Introduction
‘It’s a shame that we don’t have a museum of oil’ – during my field research on the narratives and representations of oil in Baku, this sentiment, in many variations, came up in multiple interviews and conversations, with tour guides, historians, urban activists and personal friends not related to any of these fields. Baku, with its more than a century and a half history of industrial extraction, and at least a millennium-long history of pre-industrial use of petroleum, would seem a natural place to commemorate the industry. Indeed, many of Baku’s residents are proud of this history, which contributed to, if not shaped, the urban development of the city as well as the processes of modernization and nation-building in Azerbaijan. Yet, there is no dedicated museum nor plans for one, despite multiple proposals and petitions. This is not a problem of lack of resources or expertise in museology: in the last two decades, the authorities invested heavily in the urban transformation and beautification of the city, which included the opening of multiple museums, art galleries and cultural centres.
At the same time, it would be inaccurate to say that oil in Baku is not heritagized at all. Oil-related public art such as Soviet-era mosaics and monuments and more recent installations are scattered all over the city and its oil-producing suburbs. In the most recent round of urban beautification, several historic sites of the oil industry became heritagized, including a replica of a nineteenth-century derrick in the historical field of Bibi-Heybət, a Soviet-era oil tanker and pre-Soviet refinery columns in the former Black City of Baku. These sites, and many other stories of Baku’s oil past, are the main material of a plethora of city tours, and according to tour guides, are something of interest both to foreign tourists and local audiences. But these objects are not woven into a single heritage narrative and remain disconnected, often with no regard for their physical proximity and historical links. This is despite Azerbaijan’s stated prioritization of tourism and cultural heritage as part of its post-oil development strategy.
Scholars working in critical heritage studies have recently turned attention to industrial heritage and its discontents. As Stefan Berger points out, industrial heritage is often a subject of contradictory policies, due to its entanglements in the politics of class, extractivism and environment, but also modernization and the different interpretations of it.Footnote 1 The difficulties of heritagizing industry are exacerbated by the focus of the global Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD) on the pre-industrial past.Footnote 2 In Western Europe and North America, industry began to be heritagized after deindustrialization, which in itself has been a traumatic process in diverse contexts.Footnote 3 Depending on these local contexts, industrial heritage can be subject to different actions, from policies of erasure to mobilization for cultural resistance of the working class, and commodification for tourism and the development of local economies. While the latter approach is sometimes endorsed by authorities at local and national levels, it is often difficult to devise development strategies that both include industrial heritage and engage local communities.Footnote 4 The divergence between top-down and bottom-up heritage practices has been a persistent feature of industrial heritage.Footnote 5
Industrial heritage and more generally memory of the industrial past have been even more problematic and ‘dissonant’ in post-socialist contexts, where deindustrialization often coincided with market transition and the devaluation of socialist industrial modernity.Footnote 6 In Central and Eastern Europe, after the collapse of state socialism, the state withdrew its ideological support from the ideals of industrial modernity and retreated from the heritage sector. In these contexts, the heritagization of the industry has often been initiated by local activists and academics, who may or may not be able to access some state support.Footnote 7 Building on the existing research into the complex relationship between top-down and bottom-up industrial heritage in post-socialist contexts, in this article I explore how oil heritage in Baku is divergently constructed in the discourses and practices of the state, corporate and informal actors. I argue that the three discourses have limited overlap, leading to fragmentary, disconnected heritagization, and that the outcomes of this fragmentation can be observed in the urban heritage landscape. This article thus contributes to the literature on industrial heritage in post-socialist contexts. It also contributes to our understanding of the relationship between top-down and bottom-up approaches and the limitations of top-down policies, even in contexts that are considered authoritarian. The lack of co-ordination between different discourses and integration of the bottom-up perspective ultimately undermines the official aims of state tourism policy.
This article draws on a larger study of the discursive and material entanglements of oil and urbanism in Baku. The materials include policy documents, heritage-related websites, online ethnography in virtual communities dedicated to Baku’s past on Facebook and Instagram, participant observation at city tours and museums and interviews conducted in Baku in three fieldwork visits between 2021 and 2023.
In the next section, I outline the debates around industrial heritage and its touristification in Western capitalist and post-socialist contexts. I then provide brief information about Baku’s long history of oil production and existing plans for post-oil development. In the following three sections, I discuss the official state policy towards oil heritage and its place in the national AHD, some exceptions to this policy and the informal heritage practices by tour guides/urban activists. I argue that the inherent contradictions of the industrial heritage discourses are indicative of Azerbaijan’s ambivalence towards post-oil transition.
