A story of the conquest of Baku by Vandals in 455 AD, when they destroyed the city’s architecture, carrying off its steles and statues, and then built an obelisk in their own honour (in two parts).
After reading this post, you may judge that I have very outdated architectural and urban tastes. But what I encountered during my recent walking across the city centre made me feel so disgusted that, I could not contain myself from writing a few words about the recent novelties our city went through . Despite the massive renovation and construction works at the downtown and elsewhere in the city, my impression was that as if a whole horde of vandals just passed through the city.
First of all, let’s start from the Bakı Soveti tube station (Baksovet), which is undergoing a massive re-construction at the moment and will be renamed Ichari Shahar (the Old City) once the reconstruction works are completed.
I always thought of Bakı Soveti as an ugly station which was on the wrong place from the beginning. Possessing a suspicious architectural style, it also hinders one of the gates at the Old City wall. But also its exploitation poses a great danger to our greatest cultural and architectural heritage – the Old City and the Maiden Tower. Every time that train leaves from and arrives for Baksovet, the Maiden Tower undergoes a slight vibration, and these vibrations altogether pave the way for the crevice corrosion of the buildings and walls of the Old City and especially the Maiden Tower. Thus the Maiden Tower that withstood the sieges, survived the earthquakes and opposed the rising level of the Caspian Sea, now is helpless before a by-product of the Bakuvian tube and its incompetent designers.
But what now happens at Bakı Soveti makes everyone forget all these ordeals that Baku survived at the hands of Visigoths in 410 AD. Because they didn’t know that after the Visigoths there arrive the Vandals! Just imagine! There will be built a steel-and-glass pyramid instead of old Bakı Soveti station! After all we are not the first to experiment such a thing, just recall the Pei’s pyramid at Musée du Louvre, but it is worth to ask how the Bakuvian pyramid will look in front of the mediaeval city walls? And this is not all my concern.
For me pyramids are the symbols of authoritarianism, regardless where they were built and stand, in Egypt or in jungles of Guatemala. And for me it is a blasphemy to place one of them next to the XIX-century building of City Council, Goslavski’s immortal requiem to himself and the symbol of self-rule and democracy! And here I do not mean our present city authorities, but the idea for which the latter building was built – to host the ELECTED representatives of the city dwellers to exercise SELF RULE and LOCAL GOVERNMENT. Can you feel the contrast?
Now let’s leave our beloved pyramid and ask another question: where are the statues that once decorated the façade of the Puppet theatre?
If I am not mistaken, in the pre-Soviet era, when the building of the theatre was a cinema called Odeon, its façade was decorated by pseudo-antique and pretty nude statues, and in the Soviet era, when the cinema was turned into children’s puppet theatre, the statues were replaced by other and “morally right” statues. But now, after a new renovation, all the statues disappeared completely! Purloined! Or to say à la Encyclopædia Britannica, “carried off by vandals”!
Excuse me, can I ask a question? Is this the sign of the concern of our current city authorities about our morals?
And now, let’s talk about the stolen steles. You can ask steles? Yes, you didn’t misread. Stolen steles!
Baku has some steles erected in its street, parks or squares some for permanent and some for temporary purposes, and recently two of them disappeared – one from the park next to Twin Gates, another opposite the Puppet Theatre.
The former was erected in the place of the Ali Bayramov Memorial Central Worker’s Club and was saying that “Here, in this place, there situated the Ali Bayramov Memorial Central Worker’s Club, where on [I do not remember the exact date], the founding session of Azerbaijani Communist Party was held and a decision was taken to overthrow the Musavat government”.
This stele was erected during Soviet era, but as the text on it was ambiguous from the beginning, it survived the massive de-decoration of the city, in the beginning of 1990s, when every statue and etc, reminding the ancient regime were torn down. And this ambiguity of the text also paved the way for this stele to be one of the main memorial places in the whole Baku for those who are interested in our first republic, and 1917-1922 history. Just suppose, what is wrong with the high-school students or tourists to visit this park and read the above-mentioned stele and then listen to the guide talking about the fall of Azerbaijan Democratic Republic?
Here, in this point I recall a passage from an old history textbook: “History shows that, only barbarians, slaves and fanatics struggle with the monuments. They strive to erase the signs of the past humiliations and slavery, but in their inner world they continue to remain slaves”. (Of course, this passage was also erased from the textbooks!!! )
And here I’ll halt and leave the rest of the story for the next post, where we’ll talk about another lost stele and a barbarian obelisk.
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