels and the Rothschilds had developed the oil fields in and around the city...
The sidewalk sweepers were out, mostly old women pushing oversized brooms that resembled bundles of kindling...
He headed north toward the center of the Absheron Peninsula, a scarred and grossly polluted spit of land fifty miles long that jutted out into the Caspian Sea...
Near the Balaxani oil fields—a purgatorial wasteland of oil sludge and rusting nodding-donkey oil pumps—he pulled over and bought pistachios from a guy who was selling them out of the back of his battered truck...
"I see this car,” he said, frowning and pointing at Mark’s Niva, “and I think maybe a gypsy, or even a Kurd, has come!”
A Niva (it's the 4x4 version of a Russian-made Lada.)
Mark followed Orkhan down a series of worn stone steps, into the bottom of a little depression. A white plastic table and three white plastic chairs had been set up a few feet away from a hillside that had been burning ever since an underground reservoir of natural gas had caught fire decades ago...
Marco Polo reported seeing similar perpetual fires around Baku when he passed through in the 1200s. There was a tea shop nearby when I visited, but it had been abandoned because the hoped-for tourists didn't come. The actual name of the place is Yanar Dag. Pictured below.
Adidas, Polo, Tommy Hilfiger, Sony…hundreds of Western shops, intermixed with nightclubs and restaurants, lined Nizami Street in downtown Baku. High above, colorful advertising banners fluttered slowly in the waning breeze...
Nizami Street, Baku
Before the latest oil boom, Fountains Square had been where the prostitutes hung out, but now it was just an extension of the Nizami Street shopping bonanza...
Martyr’s Alley, a long open-air memorial to all the Azeris protestors killed by the Soviets in 1990, was perched on a ridge high above the old walled city of Baku. A limestone tower, under which burned an eternal flame, anchored one end of the memorial.
Martyr's Alley
In a vast desert south of Baku, Mark lay hidden amid an elevated cluster of mud volcanoes—bizarre little cratered hills that popped out of the desert like acne and burped up gray mud and methane gas...
Oil oozing out of the ground, desert south of Baku
At the water’s edge, the dirt road turned into a decrepit wood platform held up by rotting stilts. The platform skimmed the surface of the water, snaking as far as the eye could see out into the Caspian. Mark had seen roads like it before—they were decaying relics of the Soviet empire and inevitably led to aging offshore oil derricks...
Beginning of the stilt roads, on the Caspian Sea south of Baku
At over half a kilometer in length, Imam Square in downtown Esfahan was a vast space. The Grand Imam Mosque, with its enormous four-hundred-year-old dome and millions of hand-painted blue tiles, anchored the southern end.
To the west stood an ancient palace; to the east, the Sheik Lotfollah Mosque, a delicate masterpiece built for a king’s harem. In between, hundreds of little shops were nested into an arcade that ringed most of the square...
Several middle-aged men were rolling up red carpets in front of the Grand mam Mosque—loading them into the back of a pickup truck while old women scurried around mouselike beneath their black chador robes, helping to clean up after the massive Friday prayer gathering. Farther away, clusters of young men and women in jeans sat talking by a fountain...
Interior, Sheik Lotfollah Mosque
Not far from Imam Square is the Khaju Bridge, built in the 1600s and pictured below. When I was there it was a peaceful place to eat lunch and listen to guys sing traditional songs. A few months later it was the site of violent protests. A few Iranians I talked to near the bridge said they're worried that in a war with the US, the bridge will be bombed.
The bridge had two levels, each with multiple tiled alcoves. Yellow light from inside the alcoves spilled onto the river below. In the center of the bridge, a man was singing a plaintive song, his voice echoing across the water. Couples were out on the river in yellow duck-shaped paddleboats...
The Burj al Arab, Dubai
Sheik Zayed Road, Dubai
Shop in the gold souk, Dubai