Industrial heritage
When industrial enterprises in deindustrializing places in the Global North began to close down in the post-World War II period, they left in their wake transformed landscapes, large infrastructural installations and disintegrating communities.Footnote 8 It was then that different actors began their attempts to preserve some aspects of the industrial past.Footnote 9 Yet, the heritagization of the material remains of the industrial age has not been an easy or straightforward process. A coeval of modernity, industrialization was not seen as a past worth preserving, unlike the ‘noble objects’ of the pre-industrial past, such as castles and churches.Footnote 10 Early efforts at the heritagization of industry were thus pioneered by local community activists and sometimes academics, who deemed this past valuable and worthy of remembrance for their communities. Across different contexts, the heritagization of the industrial past remains an uneven process, contingent upon the local entanglements of post-industrial transitions, cultural meanings of industry and its decline and state policies of heritage. In some cases, industrial pasts are stigmatized, with little interest in heritagization.Footnote 11 In others, the heritagization of industries can be an act of resistance, particularly by former workers, who use industrial material culture to challenge the political decisions that led to the closures of industrial plants and to memorialize the industrial way of life.Footnote 12 In a few cases, comprehensive policies of heritagization are adopted in co-operation with multiple stakeholders at local, regional and national levels. The primary example of such comprehensive heritagization is the Ruhr region in Germany, where the mining industry is heritagized and musealized at multiple levels and is broadly accepted as a basis of regional identity.Footnote 13 The heritagization of the industrial past can be further complicated by the patterns of spatial concentration, where defunct industrial infrastructure is often located near or within active industrial areas and extractive zones. As Melissa Baird has shown for North American and Australian contexts, extractive zones are often heavily regulated and put outside of public oversight.Footnote 14 This can pose additional barriers for the heritagization of industrial sites and objects.
Industrial heritage is often analysed from the critical heritage perspective as its focus on the relationship between top-down and bottom-up heritage practicesFootnote 15 helps to disentangle the complexity of different positionalities and interests of various state and non-state actors.Footnote 16 The tension between top-down and bottom-up processes of heritagization is especially apparent in the field of industrial heritage tourism. With the turn towards the commodification of heritage and its instrumentalization for social and sustainable development, the heritagization of industry became more widely accepted and is often seen as a solution to the post-industrial crises. Internationally, this turn can be traced back to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 1972 Heritage Convention, although instrumentalization of heritage more generally predates these developments.Footnote 17 Although touristification sometimes affects active industries, such as wine and olive oil factories in southern Europe,Footnote 18 in deindustrialized contexts, industrial heritage tourism is usually seen as a part of a shift towards developing a service economy. It can also provide limited employment opportunities to former workers and their families.Footnote 19 At the same time, touristification of industrial heritage often precludes a critical approach towards the past, foregrounding reductivist celebratory narratives while ignoring the more contentious and problematic aspects of the industrial past.Footnote 20
Post-socialist industrial heritage
If in Western contexts attitudes towards industrial heritage can be described as ambivalent but reluctantly tolerant, the heritagization of industries in post-socialist contexts has been even more problematic and is often described as ‘difficult’ and ‘dissonant’.Footnote 21 In Eastern Europe, the industrial past is often considered not worthy of remembering, with heritage sector and official, top-down policies towards defunct industrial infrastructure often reflecting this sentiment. Industrial objects are decommissioned or left to decay without consideration of their historical value, with the adaptive reuse of former industrial facilities being a common approach. These practices allow transforming unwanted industrial objects into ‘empty shells, devoid of any relation to their past’Footnote 22 while integrating them into post-industrial landscapes of leisure and consumption. Where industrial museums exist, when they are not neglected or underfunded, they emphasize technological achievements while silencing the memories of workers and communities.Footnote 23 Very rarely, industrial heritage is recognized for its touristic potential, such as Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, but here heritage practice is inhibited by complex interdependencies of existing military and state bureaucracies.Footnote 24 In these contexts, heritagization often happens from the bottom up, with the work of local intellectuals and activists. Thus, in the Ukrainian Donbas region, local museums and their curators in co-ordination with local activists have been key in heritagizing the region’s rich industrial past, often against official state policies.Footnote 25 In other cases, where local activists have little state support, informal heritage activists draw on the ‘ruin porn’ aesthetics and develop nostalgic narratives about the lost hopes of socialism.Footnote 26 The situation has been somewhat different in Asian post-socialist contexts, particularly in China, where the state has been actively involved in the top-down heritagization of the industrial past and touristification of this heritage.Footnote 27 Here, the industrial past is inscribed primarily in the narratives of national development.Footnote 28
The ambivalent attitude to the material traces of the industrial past in post-socialist contexts is a great illustration of Laurajane Smith’s provocative claim that there is ‘no such thing as heritage’.Footnote 29 Indeed, as these examples show, objects from the industrial past may or may not be construed as heritage, and this construal is contextual and depends on the meanings that are assigned to these objects, thus confirming Smith’s ideas of the centrality of discursive practices in the construction of heritage. While I draw on Smith’s discursive approach to heritage, my focus in this article goes beyond the AHD that Smith defines as a single institutionalized set of utterances and practices, but rather on the different discourses of oil heritage developed by various actors in Azerbaijan. As I show here, these actors select different objects and construct different narratives of oil and its past and their role in local and global development. I identify three such discourses in Baku: the governmental discourse, the state-sanctioned non-governmental organization (NGO)/corporate discourse and the informal discourses produced by urban activists and (semi-)independent city tour guides. The official discourses produced by the heritage governance bodies (Ministry of Culture and State Tourism Agency) and the state-linked corporate heritage actors can be found in their policy and strategy documents, as well as in the official scripted tours of heritage presented in museums and heritage sites. In contrast, independent and freelance tour guides can (re)produce more diverse sets of narratives that can dissent from, challenge or complement official histories.Footnote 30 They also have greater autonomy in linking their stories to other places and events. Tour guides often act as cultural mediators, translating local knowledge for foreign audiences.Footnote 31 This is certainly the case in Baku, where city tours have become a popular undertaking for academic researchers, architects and heritage activists. In Baku, in the context of severe restrictions on civil society organizations, such tour guides are also the heritage actors who remain closest to the local community.
