Thursday, September 04, 2014
visit to Baku, day 5 or six, who knows.
Today Anne & Marc’s driver Raphael took me to the Ateshgah (fire temple) in Suraxani which is NOT pronounced the way it is spelled. But don’t ask how.
It is a courtyard with a square temple in the middle. In the center of the temple is a reservoir of fire. This comes from gas. This originally was naturally coming out of the vent in the earth, and then they built a temple around it. After drilling started in the sea and on land, the pressure went down, and finally the reservoir petered out.
The square temple is surrounded by walls, as a castle keep might be. In the walls are rooms, which were decked out as if to be prayer rooms, sleeping rooms. some had fires in them. One had a tandoor in it (clay oven built into a raised square platform).
In the courtyard were some deep holes which I surmise (and Raphael also though) might be wells. HOwever, there were a lot of them, so perhaps not - they might be storage places.
The Ashtega was interesting and confusing.
Next, we went to Gala. Gala is something to visit for a whole day in a cooler time of year. It has an “old town” in which people still live, and in which you can see how some old things (like weaving) were done, and sometimes do them yourself. That looked pretty cool, but we didn’t go there because we started at the “ethnographic museum” where they had petroglyphs and representative buildings, and a dig.
Then we saw the CAMELS, and sheep, and Azeri ponies, and a donkey. One of the camels had a baby! Did you know that when they are full of water, their humps are pretty upright, but when they're less hydrated, their humps sag to one side or the other? Very strange...
The petroglyphs were mostly reproductions of petroglyphs. They SAID they were old, but I think mostly reproductions. The ones you really could hardly make out were probably old, but all of them were interesting to see.
Qala mostly shows some foundations, a well or two. There were some buildings, some pretty old, some only (only) 200-300 years old. One that was cool was a dug down foundation with a wattle and daub top. Reminded me of the Mandan village near Bismark, ND.
And, there was a “merchant’s house”, decked out with a kitchen and tandoor, a courtyard, a water basin with a DRAIN, and upstairs living quarters that they’d filled up with pillows & rugs. I have finally seen what one can do to make an Arabic place look good and comfortable with rugs & pillows. It does look OK. I bet I forgot to take a picture, though.
And there was a place with water, purposefully sub-irrigated. The idea is that there had been water pipes here in the olden days (and they mean 2000 years olden, or even more), which made growing things easier. We also saw a blacksmith shop.
By this time I was so hot and tired that I did not want to go to the other part, the village. So, we just went straight to Yanar Dag, which is the “fire mountain”.
It’s really just part of a hillside where the gas has caught fire. It’s pretty cool - but there’s not a lot to see. A hill. Burning. It’s been burning for a long time. The whole hill is not burning, but there are several vents that are burning. All the grass in the area has burnt off long ago, and the hillside is black right where the fire comes out, but mostly it looks like the rocks are on fire. which they are.
Then we came back. I am pretty tired. But it was very very interesting. very.
