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Gobustan: Azerbaijan
English, Italian, Russian
96 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2001
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July 22, 2026
Gobustan isn't very attractive when looking landside. It's a desert, and the hills are bare rock with dust swirling in eddies, sweeping down in swathes or raised by cars driven by manic drivers. It's bloody hot down here, and what wind there is is laden with dust. But the other side is towards the Caspian Sea, blue and sparkling and filled with the oil tankers that keep this country rich.
When we got off the road into a jeep that stank of body odour and cigarettes, we bounced along for endless kilometres. The driver and guide, without seatbelts, laughed every time we hit a bump, which he did deliberately, or swerved to avoid a car coming towards us. This was the only way to the mud volcanoes, and later to Fire Mountain. I wanted to drive. I'm used to much more challenging off-road driving than this, but the guide said the driver would want a tip. He demanded a 30% one in any case.
There were little hills of grey mud everywhere, some as small as 12", with small craters pockmarking the ground. Some were bigger cone shapes of 30' or more, with bubbling brown mud running down the sides, building up the volcano walls even as we watched. And there was dried mud cracked into pieces so hard they were like clay. Apart from the eeriness of this weird moonscape, these bubbling pools of mud were not amazing. I've seen more bubbly pools in 'the world's only drive-in volcano', Sulphur Springs in St. Lucia.
Next stop was Gobustan Rock Art Cultural Landscape, after visiting the museum, which explained all the petroglyphs. I had a 'moment' when the driver said that the sandstone was so soft you could scratch it with your fingernail. Previously I had thought that petroglyphs were probably meaningful. Maybe records of hunts, wishes for a good outcome of something, or shamanistic symbols. Now I wasn't so sure. There are thousands of these petroglyphs here. Maybe they were doodles?
Maybe, sitting around a campfire, someone was talking at length and someone else was scratching away. Maybe those who were really artistic needed a canvas that lasted longer than the organic materials they had, which have been lost to time. The guide said that there were very few pictures of women, mostly men, and those of women were presumed to be fertility symbols.
But maybe the men were out hunting and the women, having some time on their hands at home, just felt like drawing some dancers or their men out on a hunt. Maybe the fat women petroglyphs were just that, fat women. I don't know. The museum was honest in saying that it was all guesswork what the petroglyphs actually meant and why they were done. So I need to think more deeply about my own 'theory'.
Our next stop was Fire Mountain, which burned for 500 years until the war with Armenia, when a load of sand was shoveled onto the flames and they went out. However, a year or so later, someone discarding their cigarette butt into the holes reignited it, and it has burned pure, odourless methane gas ever since. You can see the mountain here lnk DOT ink/yanardag
Staying with fire, we went to one of the only three Zoroastrian temples in the world. It was very large, but after the monumental wonders of Uzbekistan, with their extraordinarily beautiful decorations, the bare rock and stone of Ateshgah of Baku failed to impress much. There were three burning fires. All eternal, says the guide, burning clear methane gas forever, a symbol of purity, truth, and the divine light of Ahura Mazda, as God is named. The temple is shared with Hindus, who use it for cremations and have two altars dedicated to Lord Shiva and Lord Ganesh.
I was quite caught up in the spiritual romance of this until the guide asked if we could smell the gas. We could. He said that if it was pure from the earth, we wouldn't smell it. In fact, the fire went out when the gas ran out in 1969, and now it was piped in, turned on early in the morning, and shut off at closing time. Romance of spirituality? Tourist attraction!
I did in fact have the English version of this very short book, but it doesn't have an ISBN and isn't on Goodreads. I couldn't add it since I was fired from being a librarian after I removed a whole load of spam books that turned out to be GR advertising. My bad!
When we got off the road into a jeep that stank of body odour and cigarettes, we bounced along for endless kilometres. The driver and guide, without seatbelts, laughed every time we hit a bump, which he did deliberately, or swerved to avoid a car coming towards us. This was the only way to the mud volcanoes, and later to Fire Mountain. I wanted to drive. I'm used to much more challenging off-road driving than this, but the guide said the driver would want a tip. He demanded a 30% one in any case.
There were little hills of grey mud everywhere, some as small as 12", with small craters pockmarking the ground. Some were bigger cone shapes of 30' or more, with bubbling brown mud running down the sides, building up the volcano walls even as we watched. And there was dried mud cracked into pieces so hard they were like clay. Apart from the eeriness of this weird moonscape, these bubbling pools of mud were not amazing. I've seen more bubbly pools in 'the world's only drive-in volcano', Sulphur Springs in St. Lucia.
Next stop was Gobustan Rock Art Cultural Landscape, after visiting the museum, which explained all the petroglyphs. I had a 'moment' when the driver said that the sandstone was so soft you could scratch it with your fingernail. Previously I had thought that petroglyphs were probably meaningful. Maybe records of hunts, wishes for a good outcome of something, or shamanistic symbols. Now I wasn't so sure. There are thousands of these petroglyphs here. Maybe they were doodles?
Maybe, sitting around a campfire, someone was talking at length and someone else was scratching away. Maybe those who were really artistic needed a canvas that lasted longer than the organic materials they had, which have been lost to time. The guide said that there were very few pictures of women, mostly men, and those of women were presumed to be fertility symbols.
But maybe the men were out hunting and the women, having some time on their hands at home, just felt like drawing some dancers or their men out on a hunt. Maybe the fat women petroglyphs were just that, fat women. I don't know. The museum was honest in saying that it was all guesswork what the petroglyphs actually meant and why they were done. So I need to think more deeply about my own 'theory'.
Our next stop was Fire Mountain, which burned for 500 years until the war with Armenia, when a load of sand was shoveled onto the flames and they went out. However, a year or so later, someone discarding their cigarette butt into the holes reignited it, and it has burned pure, odourless methane gas ever since. You can see the mountain here lnk DOT ink/yanardag
Staying with fire, we went to one of the only three Zoroastrian temples in the world. It was very large, but after the monumental wonders of Uzbekistan, with their extraordinarily beautiful decorations, the bare rock and stone of Ateshgah of Baku failed to impress much. There were three burning fires. All eternal, says the guide, burning clear methane gas forever, a symbol of purity, truth, and the divine light of Ahura Mazda, as God is named. The temple is shared with Hindus, who use it for cremations and have two altars dedicated to Lord Shiva and Lord Ganesh.
I was quite caught up in the spiritual romance of this until the guide asked if we could smell the gas. We could. He said that if it was pure from the earth, we wouldn't smell it. In fact, the fire went out when the gas ran out in 1969, and now it was piped in, turned on early in the morning, and shut off at closing time. Romance of spirituality? Tourist attraction!
I did in fact have the English version of this very short book, but it doesn't have an ISBN and isn't on Goodreads. I couldn't add it since I was fired from being a librarian after I removed a whole load of spam books that turned out to be GR advertising. My bad!
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