The past, the present and the future of Baku oil
Baku has a long history of petroleum extraction, as testified by accounts of gas flares and extraction of different kinds of oil found in Arabic manuscripts from the ninth century and in medieval accounts of European travellers.Footnote 32 Although crude oil has been an important item of local economy and trade for centuries, industrial production began with the global energy transition to oil in the nineteenth century. This was originally a colonial enterprise, initiated first by the Russian crown and then made more accessible to a wider group of local, Russian and foreign entrepreneurs who exploited Baku’s abundant petroleum reserves.Footnote 33 Thanks to oil, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century Baku became a boomtown, attracting capital and labour migration, and growing both in population and area. Like elsewhere, the oil boom and oil more generally became entangled in the processes of political, social and cultural development. State and corporate actors built industrial and social infrastructure; local industrialists sponsored education and cultural production, while Baku oilfields became a site of political conflict that pitted workers against industrialists, and different ethnic communities against each other.Footnote 34
After the Soviet takeover in 1920, Baku’s oilfields and multiethnic proletariat became key material and ideological resources for the young Soviet state. Oil was one of the few sources of hard currency, while the pacification of ethnic conflict allowed the Soviet state to showcase Baku as a model of ‘internationalism’ and socialist development for the workers of the Middle East.Footnote 35 Baku remained the main site of Soviet oil production until the post-World War II period, and it was a place where many Soviet technological and social innovations were pioneered. These included residential districts constructed for the oil industry workers and the world’s first offshore extraction facility, Neft Daşları (the Oil Rocks), 100 kilometres from Baku in the Caspian Sea.Footnote 36 After the discovery of large petroleum reserves in Western Siberia, Baku’s significance for the Soviet oil industry diminished, yet oil extraction and adjacent industries, such as the petrochemical industry and the manufacturing of oilfield equipment remained the main sectors of Azerbaijan’s economy to the end of the Soviet era. In the post-Soviet period, Azerbaijan attracted considerable foreign investment into its decaying offshore extraction, which allowed it to increase production and become once again an important regional producer of oil and gas.Footnote 37
After the windfall revenues between 2007 and 2012 due to high oil prices and high levels of oil production, Azerbaijan’s revenues began to decrease along with the decline in oil production and, after 2014, the decrease in global oil prices. This crisis highlighted the problems of overdependence on oil and led the government to strengthen its rhetoric of diversification of the economy. It was in this period that many international and local analysts began to write about the beginning of the ‘post-oil era’ in Azerbaijan.Footnote 38 In 2012, the first development concept outlining the state vision for diversification, ‘Azerbaijan 2020: Look into the Future’, was adopted. However, the implementation of diversification aims has been lagging and was further undermined by the subsequent rise in oil prices and increasing interest in Azerbaijani gas from the EU. Oil and gas therefore remain the ‘perpetuum mobile’ of Azerbaijan’s economy: they continue to drive all sectors of the economy, making non-oil sectors simply an extension of the oil sector.Footnote 39 Despite this, the state continues to declare its aims for diversification and publicize strategies for post-oil development, recently adding renewable energy to its list of target areas. The most recent development concept ‘Azerbaijan 2030: Look into the Future’, adopted in 2021, remains fraught with this inherent contradiction, whereas the need to diversify the economy is acknowledged, but any investment in the non-oil sector continues to depend on state investment, which ultimately comes from oil and gas revenues.
The development of tourism in Azerbaijan is similarly contradictory. In the ‘Azerbaijan 2020’ concept, tourism was recognized as one of the areas for diversification and development of non-oil sectors. The document called for the development of tourist infrastructure, new tourist routes and encouraging different types of tourism.Footnote 40 In the following years, a designated State Agency for Tourism was established in 2018, and the visa process was simplified. However, state-promoted tourism has been geared towards business, luxury and international events.Footnote 41 Significant barriers to budget tourism remain, ultimately undermining the stated goals of diversification of the economy and making tourism a significant sector. Such barriers include a lack of affordable accommodation, high fares for air travel, restrictions on low-cost airlines and the prolonged closure of land borders, particularly with Georgia, from where most budget tourists previously arrived in Azerbaijan. The latter measure was initially adopted in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic, but remains in place at the time of writing and has been extended until April 2025.Footnote 42
The strong bond with the oil industry can be also traced in the physical landscape of Baku. Oilfields and extractive infrastructure historically have been located near people’s dwellings. In the Soviet period, the oil industry was also celebrated and represented in urban public art, with many mosaics and street monuments dedicated to oil workers. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in the process of the decommunization of urban public space, oil-related toponyms and public art were mostly spared, while explicitly communist monuments were removed. As extractive activities move offshore, parts of the historical extractive zones in the city become accessible for redevelopment. Heritage becomes part of the process of reconfiguration of the extractive zones. In the next section, I examine the legislative framework of this process and identify key actors.
