Today our visit is to the Absheron Peninsula and Gobustan…and the important sights of the Absheron peninsula. We visit the flaming mountain – “Yanardag” , Temple of Fire Worshippers’ – “Ateshgah” , and the Gobustan Open Museum.
The Absheron Peninsula is located 29 m below World Ocean level. Favorable climate-geographical and geological conditions contributed to the fact that the Absheron was already inhabited 20000 years ago. The whole peninsula is studded with ancient man settlement sites and mounds dated to the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age. Azerbaijan is the first among the world’s countries by quantity and diversity of mud volcanoes. All known types of mud volcanoes on the world are represented in Azerbaijan.
Gobustan Petroglyphs
An Outdoor Museum. It is a rocky massif on the bottom of the southeast part of the Great Caucasus Range, near the Caspian Sea and a modern highway built on the ancient Shirvan road. The rocks of Gobustan also retain the evidence of the presence of Roman legionnaires crossing this attractive region in the 1st century BC. Now Gobustan is nominated for the inclusion in the list of “World Legacy” maintained by UNESCO.
Mud Volcanoes
Half of the world’s 700 mud volcanoes—oozing, gurgling mounds of once-subterranean sludge and methane—are located in Azerbaijan, concentrated around Gobustan National Park along the coast of the Caspian Sea. Unlike lava-spewing igneous volcanoes or the whiffy bubbling mud of Rotorua, the contents of Gobustan’s mud domes are cold. Their main danger is in their unpredictability—a buildup of pressurized gas in the cone can be released without warning, causing possible asphyxiation, triggering a jet of fire, and drawing a torrent of fast-flowing mud from the volcano.
Yanar Dag
Attracting a great interest among guests of Baku is the temple of Zoroastrians – Ateshgah (the house of fire) in the village of Surakhany (17th century). It is situated on a rock where natural emergences of gas on the surface have been burning for thousands of years. Near the village of Muhammedli, one can observe an interesting natural phenomenon -the emergence of burning natural gases at the bottom of the mountains. The place is called Yanar Dag (The Burning Mountain”). In ancient times, there were many such places in Azerbaijan.
Qala
Qala village is in the centre of the Absheron peninsula in the east of Azerbaijan, on a strategically important hill which dominated the area. The older part of Qala village was declared to be a historical ethnographic reserve in 1988 and encompassed 216 historical, archaeological and architectural monuments. The village has five mosques, the remains of a castle, three bathhouses, more than 170 houses, as well as mausoleums, vaults, storage lakes etc. Qala village is not, however, just a collection of monuments illustrating medieval architecture, but a complex simulating a town built in medieval Absheron. It is a rural metaphor for the Inner City and fortress at the centre of Baku.