Obituary: Baku's Soviet architecture

There are some things that you have to experience in order to understand.

I always wondered why some ancient homes had an interesting rule - "do not open a door, before closing previous one". After all, in our apartment in a Soviet era residential complex, this rule sounds pretty silly. Only after I went to Nobel brothers' Villa Petrolea in Baku's suburbs that I understood what it means.

Thus when I lament in my blog any Baku building being demolished or something else, in order to understand it, you should be born and live in Baku.

And now, I am going to lament again - after finishing the demolition of Baku's pre-1917 oil-boom architecture (q.v. here and here), the vandals started to ransack its Soviet heritage.

Today I was passing by the Government House, and then saw an empty space, where it should not be! Leveled to the ground and fenced, there used to stand... hmm... the Central Post Office Building, or Glavpochtampt as old Bakuvians would say. It had simply disappeared!!!


View Glavpochtampt in a larger map

The Central Post Office surely was not a masterpiece, but an interesting example of Azeri architecture of Soviet period. Landmark publication of 1986, The Architecture of Soviet Azerbaijan by Rena Afandi-zadeh devotes seven paragraphs and a full page with a picture and plan to the aforementioned building. Designed by celebrated Azeri architects M.Huseynov and D. Akhundov, and built in 1980, it was part of a large H-shaped complex called 'the Communication Hub', and situated in Lenin (now Independence) Square.

Thank God, the famous mosaic on its left wall from inside still survives. But how long it will?

And that is why Afandi-zadeh's The Architecture of Soviet Azerbaijan (Moscow, 1986) today reads as a book of horror stories. The more a place in the book allocated to a building, the more a chance that the building is long demolished.

Salam Pax would say in such occasion:

To see your city destroyed before your own eyes is not a pain that can be described and put to words. It turns you sour or was that bitter, it makes something snap in you and you lose whatever hope you had. Undone by your own hands. Close your doors. Shut your eyes. Hope the black clouds of this ugliness do not reach you.