Conspicuous absence: official heritage and tourism discourse
Azerbaijan’s official heritage policies are strongly aligned with the global AHD, with its emphasis on recognition by UNESCO, the distinction between tangible and intangible heritage and touristification.Footnote 43 Cultural heritage in Azerbaijan is managed by two different government bodies – the Ministry of Culture and the Reserves Management Centre. The former is primarily concerned with registration, monitoring and conservation of heritage sites, as well as with archaeological work. The latter is a relatively new structure, established in 2018 within the State Agency for Tourism, with the aim to ‘ensure the efficient use of tangible and intangible heritage for touristic purposes’.Footnote 44 Together, these two bodies formulate and implement the official heritage policy in Azerbaijan.
Despite the ‘division of labour’ between the two bodies, with one focusing on preservation and the other on the use, they are quite similar in their general approach to what is seen as cultural heritage. The Ministry of Culture maintains an extensive list of protected sites and objects, which are ranked according to their significance from world heritage to national and local. Most of these are archaeological sites related to ancient and medieval history, such as the site of prehistoric rock art in Qobustan; the eighteenth-century Hindu and Parsee fire temple Atəşgah, or the twelfth-century Maiden Tower (Qız Qalası) in Baku. However, the registry of protected sites also includes various architectural monuments, such as buildings, parks and public art constructed and created in the nineteenth to twentieth centuries. The list of heritage sites managed by the Reserves Management Centre includes several types of sites: historical-architectural reserves, sites of cultural and natural heritage and cultural-ethnographic reserves, which incorporate intangible heritage such as traditional crafts and ways of life, as well as local museums, designated as ‘cultural enterprises’, thus indicating an expectation of financial independence and profitability.
As these listings show, the main focus of both structures is the pre-industrial heritage, comprised of natural heritage and historical sites pertaining to the ancient and medieval periods. The heritage of the industrial age, which in Azerbaijan starts with the oil industry in the nineteeth century, is heritagized only for its purported aesthetic architectural characteristics. The only object related to the extraction of oil in the state registry of protected monuments is the medieval oil storage in the Balaxanı suburb of Baku. This selection appears to come straight out of the global AHD, as institutionalized in the key conventions by the International Council on Monuments and Sites and UNESCO. And while the material remains of a century and a half of oil extraction saturate the everyday life and the urban landscape in Baku, they are not formally recognized as a part of the nation’s cultural heritage. Neither the Ministry of Culture nor the Reserves Management Centre contain any information about Baku’s extensive history of oil production and its tangible and intangible legacies. To an extent, oil is recognized as part of the natural heritage, and is represented in two of the natural cultural reserves – the Yanar Dağ reserve and the newly opened Mud Volcanoes Touristic Complex – as well as the Atəşgah cultural-architectural reserve. Yanar Dağ is the site of the last remaining ‘everlasting fire’ on the Abşeron peninsula, where self-combusting flames of fire coming from a hydrocarbon microseepage appear above the earth’s surface. The Yanar Dağ Museum exhibit, set amid the extractive landscape of nearby Balaxanı, contains brief information about the hydrocarbon reserves that feed this fire. Abşeron peninsula is also a site of a high concentration of mud volcanoes, which are geologically linked to subsurface hydrocarbon reserves. The connection is mentioned on the Complex’s website.Footnote 45 Atəşgah, formally an architectural reserve, is a medieval fire temple built on the site of a larger self-combusting fire, which was exhausted in the beginning of the twentieth century due to the extraction of oil. The exhibit similarly mentions the geology of oil and gas in this location and features photographs from the oil boom period, but does not present much information on the industrial history of the Suraxanı settlement. This is especially striking given the reserve’s current location in the middle of the extractive landscape, surrounded by derricks and drilling rigs.
To summarize, in the official heritage discourse of Azerbaijan, oil industry heritage does not exist, and this is true for both the ‘traditional’ heritage practices such as preservation and registration of cultural heritage, and for the more modern practices of heritage management which emphasize commodification and tourism. The state bodies dealing with cultural heritage focus exclusively on pre-industrial heritage, and include late nineteenth- and twentieth-century material culture only as architectural or artistic objects. Similarly, the State Strategy of Tourism does not include industrial objects in its list of potential tourist sites. Moreover, it explicitly states that its aim is to ‘change the perception of Azerbaijan as an oil-producing country’.Footnote 46 In this reading, the actual history of the place, which entailed extensive industrialization, is not seen as valuable in the state discourse. State institutions thus prefer to truncate Azerbaijan’s history to fit into the basic mould of the AHD rather than to advocate for a more broad and inclusive understanding of Azerbaijan’s past.
The same logic of invisibility and erasure of the history of the oil industry can be observed in the recent projects of urban redevelopment and beautification in Baku. These projects involved reclaiming parts of the old extractive zones and the adaptive reuse of some industrial remains. Thus, in the western part of the city, a large-scale redevelopment project entailing the beautification of the waterfront and the construction of new parks and roads began in 2007. These works intensified in 2011, in preparation for the Eurovision Song Contest (ESG) held in Baku in May 2012.Footnote 47 In the course of the redevelopment, many industrial and residential objects in the Bayıl and Bibi-Heybət districts were torn down.Footnote 48 Both these districts once were important industrial sites: Bibi-Heybət is one of the oldest sites of oil extraction in the world, where the first oil well was drilled in 1846, and which featured multiple gushers at the end of the nineteenth century. This was also the site of active labour conflict, where Bolshevik leaders, including Joseph Stalin among others, worked to mobilize workers for the revolution and where he was imprisoned between 1907 and 1910.Footnote 49 Bayıl (aka Bailovo in Russian) was a site of several shipbuilding enterprises and a power station, which used to serve the oilfields as well as part of the city.
