Famous Landmarks in Baku
A walled medieval quarter of pale stone sits streets from the city's oil-boom palaces.
Baku's oldest fabric survives inside the walled Old City on the Bay of Baku, where the Maiden Tower and the Shirvanshahs' Palace stand in pale stone raised between the ninth and fifteenth centuries, as the Caspian shoreline receded and left new ground to build on. Outside those walls, the early-twentieth-century oil boom paid for a different city: grand stone civic buildings in imported European styles, among them a neo-Gothic palace funded by an oil-fortune millionaire in memory of his son. The result is a compact medieval core of alleys, minarets and fortified stone, ringed by the monuments of a sudden industrial fortune, all sitting on ground that lies below sea level.
Maiden Tower
12th century
The Maiden Tower is a tapering cylindrical tower of pale, coarse-hewn stone with narrow slit windows in vertical rows and a stone buttress jutting from its base toward the water; it stands at the edge of Baku's walled Old City above the Bay of Baku and appears on Azerbaijani banknotes and official letterheads.
A stone tower in Baku's Old City, built in the 12th century as part of the walled quarter's fortifications on ground that emerged as the Caspian shoreline retreated between the 9th and 15th centuries. Its original function has long been disputed, with theories ranging from watchtower to fire-signal beacon to place of worship. It now holds a museum on Baku's history and a gift shop, and its roof gives views over the Old City's alleys and minarets to the bay. Together with the Shirvanshahs' Palace, it forms part of Baku's UNESCO World Heritage listing.
- It appears on Azerbaijani currency notes and official letterheads.
- Its disputed origins inspired a 1940 Azerbaijani ballet, remade in 1999.
- It was listed by UNESCO in 2001 as a Category III cultural property, alongside the Shirvanshahs' Palace.
Photo: Ludvig14 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Palace of the Shirvanshahs
15th century
The palace is a cluster of low, pale-stone pavilions grouped around courtyards, including a portal called Murad's Gate, a domed mausoleum and a mosque with a slender minaret, set within the walled Old City above Baku's bay; UNESCO has called it one of the pearls of the country's architecture.
A palace complex in Baku's Old City, built by the Shirvanshah dynasty in the 15th century as their seat of rule. It combines the main Divanhane hall, the shahs' burial vaults, a mosque with a minaret, the mausoleum of the scholar Seyid Yahya Bakuvi, an eastern portal known as Murad's Gate, a reservoir and the remains of a bathhouse. It once stood inside its own fortified wall as the inner stronghold of the Baku fortress, though no trace of that wall survives above ground today.
- No inscriptions survive on the palace itself, so its construction date is inferred from inscriptions elsewhere in the complex.
- As late as the 1920s, the foundations of a vanished tower and wall could still be traced on the palace's north-eastern side.
Photo: Bruno Girin (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Ismailiyya Palace
1908–1913 · Józef Płoszko
The Ismailiyya Palace is a symmetrical stone building in a pointed neo-Gothic style, with traceried windows and a turreted, pinnacled skyline recalling a European civic hall; it stands on Istiglaliyyat Street in central Baku and today houses the Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan.
A civic building in central Baku, built between 1908 and 1913 by the Polish architect Józef Płoszko for a charity society. It was paid for by the oil millionaire Musa Naghiyev in memory of his son Ismayil, after whom it is named. Faced in stone and detailed in a pointed Gothic style, it later became the seat of the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan, the role it still serves.
Photo: Sefer azeri (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Flame Towers
2007–2012 · HOK
Three glass-clad towers with rounded, tapering profiles stand together on a hillside above the shoreline, their curved facades illuminated at night by more than 10,000 LEDs that animate a rippling flame pattern, a giant waving flag, or a filling tank of water.
Three towers on a hillside above Baku, built between 2007 and 2012 at an estimated cost of $350 million. Their curved, tapering shapes were designed to evoke flame, echoing a regional nickname tied to natural gas seepage and to Zoroastrian fire worship. The towers hold 130 residential apartments across 33 floors, a Fairmont hotel with 250 rooms and 61 serviced apartments, and around 33,114 square metres of office space. Their facades carry more than 10,000 LED luminaires that project moving flame patterns after dark. A 2020 study noted that only the hotel tower is occupied.
- A 2020 academic paper described the complex as a 'Potemkin edifice', noting that only one of the three towers, the hotel, is occupied.
- The towers featured as a checkpoint in the first series of the BBC's Race Across the World.
- They appear as a landmark in the opening campaign level of the video game Battlefield 4.
Photo: Peter in s (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Old City
12th century
The quarter is ringed by a stone perimeter wall punctuated by towers and pierced by ornate gates, its interior a dense maze of narrow lanes, minarets and pale stone buildings mixing medieval fabric with 19th-century European-style facades added after the walls opened to expansion.
The historic core of Baku, enclosed by a fortified stone wall widely dated to at least the 12th century, though some researchers argue the site was settled as early as the 7th century. Inside the walls stand medieval monuments including an 11th-century minaret and 15th- and 16th-century caravanserais and bathhouses, once organised into quarters named after the trades and communities living there, among them shipbuilders, bath attendants and armourers. About 3,000 people still lived within the walls as of 2007, and in 2000 the quarter became, with two other monuments inside it, the country's first UNESCO World Heritage Site.
- In 2003 UNESCO placed it on the List of World Heritage in Danger, citing damage from a 2000 earthquake and 'dubious' restoration work; it was removed from that list in 2009.
- An underground tunnel found in 2008 during park repairs yielded Soviet-era coins after workers had gone roughly 200 metres before being stopped by water and silt.
- Its neighbourhoods were historically named after the trades practised there, including one nicknamed 'those who do not eat meat'.
Photo: Bogdanov-62 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
History
The Old City took shape between the ninth and fifteenth centuries, as the Caspian shoreline retreated and exposed a strip of land that the Shirvanshah dynasty walled and fortified, raising the Maiden Tower and, later, their own palace complex as the seat of local rule. Centuries afterward, the discovery of oil around Baku turned the city into one of the world's major petroleum centres and produced sudden private fortunes. Their owners financed grand stone buildings outside the old walls, among them the Ismailiyya Palace, built between 1908 and 1913 by a Polish architect for a charity society, paid for by an oil millionaire in memory of his son. In 2000 the Old City, with the Maiden Tower and the Shirvanshahs' Palace inside it, was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.