Today we reach the landmark that is the last of the countries starting with the letter ‘A’. Azerbaijan was the first secular democratic Muslim-majority state when it gained independence from the Russian Empire in 1918.
Azerbaijan is located in the central caucuses region of Asia and is a Turkic country. No, I’d never heard the word Turkic before either. Turkic countries include Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. It turns out there is even a Turkic Council developing comprehensive cooperation between six Turkic states.
Azerbaijan does not get on at all with its neighbour Armenia as I touched on previously. Much of this centres on the Nagorno-Karabakh region, an area within Azerbaijan with a large Armenian population
It’s not possible to travel between Armenia and Azerbaijan. In fact, Armenians who attempt to enter Azerbaijan would be arrested. Also when the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline was built in the early 2000s its route had to be significantly extended in order to avoid travelling through Armenia eventually reaching over 1700km in length.
Talking of oil, Azerbaijan is another country whose economy is largely based on oil production - in fact, they built the worlds first offshore oil platform in 1949. This expanded wildly during the second half of the twentieth century and today Azerbaijan is left with Neft Dasları or “Stalin’s Atlantis”. Literally translating to “oil rocks”, Neft Dasları is a crumbling soviet era city built on oil platforms 50 km out into the Caspian Sea.
Azerbaijan’s capital Baku is known for its wealth of crazy architecture like the Flame towers or Heydar Aliyev Center, but most importantly it was previously home to the world’s largest KFC.
Neft Dashlari. Source: Wikimedia
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