The redeveloped sections of Bayıl and Bibi-Heybət now form an extension of the Seaside Park, popularly known as the New Boulevard (Yeni Bulvar/Novyi Bul’var), National Flag Square with a museum and a 162 metre tall flagpole;Footnote 50 and Crystal Hall – the concert venue for 25,000 viewers built for the 2012 ESG. Several industrial buildings located here were adapted for cultural and leisure consumption. Thus, the building of the Bibi-Heybət power station, originally built by Siemens and expanded in Soviet times to provide electricity for the Bibi-Heybət fields, has been converted to the Museum of Stone Сhronicles, which features replicas of rock engravings in Qobustan and some stone sculptures. The building’s history as a power station is mentioned briefly, without any details, on the plaque near the entrance. Parts of the original electro-technical equipment of the station are scattered around the building, without any explanations or descriptions.
Nearby, several docks from the shipbuilding factories have been converted into clubs, restaurants and art galleries, including the YARAT contemporary art centre and the Museum of Azerbaijani Painting of the Twentieth Century. The names of the clubs (Electra and Energy) offer a vague reminder of the industrial past, but the contemporary art spaces offer no references to it. The website of the YARAT centre, established in 2015, condenses the long history of the building into just one sentence: ‘[The YARAT centre] is housed in a converted Soviet-era naval building overlooking the Caspian Sea which acted as a maintenance base for navy ships in the 1960s.’Footnote 51 The scripted guided tours in these museums and galleries also do not provide any information on the previous use of the buildings. The website of the National Seaside Park where these sites are now located lists the clubs and galleries as ‘cultural objects’, without mentioning their industrial past. It thus follows the narrative frame proposed in the State Strategy of Tourism whereby the industrial past is de-emphasized while culture and spaces of consumption are foregrounded.
In the eastern part of Baku, a former industrial zone known as the Black City is currently being transformed into an upscale residential and business district called ‘Baku White City’. Black City was formed in 1876 on what was then the outskirts of Baku, and housed refining, transportation, shipping and auxiliary industries until the end of the Soviet period when most of the industrial installations were left to decay.Footnote 52 The official narrative of the White City Project appears to support the State Strategy of Tourism in its aim to transform the perceptions of Baku and reduce the industrial legacy to a memory: ‘With the initiation of this project, the industrial appearance of the Black City will become a memory, giving way to harmony and comfort in the name of Baku White City.’Footnote 53 Indeed, the construction of Baku White City, which started in 2013, involved a nearly complete tearing down of industrial and other old structures within the redeveloped area. In several locations of the White City, however, decorative walls with sketches of the Black City’s industrial landscapes offer brief descriptions of the Black City’s industrial past.
Thus, the official top-down policy towards the heritage of the oil industry appears to be a rather comprehensive programme of occlusion and making the industrial past invisible, in plain sight. At the same time, it promotes the post-industrial, consumption-oriented future, in which the pre-industrial is seen as worthy of heritagization, while the industrial is not. However, as I show in the following section, this regime of erasure is not total, and it has small but significant cracks. In these interstices, interested actors achieve some limited memorialization and heritagization of the industrial past that they deem important.
Hesitant presence: state-sponsored heritage
In the overall context of official neglect, several objects of industrial heritage were restored by various organizations in the redeveloped parts of Baku. In Baku White City, these are two nineteenth-century refinery towers and the building of Villa Petrolea. The refinery towers, built in 1863, are linked to the work of the world-renowned Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev who had visited Baku’s oilfields and refineries at the time. This information is provided on explanatory plaques hanging on the towers. Beyond these plaques, no other information about the towers is available. They are also not included in the state registry of monuments, and it is unclear who conducted the restoration and who is managing them now.
The nearby Villa Petrolea was constructed in 1884 when it housed the residence of Ludvig Nobel and his family and the office of the Nobel Brothers Company (BRANOBEL), the largest oil company in pre-Soviet Baku. It was originally part of the residential complex built for the European managerial and engineering staff which included a park with an artificial lake and an open-air theatre.Footnote 54 After the Soviet takeover in 1920, the building at first served as an orphanage and then as a house of culture for oil workers’ children until it fell into disrepair along with the rest of the park and was left to decay in the 1980s. The building, and the park in which it is located, are included in the state register of protected monuments as architectural objects. However, the renovation of the building was carried out in 2007 by a ‘private non-profit organization’,Footnote 55 the Baku Nobel Heritage Fund, established jointly by a Russian–Azerbaijani businessman Dr Toghrul Baghirov and the Nobel Family Society.Footnote 56 At present, it hosts a museum dedicated to the Nobel brothers and their company, as well as a private business club and a conference centre. The exhibit of the museum includes carefully restored interiors of the original building, some memorabilia from the period, originals and replicas of Ludwig Nobel’s belongings and two meeting rooms, with an exhibition of late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century photographs in one and an exhibition of contemporary Azerbaijani art related to oil in the other. The museum provides a guided tour, available in Azerbaijani, Russian and English, which has to be pre-arranged. The scripted tour is focused on the history of the Nobel Brothers Company in Baku and the pre-Soviet history of the building. The museum is operated by the NGO that established it, and as such presents a rare example of a non-state museum that is managed neither by the Ministry of Culture nor by the Reserves Management Centre. Although Villa Petrolea is not industrial heritage in the strict sense of the word, it is a part of the world’s early petroleumscape,Footnote 57 and is used to commemorate the industrial past.
