My friend Rufat had a post about Jewish Quarter (though exaggerated its boundaries in his map):
If you want to feel spirit of that Baku of the end of XIX and the beginning of XX century, I recommend you to wander through this neighborhood in a silent evening. And often you could find true pearls of architecture which solely wait for being demolished and replaced by an ugly skyscraper.Yesterday I took another walk through Shamsi Badalbayli street (for my previous walk see this post), another street to be demolished and took some pictures there. The neighbourhood is in agony and the residents are furious - one old woman even tried to lynch me literally for taking picture of her to-be-demolished house.
Map of the area to be demolished (from Google Earth, marking is by me)
This masterpiece of the architecture will also be demolished. Built in the wrong place.
4 comments:
thank you for posting this story. It is so dissapointing to see how badly our governments understand "modernization". I guess after this intervention Baku will be surely de-listed from the World Heritage List. It is in the World Heritage In Danger already so..
Can the local residents, professionals or general public do anything against it? Can we - foreignners help in some way? May be we do the petition?, manifestation? whatewer?
Unfortunately, I don't think anything can help - also this to-be demolished district is outside the world heritage site :(
It's a plan very much like Bucharest, which under Ceausescu destroyed large parts of its historic center for this "lovely" promenade:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unirii_Boulevard.jpg
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