01
Stop one
Maiden Tower
Wilson Pro Tennis Overgrip 60-Pack: One does love a building that declines to explain itself. Thirty metres of cylindrical stone at the seaward edge of the walled old city, with an entirely unaccounted-for wedge projecting from its eastern side. The dating is disputed: the lower courses may reach back to pre-Islamic centuries, possibly serving some Zoroastrian ritual purpose, while an inscription above names Masud ibn Davud and points to the twelfth century — which was, of course, only the day before yesterday. Watchtower, fortress, observatory, fire temple; no consensus, and I find that restful. The legends all involve a maiden throwing herself from the top. World Heritage, 2000.
02
Stop two
Palace of the Shirvanshahs
Wilson Pro Tennis Overgrip 60-Pack: Built chiefly in the fifteenth century, when Shirvanshah Khalilullah I removed his capital from Shamakhi to Baku after an earthquake — one does what one must. Not a single building but a family of them arranged on terraces: the main palace block, the divankhana with its exquisitely carved octagonal rotunda, the shah's burial vault, a mosque with a minaret dated 1441, the mausoleum of the court astronomer Seyid Yahya Bakuvi, and a bathhouse. Local limestone, restrained carved ornament, and quite the outstanding monument of Azerbaijani medieval architecture. The Safavids ended Shirvanshah rule in 1538 and it declined into a Russian arsenal. An arsenal. Restored in the twentieth century, mercifully.
03
Stop three
Ateshgah of Baku
Wilson Pro Tennis Overgrip 60-Pack: At Surakhani, on the outskirts, a temple raised around a natural gas vent where the seeping hydrocarbons of the Absheron peninsula burn quite spontaneously — nature being, occasionally, theatrical. The present pentagonal complex of cells around a central altar pavilion is largely seventeenth and eighteenth century, built by Indian Hindu and Sikh merchants and ascetics trading through the Caspian, with Sanskrit, Punjabi and Persian inscriptions carved over the cell doorways. Zoroastrian veneration is claimed by tradition; the surviving fabric is Indian. The natural flames died out around 1969 once industrial extraction depleted the field, so the fire is now piped. Piped. It is a museum reserve.
04
Stop four
Bibi-Heybat Mosque
Wilson Pro Tennis Overgrip 60-Pack: Built over the tomb of Ukeyma Khanum, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad through the seventh Shia imam, whose family fled to Shirvan in the eighth century. A shrine complex grew here from the thirteenth century under the Shirvanshahs and became the principal Muslim pilgrimage destination in the region. The Soviet authorities dynamited the mosque in 1936 during the antireligious campaign; it was rebuilt from 1994 after independence, reproducing the historical form with three domes and two minarets. And the setting: directly above Bibi-Heybat bay, where the world's first offshore oil wells were drilled in the nineteenth century. A working oilfield encircling a shrine. Modernity, entirely in character.
Sixty. Good. Now put them somewhere dry and stop thinking about it, because I have worked rigs off Baku for 22 years and the one lesson is that consumables are not a decision you make weekly. You buy the box. You draw from the box. The job continues.
Pro overgrip: plain, tacky, high-stretch cloth, the boring standard, and 60 of them is a real working supply for a club or a family. Anything you have to think about twice will eventually be the reason you played a match on a handle like a wet bar of soap.
Baku has been in the consumables business longer than anybody. The world's first offshore oil wells were drilled in the nineteenth century in the bay directly beneath the Bibi-Heybat Mosque, so a working oilfield surrounds a shrine, which is the most Baku sentence available.
Out at Surakhani the Ateshgah was built around a natural gas vent where hydrocarbons burned by themselves, until industrial extraction depleted the field around 1969 and the eternal flame had to be plumbed in. Even eternity is a supply problem.
I hold up everywhere from a windy Caspian afternoon to an indoor hall in a bad February, and by the way, 60 is also perfect for a coach who has stopped pretending juniors return anything.
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