In the redeveloped parts of Bibi-Heybət, several decommissioned and active derricks were restored and opened to the public. The most important of these is the nineteenth-century derrick which sits atop of what is believed to be the world’s first drilled well from 1846.Footnote 58 The derrick also exhibits several nineteenth-century industrial tools. Nearby, several other wells, both decommissioned and active, mostly dating to the Soviet period, are open for observation with their ‘nodding donkey’ pumps. All of these objects were restored by the national oil company (the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic, or SOCAR) and remain in its operational control.Footnote 59
Within walking distance from the well, near the YARAT contemporary art centre, a decommissioned oil tanker Suraxanı has been transformed into a tanker museum. It is perhaps the most comprehensive object of industrial heritage in Baku. Decommissioned in 2017, the tanker opened to the public as a museum in 2021. In line with the emphasis on consumption and commodification, in addition to the museum the tanker also houses a restaurant on its upper deck. The museum’s exhibits, complete with interactive displays, familiarize visitors with various activities of the oil shipping industry, from diving to filling the tanker with oil. One of the halls has a 360-degree screen showing a short documentary outlining the history of oil shipping in Azerbaijan and situating it in the context of Azerbaijan’s national narrative. The scripted guided tour, which at the time of my visit in 2021 was only available in Azerbaijani, also provides information about the history of the oil shipping industry in the Caspian with a focus on its early development in the nineteenth century, after the onset of the oil boom. Important personalities in the history of the industry are also mentioned, including the Nobel brothers, who built the first oil tanker, Zoroaster, and the captains of Suraxanı. A few exhibits also aim to provide a broader international context, such as comparing the Azerbaijan Caspian Shipping Company (ASCO) tankers in the Caspian with those elsewhere. Similar to the nearby restored derricks and the refinery columns in the White City, the tanker museum is not included in the list of protected monuments or state museums. It is managed by the ASCO, the successor of Caspian Shipping (Xəzər Dəniz Gəmiçiliyi/Kaspiiskoie Morskoie Parokhodstvo and Xəzər Dəniz Neft Donanması/Kaspiiskii Neftianoi Flot), the companies that operated the shipbuilding factories and docks in Bayil before the redevelopment.
None of these sites, even those in close proximity, make any references to each other. Despite considerable interest both from foreign and domestic audiences, as evidenced in my interviews with tour guides as well as in the discussions in social media groups, these heritage objects are not integrated into the State Strategy of Tourism, remain disconnected from each other and, at best, can present a fragmented picture of Baku’s industrial past. The lack of an integrated approach to these heritage objects can be easily explained by the disinterest of the official AHD and its exclusive focus on pre-industrial heritage. Yet, in the context of top-down policy in which the industrial past is ignored, it is surprising that any industrial objects are heritagized at all. Why, then, are some industrial sites and objects heritagized? What are the criteria for their selection? And who are the actors involved in this selective heritagization?
Three of the five objects discussed here – the refinery towers, Villa Petrolea and the 1846 oil well – are all from the nineteenth century, and thus heritagize the period of the first oil boom. This heritagization also avoids the problem of the ‘dissonant’ Soviet heritage, with the descriptions remaining silent on the Soviet use of the objects. The older age of these objects affords them more ‘cultural significance’ with the passing of time,Footnote 60 and thus makes it possible to incorporate them into the AHD. One of these objects is also a ‘historical “first”’Footnote 61 – a characteristic that had been valorized even in the Soviet era. The more recent heritagized objects – Soviet pumpjacks and the Suraxanı tanker museum – are inscribed in the narratives of continuity that can be traced back to the nineteenth century as well. Such narrativization presents these objects as part of the national story, deemphasizing their connection with Soviet industrial projects.
But perhaps the most interesting feature of these heritage objects is that although they remain outside of the main heritage management institutions, they are directly connected to the state in other ways. Two of the sites – the tanker museum and the restored derricks – are operated by two state companies, ASCO and SOCAR. Both of these are the successors of Soviet state enterprises and have inherited much of their property along with managerial practices. In establishing these heritage sites, the state corporations draw on the Soviet practice of factory museums.Footnote 62 In the Soviet Union and many Eastern European contexts, where industrial enterprises carried a lot of social functions, factory museums were a common way to memorialize the history of specific industries and their workers. Similar to the examples presented here, these museums remained outside of the purview of the official heritage authorities, which gave enterprises a significant leeway in the management of their museums, but also prevented comprehensive heritagization. In the current post-socialist context, these practices are framed in terms of ‘corporate social responsibility’.Footnote 63 The state corporations engaged in the heritagization of the oil industry can be seen as middle-ground actors mediating between top-down policies and bottom-up initiatives.
The Villa Petrolea museum stands somewhat apart from these other examples in that it is managed by an NGO rather than a state corporation. This is especially significant given the existing restrictions on NGOs in Azerbaijan. In this particular case, the NGO involved an international expert – Dr Toghrul Baghirov, the founding president of the Foundation, and an international organization – the Nobel Family Society. Here, the international prestige of the Nobel family affords heritage value to the old building.
