Azerbaijan
Land of fire on the Caspian shore
Azerbaijan spreads along the western shore of the Caspian Sea where the Caucasus meets the steppe, a Turkic, mostly Muslim nation whose very name evokes fire, natural gas flames have burned from its hills for millennia. Oil made Baku one of the world's first petroleum boomtowns, and the modern capital glitters with flame-shaped towers above a walled medieval core. Mountains, mud volcanoes, and a semi-desert lowland give the country a landscape as varied as its history of empires.
The Greater Caucasus range walls off the north, rising to Bazardüzü, while the Lesser Caucasus frame the southwest and the Kura-Aras lowland spreads toward the Caspian. The country holds the world's greatest concentration of mud volcanoes. The climate ranges from semi-arid lowland to alpine. Oil and natural gas from Caspian fields dominate the economy, piped westward to Europe, alongside agriculture in the fertile valleys.
Ancient Caucasian Albania, Persian rule, and Turkic migration shaped the region before it was divided between Russia and Persia. A short-lived democratic republic in 1918 was the first secular Muslim-majority state before Soviet absorption. Azerbaijan regained independence in 1991 and fought protracted wars with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, retaking the enclave in 2023. The exclave of Nakhchivan lies separated from the main territory. Baku remains the political and economic heart.