AzerbaijanAzərbaycan

The rock carvings at Gobustan — hunters, boats, dancers and animals cut into boulders over thousands of years — show people living by the Caspian since the Stone Age. In antiquity the north of today's Azerbaijan was Caucasian Albania, a kingdom unrelated to Balkan Albania, which adopted Christianity in the fourth century. Its churches survive at Kish near Sheki, and the Udi people of Nij still speak a descendant of its language.

Arab armies brought Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries. From the ninth century the Shirvanshahs ruled the eastern lands from Shamakhi and later Baku; their fifteenth-century palace complex in Baku's Old City, with its mausoleum, mosque and bathhouse, is one of the country's finest monuments.

Baku's walled Icherisheher grew around the Maiden Tower, a cylindrical stone tower whose date and purpose are still argued over; theories range from a Zoroastrian fire temple to a watchtower. The walls, caravanserais and narrow lanes are a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Safavid dynasty, which made Shia Islam the religion of Iran in the sixteenth century, had its roots in Ardabil just south of today's border and spoke a Turkic language. Most Azerbaijanis are Shia by heritage as a result, although practice today is private and the state secular.

The Treaties of Gulistan (1813) and Turkmenchay (1828) split the Azerbaijani-speaking lands between the Russian Empire in the north and Qajar Persia in the south. More Azerbaijanis live in Iran than in the Republic of Azerbaijan, a fact that shapes relations between the two states.

The poet Nizami Ganjavi, who wrote in Persian in twelfth-century Ganja, is the national poet; his five long poems (Khamsa) inspired miniature painting across the Persian world. The Sheki Khan's Palace, with its painted walls and coloured-glass windows, reflects Persian court style in an eighteenth-century khanate.

Oil seeped from the ground on the Absheron peninsula for centuries, and gas fires like Yanar Dag drew fire-worshippers; the Ateshgah temple outside Baku was kept by Hindu and Zoroastrian priests until the nineteenth century. In the 1870s the Russian state opened the fields to private investment, and Baku boomed.

The Nobel brothers built the first oil tanker and pipelines; the Rothschilds financed railways to the Black Sea. By around 1900 Baku produced about half of the world's oil. Local millionaires such as Zeynalabdin Taghiyev built mansions, schools and theatres in European styles, which line the streets around Fountains Square today.

Oil also brought labour unrest, ethnic violence between Armenians and Azerbaijanis in 1905 and 1918, and the attention of empires: control of Baku's oil was one of Hitler's aims in 1942.

On 28 May 1918 the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic declared independence, the first secular democratic republic in the Muslim world, which gave women the vote in 1919. The Red Army ended it in April 1920.

In the Soviet Union Azerbaijan supplied oil and later cotton; Baku was a cosmopolitan city of Azerbaijanis, Russians, Armenians and Jews. The Stalin-era purges killed much of the intelligentsia. The Latin alphabet introduced in the 1920s was replaced by Cyrillic in 1939, and Latin returned only in 1991.

In 1988 the Karabakh conflict broke out. On 20 January 1990 Soviet troops entered Baku to crush the independence movement, killing over a hundred civilians; the day is remembered as Black January at the Alley of Martyrs above the bay.

Mugham is Azerbaijan's classical music: improvised modal suites sung to the tar (a long-necked lute) and kamancha (spike fiddle), passed from master to pupil. UNESCO lists it as intangible heritage. Uzeyir Hajibeyov's 1908 opera Leyli and Majnun, the first opera in the Muslim world, blended mugham with European form.

Carpet weaving is regionally varied — Quba, Shirvan, Ganja, Karabakh and Tabriz schools each have their own designs. Baku's Carpet Museum, in a building shaped like a rolled carpet, holds the country's best collection.

Other crafts include coppersmithing in Lahic, silk kelaghayi headscarves in Sheki (also on UNESCO's list), and the coloured-glass shebeke windows of Sheki made without nails or glue.

Heydar Aliyev, a former Soviet KGB general and Politburo member, took power in 1993 and was succeeded by his son Ilham in 2003. Oil and gas from the Caspian, sent west through the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline, funded the new Baku of glass towers, Zaha Hadid's Heydar Aliyev Center and events from Eurovision to Formula 1 and COP29 (2024). Opposition politicians and journalists have been jailed, and press freedom ranks among the lowest in Europe.

The first Karabakh war (1988–1994) left Armenian forces in control of Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding districts and more than 600,000 Azerbaijanis displaced. In the 2020 war Azerbaijan retook most of the lost territory, and in September 2023 a one-day offensive ended the Armenian-run entity; almost all its Armenian residents left for Armenia. The state is now rebuilding towns such as Shusha and Aghdam, but mines remain a hazard.

In August 2025 Azerbaijan and Armenia initialled a US-brokered peace framework, including a transit corridor through southern Armenia to Nakhchivan (check progress). For visitors, the practical realities are an efficient e-visa, a comfortable capital, land borders closed to passengers since 2020, and sensitivities around Armenia that are best left unargued.