There is one other way in which all of these cases are linked to the state. All four sites were sanctioned and endorsed by Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev and the First Lady, Mehriban Aliyeva, who has also been the vice-president since 2017. Thus, paradoxically, these sites are approved by the highest state authority even as they are excluded from the official state policy on heritage and tourism. In two cases, the foundational stories of the heritage sites involve the president’s personal sanction. Thus, the Villa Petrolea museum was established following the direct appeal of Togrul Baghirov, the founder of the Baku Nobel Heritage Fund, to the president, who personally approved the project of restoration and the establishment of the museum.Footnote 64 In the case of the Suraxanı tanker museum, the ASCO director personally appealed to the president, who once again granted his approval of the conversion to a museum. Beyond official approval, the president and the vice-president also participated in the opening ceremonies of all these objects. This includes the restored refinery towers that do not exist in the official documents.
The role of the president and the vice-president in the legitimization of industrial heritage which is otherwise dismissed and trivialized raises important questions about the centralization of the state and the nature of the ‘top-down’ policies in heritage management in Azerbaijan. This legitimization, I argue, can be conceptualized as a sovereign favour, or a mini-exception to sovereignty combining the logic of both a sovereign exception and a gift.Footnote 65 Heritage and public space are often implicated in these logics. Writing about indigenous heritage in the Altai region of Russia, Gertjan Plets has argued that Gazprom created a neoliberal ‘state of exception’ where local heritage activists could operate outside of the normal rules of the game.Footnote 66 Michal Murawski conceptualizes the Palace of Culture in socialist Warsaw and the ultra-modern Zaryadye Park in Moscow as sovereign ‘gifts’ bestowed upon the public by the Soviet/Russian sovereign, respectively.Footnote 67 In the case of oil heritage in Baku, the figures of the president and the vice-president act as the supreme sanction that allows smaller state-related actors to heritagize the objects they deem important.
Guided tours: connecting the dots
In guided city tours, the oil industry and its past feature prominently, in stark contrast to the official AHD of the Ministry of Culture and Reserves Management Centre. Most of these are organized and authored by independent or freelance tour guides. Often, these are semi-professional guides, who take on tour guiding as a hobby alongside their main vocation. Many of them have training in history or architecture, while others simply pursue personal passions and interests. They hold normal ‘day jobs’, with some reluctant to fully commit to tour guiding due to the financial precarity of this trade, and others choosing to keep it as a hobby to protect their creative autonomy over tour content from the vicissitudes of market trends. As Alina, one such tour guide, put it: ‘I don’t want to become a full-time tour guide, I don’t want to depend on this income, and allow the commercial demands to dictate the content of my tours. I want to do this for fun, to share what I love about my city.’Footnote 68 One of the guides I interviewed, the author of an oil history tour, is a full-time employee of a state museum. Although this museum is unrelated to the oil industry, his manager had fully endorsed the tour, which once again suggests a disjuncture between the official government policy and the views of some heritage professionals. Most of these guides also write about Baku’s history – in personal blogs, social media groups or dedicated websites. They often conduct their own research for these publications and tours, including forms of oral history with city residents, research in personal, family or state archives and analysis of secondary literature. In short, these tour guides are the closest thing to urban heritage activists, in the context of de-NGOization following the crackdown on NGOs in Azerbaijan since 2013.Footnote 69
It is in these tours that the fragmented industrial heritage objects are woven together into more or less comprehensive narratives, where the guides use material objects to tell stories of the place and its people. A few of the city tours are specifically designed to address the oil history of Baku. For one tour guide, who specializes in walking tours, the distance between oil-related locations was a major limitation, which he addressed by focusing on the individual personalities of the first oil boom period. He used the buildings of the oil-boom period in the Baku city centre, many of which were constructed by oil industrialists, to narrate the history of the oil boom. Two other tours involved using transport (public and specially hired), which allowed the tour guides to link the city centre with the Bayıl/Bibi-Heybət area and Baku White City. These tours were more comprehensive and included stories of change and transformation, touching upon the Soviet history as well as the current developments.
Besides the specialized tours, oil is also featured in the more general city tours. In these cases, the oil boom period, defined somewhat imprecisely as ‘turn of the century’ or ‘late nineteenth century’ is seen and presented as central to Baku’s history and urban development. The story of oil in Baku is thus very much a story of modernization and the associated symbolic spatio-temporality of movement from East to West, as well as from the past to the future.Footnote 70 In the general city tours, the oil boom period is also narrated through the architecture in the city centre. This makes especially strong sense for walking tours, which usually begin in the city centre, inside or just outside of the medieval walled old town – the İçəri Şəhər, or the Inner City. The area right outside of these medieval walls contains several buildings that belonged to or were financed by oil industrialists. The buildings serve as ars memoria, through which tour guides narrate the stories of the people who built them and the story of the city itself. They also serve as nodes which allow the guides to interweave the biographies of specific people who are related to the buildings with an account of the social and economic history of Baku and Azerbaijan. Thus, the building of the first school for Muslim girls (1901) is used to talk about the oil millionaire and a philanthropist Hacı Zeynalabdin Tağıyev (?–1924), but also about women’s education and more generally gender relations in Azerbaijan. The building of the Baku City Duma (1906), designed by Polish-born architect Jozef Goslavsky (1865–1904), opens up stories of Polish architects in Baku, the Catholic community of the city, some of Baku’s previous mayors as well as the history of urban governance in the city. This history is then contrasted with the present, when the mayor’s office, unlike at the beginning of the twentieth century, is no longer an elected position. The building of the present-day Palace of Happiness, aka Muxtarov’s palace, is used to tell the love story of a self-made millionaire Murtuza Muxtarov (1857–1920) and his wife Lisa, an aristocrat from Ossetia, as well as the story of tense inter-estate relations within the Russian empire and the Bolshevik takeover of the city, in the course of which Muxtarov was killed and Lisa was exiled. The Ismailiye (1913), the building of the Muslim Charitable Society, is used to tell the story of the millionaire Musa Nağıev (1849–1919) and his deceased son, in whose memory the building was built, as well as the history of the Armenian–Azerbaijani strife in 1918, when the building was burned down. Often, when speaking of the oil boom, tour guides employ visual aids – maps and photographs of the people they describe, the historical images of the buildings, as well as the industrialists’ other possessions in the industrial sites in the Black City, Bibi-Heybət and occasionally in various locations outside of Baku and Azerbaijan. The city centre and the oil boom architecture thus anchor the wider geography of extraction as well as the history of the city.
The level of detail and the specific stories often depend on the target audience of the tours and the language in which tours are delivered. The tours are usually offered in Russian and English, with the English tours usually intended for foreign tourists from Europe, North America and the Gulf countries. The Russian-language tours target tourists and visitors from former Soviet countries; but in addition to that, ‘heritage tourists’ – individuals who left Baku a long time ago and their families. In addition, Russian-language tours are often attended by Baku’s own residents, many of whom still speak Russian as their first or second language.
In the tour guides’ narratives, the industrial past of Baku is mostly used for constructing and conveying local identity. Few connections are made to the global processes; and when they are made, the focus is on their ‘grounding’ in Baku, such as the narratives related to the Nobel Brothers Company and ‘historical firsts’. The touristic narratives also make an important contribution to the heritagization of oil by including the built environment related to the oil industry even if it was not industrial per se. Such a built environment is conceptualized by Carola Hein as ‘petroleumscape’.Footnote 71 At the same time, these narratives are also quite selective, and they are structured by the dominant views on class, nation and gender: most, although not all, personal stories focus on wealthy Azerbaijani men, although some of them had ‘rags-to-riches’ elements. In the meantime, the working-class histories of Baku’s multiethnic population receive far less attention, in line with the industrial heritagization trends elsewhere in former socialist countries.Footnote 72
Conclusion
The heritagization of the oil industry in Baku presents a peculiar, uneven terrain. While physical remains of the industry are still widely present in the urban landscape, it is all but invisible in the official heritage and tourism strategies. The urban renovation and redevelopment projects largely fall in line with this approach, adopting the strategies of adaptive reuse with minimal references to the objects’ industrial past. At the same time, powerful corporate and private actors are able to wield space for some exceptions, sanctioned by the president, and heritagize individual objects that they deem important and significant. Both of these approaches are in contrast to the growing interest in the city’s industrial past from both local and foreign tourist audiences. In this context, urban activists and tour guides fill the gaps – by conducting their own research and linking existing heritage objects into more or less coherent narratives. The middle-ground and the bottom-up heritage actors – state corporations and activists – perform important work in place-branding, contributing to the construction of local identity. In doing this, they fulfil ‘the spirit’ of the State Strategy of Tourism – transitioning the urban economy into a post-oil service-oriented era – by going against ‘the letter’ of the said strategy.
The existing heritagization, limited as it might be, does not avoid any of the problems associated with industrial heritage. Thus, the narratives are largely celebratory, emphasize the national narrative and focus on the ruling class rather than workers’ history, with Baku’s spectacular labour mobilizations of the beginning of the twentieth century all but forgotten by all actors. The devastating impacts of the oil industry on the environment are also never foregrounded, although they can sometimes be mentioned by individual tour guides. The ‘dissonant heritage’ of the Soviet period is also something that is proving difficult to comprehend and narrativize, resulting in silencing and reductionist narratives.
Despite these many shortcomings, the experience of both corporate heritagization and independent guided tours suggests that industrial heritage holds important potential for tourism as well as the development of place identity and place branding. As Christian Wicke argues, the top-down heritagization of the industry often follows the efforts of heritage activists.Footnote 73 While Wicke draws mainly on examples from more democratic Western and Eastern European contexts, it is also possible to imagine a similar appropriation of industrial heritage into the official heritage discourses in Azerbaijan. In the case of Baku, as I have argued elsewhere,Footnote 74 the use of material remains of the oil industry for heritagization can have an important impact for Baku’s future in the energy transition. The inconsistency in Azerbaijan’s own position with regards to the oil and gas industry, where post-oil transition is posited as a priority while the state continues to overwhelmingly rely on oil and gas revenues, also contributes to the ambivalent approach towards the industrial past. In the context of a strong authoritarian state, without the overhaul of the official state policy, the efforts of both corporate and individual actors are unlikely to achieve a significant change in the heritage landscape, despite all their innovativeness and dedication. The change can only be achieved through collaboration between the authorized heritage actors and informal heritage activists.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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